My freezer is full. One would think if one has a full freezer, there would be something in there to make for dinner.
So why is it that, when I open the freezer door, I can't find anything to eat? This has happened before. I found that life became much easier after I trained my eyes to look at only those things I was specifically looking for and ignore any anomalies that might happen in a family of seven.
Well, when you have a full freezer, but there is nothing to eat, it is because your freezer is full of anomalies.
It took some effort, but when my eyes readjusted to "real life" mode, I could see the little rascals - and there were a lot of them. Time to exterminate my freezer.
The first anomaly I see is a glass bowl with a lump of uneaten cookie dough ice cream. It's not covered. It's just sitting in there as if someone was in the middle of eating a forbidden snack and someone arrived home too early. I suspect my husband.
The bowl of ice cream was balancing on top of a short stack of pancakes on a plate, half covered with Saran Wrap. The Saran Wrap stuck to the bottom of the ice cream bowl which was probably the reason the pancakes were only half covered and also why those pancakes would never be edible again.
I found three opened packages of polska kielbasa. Each package had just enough left to make one meal for one tiny person. I make only one recipe that involves polka kielbasa and I only make that once every three months because only three-sevenths of my family like it. This means that one of those packages is over nine months old! The meat packers are partly to blame for this heinous waste of sausage. Nobody uses that much polska kielbasa.
Apparently, a box of fried chicken spilled in the bottom bin. The weird thing was that only drumsticks were lying there, haphazardly interspersed with random popsicles. Why only drumsticks? And where is the box? Again, it's a mystery. If my freezer could talk, the stories it would tell!
I have an ice maker in my freezer, so it was strange to see an old fashioned ice cube tray buried by a stack of TV dinners. The tray contained blue ice. The tray wasn't blue, it was pink. But the cubes were blue.
Okay, I had to know about this one. I asked my son, who seemed to be in the know about most anomalies in my house. He said the blue cubes were used as an experiment to find out what happened to cold water (blue ice) when it was added to boiling water. He was saving the rest to be used as an armada of iceboats come summertime.
There was another plate (I've been wondering where all my dinnerware got off to!) that had an unidentifiable greenish-yellow substance on it that would almost certainly be slimy once it thawed. I decided not to touch it until I knew what it was. Again, I quizzed my son. He knew exactly what it was.
It was chopped lettuce that he had been feeding some captured tadpoles. He hoped to watch them turn into frogs, but we went on vacation and they all died. I assume it was from the lack of frozen lettuce.
The vial labeled "mentholated spirits" in one of the freezer door bins also gave me pause. There must be a reason it is kept in the freezer. Is it the type of thing that will explode at room temperature? My son explained that it is simply denatured alcohol... which only called forth more questions. It's apparently going to be used for extracting tomato DNA... Okay, too many questions. My brain has a cramp.
I don't want to curb my son's inquisitive nature. Many scientific breakthroughs have come about by accident. However, one can only imagine what would happen if the blue ice, the greenish-yellow frozen slime, the cookie dough ice cream, and the vial of mentholated spirits were to somehow get mixed together in my freezer. It would either prove to be a cure for cancer or create a mushroom cloud the size of Phoenix.
Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more info.
