Sunday, June 25, 2006

Thirtieth Birthday is the Appliance Birthday

... such is the new tradition. Apparently.

G. turned 30 recently and he got lots of new appliances: a fridge from me, and a gas grill from his dad. The fridge was less of a frivolity and more of a requirement, assuming we wanted to stay sane.

We rent, and the fridge that came with the house (which we otherwise love) is VERY SMALL. Like 10 cubic feet. Like the same size as three tiny dorm fridges, or two under-bar wine fridges. Because it is so small, we often packed it with food just to go about our daily lives -- it can't hold a stock pot of leftover soup and a jug of milk, requiring us to always purchase the thing of milk that has a spout with a lid, instead of the kind that you open like the tiny cartons of milk from school, so that we could balance the milk on its side, on top of the stock pot, which occupied the whole top shelf.
Because we had to pack the fridge so full, and also because it is a crappy fridge to begin with, things were always freezing when they shouldn't. Our vegetables went bad within a few days: lettuce & herbs froze and thawed all nasty and black; carrots became limp and weird; meats & fish were kept in a weird limbo of frozen & non-, and suffered for it. Plus, the shelves were always so crowded that we would lose cheeses in the back for weeks, and not find them until they were fuzzy and smelling of ammonia.

We bitched and moaned about this fridge pretty much from the day we moved in. We asked the landlady if she'd like to replace it for us, and if she'd be more inclined if we offered to pay for half. She said no, the fridge was fine, its problem was that we filled it too full and it couldn't seal properly. We bitched and moaned some more and scoured Craig's List occasionally, only to find crappy fridges and really expensive ($2200? It's CRAIG'S LIST, people!) fridges, and not much in between. Plus you have to go get it when it's on CL, and that's just a pain ...

Finally, G.'s birthday rolled around, almost a whole year after we moved in and became fridge martyrs. I couldn't figure out what to get him. I'm not very smart. Then we were talking about how we'd lost about half of yet another bi-weekly box of veggies, and I finally figured it out.

I ordered the fridge from Sears' website for $400, plus $50 or so delivery. I told him about it, because I wanted to verify that it was OK, and because it has to live in the basement so we needed to collaborate on cleaning before it could arrive. He was ecstatic.

Now the fridge has been here for a month and it has made our lives infinitely better. We have room to buy beer! We have room to stock up on meats that are on sale and put them in the freezer for later! We have a chicken carcass that we just roasted, AND a chicken in the freezer waiting for future roasting! It has tonight allowed us to make a delicious roast beef on the grill (discussion to come), with spring onions (kept in the downstairs fridge for a week!) tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and grilled to deliciousness. Maybe I'll try to enlist G. to write about it.