Damn the fridge!

Where do those frozen onions come from?


Ok, so you’ve just done your daily, weekly or maybe even monthly shop. You’ve bought perhaps more than you should have (damn those buy-one-get-one-free offers) and your arms are practically severed at the shoulder from carrying the groceries from the car/bus.

You slam down said bags, sigh and set about the process of trying to cram everything in without being hit on the head by a rogue, unbalanced tin of baked beans.

Then you get to the fridge, which may look innocent enough from the outside, but upon opening is actually a germ-harbouring vessel replete with crusty nodules of cheese, dribbles from where you didn’t quite put the lid back on something properly, and onion skins!

Inevitably there will be a sludgy courgette pasted to the salad drawer, having given up the ghost, and the odd carrot lingering about somewhere.

There will be the jar of pickle you forgot about, and that bottle of hoisin sauce you’ve been using in stir-fries without realising it had to be USED WITHIN 3 DAYS. And in my case, there will always be an onion, frozen to the back- a real bugger to clean.

Some days, when I haven’t hit the shops for a little while, I wouldn’t be surprised to find tumbleweed wisping across the fridge drawer, such is the sad and barren landscape that has been left behind.

I didn’t buy any vegetables last weekend, determined to use up whatever I could dredge from the fridge before my new organic vegi box delivery made its first ever visit.

This has proved somewhat of a challenge. Contents left yesterday consisted of a swede (half frozen and a tad slimy), a rather limp leek, a carrot, about a million onions, some Grandma Singleton’s Lancashire which has been starting to smell a bit like a used nappy, and a few small apples.

What to do?

Cheese on swede? Swede mash layered with onions and cheese? Some kind of casserole? It’s a shame I don’t have a weaning baby anymore – they really are such fantastic garbage bins. Almost any leftover vegetable can be blitzed beyond recognition and still be passable to them.

In the end I whipped some mince out of the freezer (very, very bad practice) and put together a chilli, including tiny chopped pieces of swede and carrot and a hell of a lot of spice.

It didn’t taste half bad actually. Hell, you couldn’t even taste the swede.

I think this will be my future way of thinking when it comes to those poor, stray vegetables – chop em up and chuck em in – it can’t go too far wrong. Can it………