I freaked out at Barny this morning about expired yogurt in the fridge. I wasn’t mad at him for it, but I was angry that we let food go bad. There is absolutely no reason for that to happen.
I’m the one that cleans out the fridge most of the time so I’m the one that throws away old deli meat that we never used, leftover fish that no one ate, and Pillsbury crescent rolls that were two months past their expiration date (3 of them). Along with the crescent rolls that I threw away yesterday was the expired yogurt. It was six weeks past its expiration date. It’s yogurt that Barny loves. There’s no reason he didn’t eat it. It just sat in the fridge, never getting chosen for one of his snacks. I’m not saying that it’s just Barny who’s letting this stuff go bad; I can eat these foods too, and just don’t. I would say, however, that I’m the one who really tries to eat leftovers. I’ll take them with me to work for lunch the next day. With Barny, leftovers will just sit in the fridge, and he’ll make a sandwich. Even if it’s a REALLY delicious leftover.
I shouted about it today, but then we were able to have a talk about it (although I was still quite excited, and probably appeared to be mad at him). I really hope that our talk leads to us really trying much harder. We’re getting half a share of vegetables from North Forty Farm in Townsend, so we really need to be cooking with a lot of vegetables. It bugs me when we go to pick up all our new vegetables, and we still have three cucumbers in the fridge from last week (and got two new ones!). So tonight, I chopped one up and ate it as a snack!
Barny and I already are getting pretty good about our food habits. He’s been cooking every night, while I get to sit around and relax after work. It is awesome, and I really appreciate it. To help out, I’ve agreed to plan the meals (he doesn’t like having to think about what to make). We have a Google Calendar where I write our dinner menu, and it gives the name of the recipe. He then goes into our Google Docs, and opens the document called “Recipes”. It’s a spreadsheet of recipes that lists either the URL where the recipes can be found, or which cookbook to find the recipe in. The ones we make, I write our rating (1-10). Some we’ve made, a lot we haven’t. I collect them using allrecipes.com, and my cookbook collection. On the allrecipes site, I sort the reviews by their ‘helpfulness’. I then take the most helpful comments (e.g., ‘add more spices’, or ‘less lemon juice’), and add them as a “preparation note”.
Another part of our new dinner routine is sitting at our kitchen table. It makes us talk, and it’s nice to sit across from each other every night. It’s much better than sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Barny has also been taking photographs of all of the meals, and wants to blog about it once a week. We even had a contest with Maria to see which of us could take the best photo of our meal!
Oh, and we woke up early twice last week and Barny cooked a hot breakfast!
