Dangers of fridge rummaging—what’s really in the Cool Whip bowl?
By Burton W. Cole
Recycling begins in the refrigerator.
According to new statistics (I just now made them up), 72.6 percent of all refrigerator space is filled by leftover meals stored in Cool Whip and margarine bowls. The only thing you won’t find in Cool Whip bowls is the Cool Whip. That’s where we store the leftover margarine.
I used to think it was just my mother. She preached never throwing anything away if you could squeeze another use out of it.
She once threatened to lengthen my jeans by tacking on three inches of lace snitched from a dress my little sister outgrew.
Mom was joking. I hoped. No mom could send her son to junior high in the 1970s with frills around his ankles and not expect him to get beat up.
Just in case, I buried my jeans behind the barn.
Now I know, after careful research by filching from refrigerators wherever I go, that the dairy case philosophy of recycling is standard.
When spreads and toppings run out, you wash the bowl and have an airtight, resealable storage container for leftovers. It’s like getting a free prize with every purchase, only the prize isn’t inside the bowl, it IS the bowl.
The dairy case philosophy of recycling works beyond the kitchen.
When my siblings were still on baby food, Dad took the emptied jars, nailed the lids to boards, screwed the jars onto the nailed lids and hung the baby-food-jarred-boards around the shop. He sorted his nails, bolts, hooks, screws and other metal clutters by size into the jars for convenient, see-through sorters.
So the dairy case philosophy both tidied Dad’s shop and made it possible for me to help him work despite lacking any mechanical inclination whatsoever.
“Son, hand me a 3/8-inch nut.”
“Huh?”
“The cream of broccoli. Get me one of those. Nope. Too small. Try a 1/2-... I mean, strained peas. And I’ll need a creamed beef and carrots in a minute.”
I have applied this forward thinking recycling to my adult life. I store all important papers in shoe boxes stacked against the wall. I wear Size 13, so roomy desk “drawers” without the need of buying a desk.
If I need, say, a receipt for Dairy Queen for business expenses, I can tell my accountant (my wife), “Open the Nikes. No? Oh yeah, I organized my filing system. DQ is in New Balance now.”
Sometimes, though, dairy bowl storage can be tricky. With so many opaque bowls scattered around in there, you’re never really sure what’s on the refrigerator shelves. A midnight snack becomes Russian roulette, only worse. You could dish up a plate of AA batteries on fishing bait, both of which some people tuck away in Cool Whip bowls because they are supposed to stay fresher in the fridge.
Another difficulty I learned a few hours after a Thanksgiving feast when I was helping my mother-in-law clean out her refrigerator by assembling a postgame snack culled from bowls of various shapes and colors. I loaded up on turkey salad, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, and other leftovers all stored handily in spread bowls.
Suddenly, I was stuck. I stood at the open fridge door, searching high and low with a hungry stare.
“What are you looking for?” my mother-in-law asked.
“Margarine,” I said. “I can’t find the margarine.”
“It’s right there in front in that blue bowl,” she said. “You know, the one marked ‘Margarine.’”
Fooled me completely.
Burt’s mom emptied all the storage bowls into a big pot for her weekly leftovers stew. Good eating! Raid the fridge with Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at www.burtonwcole.com.