Log in

No account? Create an account
Mama Deb
Mama Deb [userpic]
Empty fridge. Empty freezer.

Pesach is...an eyeopener.

It's very wasteful - I make it a practice to discard any open packages of food (I sell unopened ones.) And it's probaby the only time of year I clean out my freezer, since it's a frostfree one.

So much *stuff*.

Resolution for after Pesach (heck, I'll start it before.) - any item of food that gets placed in the freezer (with the exceptions of ice cream and convenience foods, like knishes) will get dated and made part of an inventory list. Meat will be used within three months or discarded, and then checked off. This way I'll know what I have on hand before getting new stuff.

I have a bag full of very expensive food of unknown but probably great age. *sigh*

Should probably do the same for the fridge.

And now with 50% more correct grammar:

I was going through my cabinets recently (last night; I always clean at night or in the very early morning; I'm weird). It is frightening, some of the things that I found yesterday evening in my cabinets. *hides face*

I give my opened packages to gentile friends. Once you explain why you're doing it, it's not a big deal. Maybe they throw it out, too, but I feel less guilty that way. My mom was big on instilling "waste not, want not" in me.

I do that too (and usually try to figure out if one of them is on a tighter budget than usual; I've had the pleasure of seeing later posts using ingredients I've passed along, too.).

This is stuff I would use up myself if I thought it was edible. I don't think it is - I've let it go to waste.

And, as I said above. Most of my local friends are members of NY fandom, who tend to either be Jewish or married to Jews, or members of one or the other of my synagogues.

If I lived in Manhattan and I had edible stuff available, I'd donate it to my mother-in-law's chometz drive, but that's a $30 cab ride.

I use up what I can,but I honestly don't even trust most of the stuff in my fridge.

None of this stuff is worth giving away - the meat is of unknown age and the bottles are probably unsafe at this point (half used jars of salsa purchased for a specific reason and such). That's the main source of the waste - not that I'm throwing it out, but that it needs to be thrown out.

Also - and I'm being honest here - most of my non-Jewish friends are online. Those few who aren't, who live locally to me, are married to Jews.

I need to start doing a freezer inventory too; I date most things, but then I completely forget about them, so my freezer contains a lot of vegetables from 2003 that I should just toss. (And then there's the loaf of square bread that said March 15 -- except that I haven't been to the bakery outlet this March, so it's actually March 15 of last year :-P. But it's square bread, so the flavor isn't that much diminished anyway....)

Well, right now, the freezer inventory is 1 sugarfree ice cream cone, 1 frozen chicken breast (I know when I got that one), 2 sugarfree popsicles, two frozen knishes (30 grams carbs, so suitable for my diet), one frozen potato kugel, a couple of half used bags of vegetables and some butter and margarine. And about a quart of chicken broth I need to use sometime this week.

Oh, and boxes of candles.

You might want to think about plumping for a vaccuum sealer. That will make it possible to keep the meat for about a year; and for some other things (not the salsa) the storage would be indefinite.

I don't know if you'd count e.g. pasta, in a vaccuum sealed bag as contamiinating leaven.


If it were just that I purchased a great deal of meat at one time,then a vacuum sealer would makesense - say, I lived in a part of the world where kosher meat is unavailable retail.

Unfortunately, this is the accumulation of half-packages of chicken and such that a little organization would prevent. Or entertaining more, which would be a good thing. I have 15 cumulative guests this coming Passover, and that makes me very happy.

The thing about chometz is that it's forbidden to own it during Passover, no matter how it's stored. I do try to eat up as much as I can before Passover, but this year has given me the extra and unexpected challenge of a low carbohydrate diet.