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Running the dishwasher
I live in Palm Beach County in South Florida, and the most popular local morning radio show is “Moe and Sally in the Mornings,” hosted by a black producer named Curtis. Moe and Sally have been married for a very long time. They make clever small talk in between songs, the calls from listeners and crazy contests. They like to find weird internet polls to respond to. Today they noted that only 36% of roommates or spouses admitted that they’d argued over how to load a dishwasher. That tells me that in 64% of households, only one person loads the dishwasher.
So I began to wonder about other kitchen chores, and the first one that came to mind was cleaning out the refrigerator. Surely that is a joint project. At least it is in our house. We tackle it together, but each takes individual pride in asking, “What the hell is this?” as we pull small Tupperware containers from the recesses of the unexplored crevices in that dank moldy machine.
What say you? How many small jars of sauces or condiments reside within your refrigerator door, and do you agree on how long you should keep them?
Published in General
My sister and her husband visited Dad and I for the 4th of July. She treated us to her cooking, which is pretty good. One of the meals was corned beef with a horseradish sauce that she concocted, and there’s still a little container of what was left in the refrigerator. I really ought to pitch it.
This made me chuckle. We have visitors throughout the summer and then through the November-December holiday season. As described so well in The Inevitable Guest, the contents of our refrigerators are unrecognizable at the end of the guest season. When the summer or the holidays are over, we take great delight in the rituals of cleaning them out and throwing away whatever we can’t identify. :) :)
I need to digress here, and I hope it’s okay.
I had never heard of pickleball until you talked about it on Ricochet.
Recently I watched two videos on YouTube about the growing popularity of pickleball in New England. The courts are springing up in residential neighborhoods.
This first five-minute video is about a lawsuit being waged against the owner of the court to make the owner install noise baffles. Apparently, living next door to one of these courts can be nerve racking after a while. I guess it sounds like and attracts a person’s attention the way the original computer tennis game sounds did years ago:
Pickleball opponents seek noise relief (youtube.com)
[Note: I wrote the preceding paragraph about the lawsuit unclearly. I think pickleball is great. I think the lawsuit is silly. The only reason I posted the video was that the discussion in the video clip about the pickleball court existing in the heart of an old neighborhood was fascinating. I think it’s wonderful that these courts can be put into existing neighborhoods. So to be clear: I am not against pickleball. I think it’s great. I was only trying to say that the lawsuit caught my eye and in the discussion of it, I learned many fun and interesting things about the sport’s popularity. :) ]
The second one is what made me think of you. It talks about how these pickleball courts are becoming the heart and soul of little communities of people. For some reason, the game attracts nice people like you who make friends with the people who show up to play:
Pickleball helping to create community (youtube.com)
Loneliness is a huge problem in our country. I can understand that we can’t cure cancer, but this is a problem we should be able to do something about pretty easily. These pickleball courts are doing just that. :)
I was introduced to pickleball in the summer of 1978 when, as a newly hired assistant attorney general, I and my wife were invited to a gathering of all the newbies and significant others (in the parlance of the times) for a picnic at the summer home of the then Attorney General Slade Gorton. He had a pickleball court etc. at the beachside family getaway on an island in Puget Sound. He claimed that he, along with pal former WA governor Dan Evans (just recently deceased at 92) and some other member of their group had invented the game. I played mixed doubles and it was lot of fun. We lost.
We have a system on Garbage Day: I go around the house and collect what’s in all the little garbage cans in the bedrooms, bathrooms, etc., and the wife does the refrigerator. Then we both take it out to the end of the driveway.
Oh, and I’m the only one qualified to load the dishwasher.
What is in the refrigerator, where it goes, and how long it stays is entirely the domain of Mrs. Tabby. 1) She was entirely in charge of the kitchen for 40 years until I retired, when I am now allowed certain use of it as she does not wish to prepare lunch for me; and 2) I would no doubt be more lax than she is about allowing stuff to stay longer. She has learned that if she does NOT want me to eat something (she intends it for some specific meal) she needs to affix a very specific “do not eat” label. Nonetheless, if I were to dispose of some jar of something, I would no doubt pick the wrong jar, and dispose of something for which she had specific plans.
I will add stuff to the dishwasher, but only until it is about 80% full. Final object arrangement is another area that belongs entirely to Mrs. Tabby. I am however expected to empty the dishwasher most of the time.
The frig cleanout is mostly my job. We don’t usually have too many containers of food to pitch, but I do have jars of jellys and jams that seem to never get eaten up. We go through spells of eating these things. Then there are the jars of things you have to get more than you’ll ever need when making a new recipe only to never make it again.
You will be glad to learn that there are now noise free paddles and balls available for friendly players like me who play on public courts. I haven’t bought any yet because I assume they are costly.
At the risk of going off topic, here is a kitchen chores’ tip I wanted to share: If you have a pot or a pan that is unusually greasy, and you don’t put it in the dishwasher, this is one cleanup trick:
Take some coffee grounds you were going to pitch and dump them in the pot. Add a little water and let it sit overnight. (I limit the amount to under 2 tablespoons as the grounds can clog the sink.)
The tannins in the coffee grounds degrease the pot so that minimal scrubbing is required. Teabags also work.
Also, I live for the joyful sound of whack, wock, thunk, followed by Oh S..t!
The first time my wife really yelled at me was when I put something in the dishwasher that should be handwashed.
I like the sound too. I didn’t post the story to suggest otherwise. Not at all.
I found it fascinating that the courts were so easy to insert into small neighborhoods. I’ve always wanted to see more “gathering spaces” in small neighborhoods. It’s something I’ve been daydreaming about for forty years. I always think of garden spaces or chess games or “tot lots,” but these pickleball courts are wonderful. They check all my boxes for bringing people together. :)
I also found it fascinating what the appeal of the game was: it’s that magical sound. It must have the same kind of attention-getting quality as those first tennis video games, which I also enjoyed.
I’m sorry to have not been clearer. :) I thought the lawsuit was funny and interesting. :) :) :) And it sounds like an easy problem to handle in places where the courts are really close to people’s homes. People have all kinds of sensitivities. For those who have this one, it sounds like an easy problem to solve. :) :)
We have never had a dishwasher so I can’t help with that. As for how long, my rule is: if it’s not moldy and doesn’t stink it is still good.
We never had a dishwasher OR a refrigerator, so I can’t help with either. If you need help laying a fire to cook your food, my rule is: don’t use matches that you did not whittle with a knife that you forged yourself.
“visited Dad and me”
Sorry
Clean the refrigerator? There’s an odd concept.
He’s an engineer. He don’ know subjects from objects, but if you need a control for an aircraft, he’s your man.
Also, fewer.
Chief dishwasher loader here. Husband
neverrarely loads properly (according to the rule of wife) plus doesn’t fill it as full as possible. I, shamefully, am a rinser so the dishwasher hardly needs to be run. I actually try to label little containers of leftovers but mysterious ones still end up in the back of the fridge. Husband’s mom – a wonderful m-i-l – was a farm gal so never threw any little bits of food away. We remind each other (with great affection) ‘not to be Marie’ when we’re using up all the little containers. Sigh. I still miss Marie. She was a second mom to me since my own mom had died before I met my husband. No dog in the pickleballwarfight.And there are family members who shall be nameless who think putting a dish or glass or spoon or bowl in the dishwasher is impossible. It’s almost as if the dishwasher is hidden somewhere.
Our dishwasher is equal opportunity: we both (Mr. SiS and I) load and unload it, and don’t care much where anything goes apart from corralling the silverware. Our fridge tends to gather things that have half-lives, not shelf-lives and a magnet on the front that states, ‘expiration dates are for the weak.’
Our policy with the refrigerator is probably suboptimal. Most of the time, stuff goes in, but a lot of it never comes back out. Eventually I find myself saying “OK, we don’t have any food, and yet the refrigerator is full. It’s time to figure out what’s in there.” When you can’t put anything in the refrigerator without balancing it on the front edge of a shelf, there’s a problem.
The cleanout process generally has to be collaborative because so much of it is detective work. “What is this?” “Have we even had chili this year?” No one person is going to know all the answers. The basic rule is that if we can’t identify it, or we have no idea how old it is, out it goes. I tend to be fairly ruthless and probably toss some stuff that’s still good, but when I reach that point all I want is some space.
It’s still an error-prone process. One time I dumped out a container of some kind of noodle soup because neither my wife nor I recognized it. Immediately after dumping it in the sink, I remembered our daughter telling me all about the delicious pho she had had at a Vietnamese restaurant with a friend the previous evening, and how she had brought home some leftovers. Oh well.
I guess my OCD keeps our frig from getting to that point. I have several family members with refrigerators like yours. Even people who live alone.
Answer: separate refrigerators.
My mother lives with me and uses the kitchen fridge. I have a fridge downstairs. She actually tried to convince me we didn’t need both when she moved in.
We haven’t progressed to separate dishwashers.
Earlier this year I threw out a jar of refrigerated Marmite whose expiration date was July 2015. Strange thing is that I don’t even like Marmite and can’t remember why I had some, but there it was nestled in with the mustards and sauces and whatnot craftily escaping my notice for almost a decade.
The circle of life or something. The older and more yucky those containers get the better they are at hiding. Probably move around when the door is closed and the light is off. Or is the light really off?
Dispute in our household about the proper way to fold a towel.
We do a pretty good job keeping the fridge current. Bigger problem is the pantry because the “main” grocery shopper here is always buying stuff because it’s on sale. I just threw out some things the other day (instant oatmeal, rice, other boxed stuff) that
waswere at least six years old.(Edit)
There is one fella at work – that keeps putting his coffee mug on the bottom shelf of the dishwasher. Its like offensive to do that, mugs belong on the top shelf!
Towels get rolled, not folded.
Why throw out dry stuff? What is it going to do, get more dry?
It’s best though if dry stuff is inside a plastic bag, within the box.
Beats “bowling alone.”