Do you own a refrigerator? Do you have bottles and jars of condiments? If you have both, you might relate to this post.
As one does, after you open a bottle or jar of salad dressing, sauce, marinade, jam and the like, you need to put almost all of these items under refrigeration lest they start to go bad. More often than not, I never wind up using all of said item before it reaches its ultimate best before date.
So here’s the thing about a container of something in the fridge. One day it’s great, still edible, and thus it belongs in the fridge. It’s like that for many days and then one day its no longer any good. I don’t take notice of when that transition happens. As I bought more of these condiments, they just began to take up more space on the shelf that I designated as the “condiment shelf”.
It got to the point that I noticed nearly a quarter of the usable space in my fridge was taken up by these useless and out of date containers. The shelf was full of stuff that I’d never use again. Weeks would go by where I’d open the fridge to get something, see this shelf, and mutter something about needing to clean it up.
Well, one day, about a week ago, I designated one evening as “shelf clean up night”. I began that evening by hauling out every single container from that shelf and lined them all up on my stove. Now if this were the 1950s, I would have just tossed all of them into a garbage bag and tossed that into the nearest body of water. Instead, this is the 21st century and we’re barely more civilized since then, but at least we’re able to recycle.
Since all the containers were either glass or plastic, they were all great candidates for recycling. All I needed to do was to empty out the jars and bottles, rinse them, and toss them into a bag. It took me about 45 minutes to get everything emptied and cleaned. That’s how many containers there were. I didn’t care though because I was left with a great amount of satisfaction. Also, my fridge looks so empty now in comparison.
The wonderful thing is, the cycle will continue again. I have a jar of blueberry jam that is still months away from expiring and there’s a jar of capers I’m using when I make chicken piccata. They look almost lonely in my fridge. Who knows what’s gonna happen. Maybe I use all of those ingredients. Maybe I don’t and they’re joined by more jars and bottles.
In a year, we might be doing this all again.