1. One bottle of red wine can last two adults a week and a half. Somewhere around day seven, the cork will disappear; a mashed-up ball of foil jammed into the bottle neck will work just as well.
2. There is no amount of leftovers too small not to bring home in a doggie bag and prepare for lunch the next day. Two bites of salmon can be turned into nearly four tablespoons’ worth of salmon paté.
3. Yogurt never goes bad. Leave it in the fridge forever.
4. Have one favorite mug and one favorite miniature wineglass, but keep them a secret and change which one it is every three years. Gasp in horror if any of your children have mistakenly used them — “I was saving that for my cup of tea in the morning tomorrow!” even though it is four in the afternoon and there is plenty of time to wash it — but never tell them which one it is, so that they could avoid using it.
5. Hide a single bag of candy in your nightstand drawer and a large paper bag full of the best flavor of protein bars in your closet. Never notice how many pieces go missing until you run out, then wander into the kitchen and ask, “Have any of you been eating my [treat I value so highly I won’t leave it in the kitchen, where food is]?” Believe them when they lie.
6. The best thing to do with the single potato in your pantry that has sprouted Viking horns and gently waving legs is to let it stay there. Potatoes rot cyclically, so the sprouts will eventually retract and the potato will become safe to eat.
7. Never keep olive oil, root vegetables, tomatoes, eggs, pasta, or any other meal staples in your house, but do make sure to have exactly two Skinny Cow caramel cones and an exploded frozen bottle of root beer in your freezer at all times.
8. Could you own more never-opened jams? You could own more never-opened jams.
9. Always keep two separate boxes of chocolate-covered almonds; one for the house and one specifically for you, and know the exact level of chocolate-covered almonds inside both boxes to within a micron.
10. Remember: it doesn’t matter how empty the fridge itself is, as long as the shelves on both doors are absolutely crammed with mayonnaise bottles, ketchup bottles, four different variations on honey mustard, horseradish you only use for the horseradish sauce you make on Christmas Eve, aloe vera gel for sunburns, and half-drunk bottles of sparkling water you’re going to finish someday after you get them nice and flat.
11. Mallory, close the door, you’re letting all the cold air out. Why do you come over here and poke through the fridge and criticize everything and throw things away? Why don’t you go home? You have your own kitchen there.
Tags: kitchens, life lessons, mom and dad look nice but they can’t be trusted, poking some gentle fun at nancy and john ortberg
But seriously, look at your mom’s hair. Aren’t you happy that despite the genes that will cause you to hoard jam (this is bad why?), you will also have gorgeous flowing locks well into your almond-counting dotage?
(Not to suggest the Ortberg parents are in their dotage. I dote on them, but that’s not the same thing.)
Will Mallory count almonds? I feel like she has some strong opinions on that particular nut.
(Are almonds a nut?)
I think almonds are related to peaches, maybe? And are also possibly poisonous? I only have small amounts of knowledge about things.
Almonds are actually the seeds of drupes! They are related to peaches, cherries, apricots and nectarines, but most closely to peaches.
Holy shit, this is literally the first time I have seen the word “drupe” in print since I discovered it in my middle school library’s Oxford dictionary, after which my friends and I spent the next several years using it at every available opportunity (yeah, we were cool).
HAH. I do remember a thing sometimes!
Well, something that’s not a garbage food, then. Unless it is a dotage, in which case, Mallory might start accidentally eating almonds.
Horde Jam would be a great name for a death metal/stoner band collab.
I think your parents might be me.
I found myself thinking how good it would be to have more unopened jam. (I like jam, and we have a doll-house sized kitchen with tiny cabinets that goods tumble out of willy-nilly, so there’s never any unopened jam. Jam is a buy-for-use proposition in my home.)
Well, my parents definitely have her parents’ fridge door.
Strange kitchen proclivities aside, Mallory’s parents are the most charming people in the world.
Mallory’sdadhasawikipediapageandit’sreallyimpressive.
Oh my god, it’s so detailed, and it doesn’t even mention that one of his daughters cavorts with ghosts.
It’s so meticulously cited!
Do you think Nicole edits it in secret?
No, there would be at least one mention of Mallory if she did.
huh. my friend-from-high-school’s-dad once interviewed him for Christianity Today.
I googled “John Ortberg” and Google suggested “John Ortberg who is this man” and I thought that maybe we had all, collectively, googled him wanting to know about him. Either that or Google was being really pushy. But nope. Nope, just a book that he wrote. (JUST?!)
I love that, though. Mysterious and so Ortberg-y. I am picturing it on the cover of the next Dad Magazine.
One of MANY books apparently! He’s written multiple!
he’s also more popular than me on twitter, for which i will never forgive him
HOW
(simply in shock that ANYONE is more popular than you on Twitter; not trying to impugn your dad’s Twitter popularity)
BRB, going to follow him right now…
(Sorry.)
Do you think it’s genetic? Is this why Mallory flings out works of genius onto the toast multiple times a day every day.
Yes. I do, and it is.
My parents have so many never-opened jams. I think you hit a certain age and everyone inexplicably starts giving you jam as presents. I am too cheap to buy nice jam and want so badly to take them, but I would end up paying more to check my luggage home than I would save on jam.
Maybe if I casually slipped this into conversation with my mother she would send me jam.
Oh, man, and my parents are both ministers, so every Christmas it’s just a church-instigated deluge of fancy crackers and jams and fancy pancake mix and toffees (which they NEVER EAT because all they eat is leftover salmon and steamed broccoli), so the back pantry just gets crammed fuller and fuller and looks like the weirdest survivalist hoard ever.
I think you hit a certain age and everyone inexplicably starts giving you jam as presents
Ohhhh, I think you explained it. Also, when is that age and can I just start telling people I’m there already? MOAR JAM PLEEZ
I’m pretty close to offering a never-opened jar of probably homemade jam to anyone who wants one, but somehow I think that might be a crazy offer to make to strangers on the internet? Unsure.
This isn’t the internet, this is The Toast. Clearly the best place to offer up jam.
Ha! Good call.
I think you just need retired or otherwise unoccupied/homestead-y friends who have the time and fruit to make their own jam.
The age I hit when my mother started giving me jams as gifts was 24. I think you’re on to something.
Ooh, I’m 24 now, I should make a note of this for my mother.
I get a box of home made jam* every Christmas, and it is delightful. Do it.
*wild elderberry is always a hit with the kids. this year though she sent apple butter with too much cinnamon. why always with the cinnamon in apple butter, the only good apple butter is cinnamon free, people.
A fridge door has never ever been empty; they are always full of a million bottles. At least half of them contain only a few tablespoons of liquid.
Corollary: there is always almost no relish left. Even if you just bought relish, the next time you need it, there will be almost none left.
You are always out of something, you are surrounded by EVERYTHING.
It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but for FOOD
How many kinds of mustard does my husband really need? ALL OF THEM IS HOW MANY, judging by our fridge door. And I can’t argue: I don’t eat mustard, so I assume they actually are all different and necessary.
Continue assuming that. Each mustard has its place.
I assume so, but at last count there were 16 mustards, two of them just plastic bottles coated at the bottom with a fine layer of crust. And I left them there because what do I know, maybe he enjoys crusty mustard.
Crusty Mustard, band name, called it.
Ok, 16 is too many. I will concede that you need:
1. plain yellow
2. spicy brown
3. whole grain
4. Dijon
5. horseradish mustard
6. beer mustard
7. honey mustard I GUESS but you really can make your own
8. that bottle of homemade mustard that you got as a gift that you haven’t opened yet because you already have like 7 mustards that serve all your needs
Any more that 8, you’re taking away space from that hot sauce collection.
Do you keep your hot sauce in the fridge? My household has somehow settled on keeping the Sriracha in the fridge and all the others in a cupboard. I’m not confident there’s really logic happening there, though.
I keep all of mine in the fridge because…..because.
My hot sauce is in the fridge (Trader Joe’s Jalapeno and Sriracha, because what else could you need??) but I keep feeling like they should be out. At room temperature. They seem less spicy when chilled, which is a travesty.
Mine’s in the fridge because when it’s left out, I swear it ferments more, which also turns it into a bottle of pure fire and pain.
Hah – we do keep it in the fridge, but most of them are just some variant of vinegar+chiles, so I think it’s fine on the shelf? The people that really mystify me are the ones who keep peanut butter in the fridge (but PB *can* actually go bad, so… yeah, not much logic there)
Also, off-topic, but I’m logged into my wordpress account, yet can’t log in here? Is that a problem other people get? Is this a cookies thing?
Ants can walk the threads of a screw-top jar like it’s a leisurely tour of the Guggenheim, then take a big armload of your peanut butter and roll back down. I picture them rollerblading to help me deal with the rage of having my peanut butter violated. That’s why I keep mine in the fridge now.
I want to tour the Guggenheim and walk out with a big armload of peanut butter.
OH if it is a cookies thing that would explain why i cannot log in, ever, and exist only as an accountless Toast ghost.
http://store.mustardmuseum.com/
/casual enabler
omg the Mustard Museum is in my home town and I’m not even joking when I say that that’s where I went on my last birthday. I love that place!
FOR THE LAST TIME STAY OUT OF MY FRIDGE
Who are these mythical people for whom a bottle of red wine lasts a week?
Dad kinda looks like Joe Biden which is not a bad thing.
Two of my friends got through a box and a half of Franzia in a week… Which made me feel better about my drinking…
Also yeah seriously open a bottle, drink it in two days or less, come ON.
1. My parents never drink more than one glass of wine a day
2. Tread very carefully when complimenting my father’s appearance (KEEP IT APPROPRIATE)
Between them?
My parents, who use tiny, tiny sake cups to measure their wine in ounces.
I am getting new cupboards in the kitchen and they offered a wine rack like I’m ever going to have bottles of wine that haven’t been drunk yet.
I grew up with more of a “if you open a bottle of wine it’ll go bad so you have to drink it all” family so this thread is making me feel like a goddamned wino.
They put it in those single-serving bottles for a reason…
this is my new life’s motto.
Red wine lasts forever in my house because I live alone and only use it for cooking once in a great while. This means any bottle of red wine has approximately 1/2 cup used and then it sits there and turns to vinegar.
Riesling and Gewurztraminer, on the other hand? A bottle is gone in 2 days. And again, I live alone.
“Could you own more never-opened jams? You could own more never-opened jams.”
Never too many never-opened jams. Eventually you will go to buy more jam. That jam you will open, but the never-opened jam sitting in the pantry? It will just quietly multiply.
It is never the jam you need right now.
(Something something jam we need, but not the one we deserve, something something)
Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today.
“Get away from the microwave while it’s on, you’re gonna get cancer.”
*eye roll* “Okay Mom.”
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me.”
“Did you just microwave that food in plastic?”
“…no, Mom.”
“Because you know microwaving plastic gives you cancer.”
“Ok, Mom.”
“So I would be really disappointed if you’d happened to, say, microwave that chili in plastic and then moved it to a bowl so I wouldn’t notice.”
“Yeah Mom.”
“Because you’ll get cancer.”
etc.
My mom has moved past “microwaving plastic gives you cancer” to “plastic in contact with food gives you cancer” and so now all leftovers and vegetables in her fridge are swathed in waxed paper. It’s like opening King Tut’s tomb, if the Ancient Egyptians had waxed paper.
Also, microwaving food uncovered will cost you at least five extra household chores in penance.
I think your mom is on to something, food/liquids probably leech carcinogens out of plastics. Then again, we’re all getting cancer from breathing/eating anywhere/anything.
Whatever you do, do not tell your mother about all the chemicals used in the paper making process or that the wax on wax paper is petroleum based.
My sister and I used to roll our eyes at this. Then my sister changed her stance sometime in the process of getting her neuroscience degree. And now I listen to her because things that frighten my very sensible family members with phds frighten me.
(Also titled: Why I Am Now Always Breaking Mason Jars Instead Of Just Dropping Tupperware.)
Story of my entire childhood. “Don’t stand in front of the microwave!” “Mom, it’s not going to give me cancer.” “How do you know? Just go stand over by the sink.”
Reading her online articles did nothing. Finally, I asked my college advisor, head of the physics department, if microwaves could cause cancer. He just laughed.
“Mom, Professor X says there’s no way I can get cancer from the microwave!”
“How can he know for sure? Why can’t you just stand a few feet away just in case?”
See also: there’s a breeze outside, therefore we should turn off the A/C and open all of the windows.
This was my life too, PLUS I was never allowed to sit closer than 3 feet from our TV, which could not have been bigger than 18×18 and we didn’t have anything but very fuzzy public access. My mother kept a yardstick in the living room so she could hold it against our noses (I am not making this up) and make us scoot back.
Oh, you all laugh, but my home AND my work microwave are both placed at head level and I can’t help it, I have to skulk around the side of the microwave and slouch a little when I use them.
I rolled my eyes then, but she conditioned me well since I sure as shit don’t stand in front of the microwave while it’s on–even as a more informed adult.
Right? It doesn’t matter how many times a physics-type person tells me there is literally no way it’s giving me cancer – I duck out of the way and leave the room anyways.
I wasn’t even allowed to have a microwave, on account of how it rearranges the ions…
I bought and installed for my parents a new microwave after their 1987 model developed a HOLE rusted through the inner door.
My mom refuses to use it and says the old one “still works just fine.”
That shouldn’t actually cause that many problems, unless they use that as a peephole or something.
The key piece of this operation s sneaking the old one out in the night. Then they can’t use it any more! (Sometimes they will get angry about this. But they’ll get over it! Eventually…)
This is all 100 percent accurate, I can vouch for it, and were Mallory not regularly in the habit of cleaning out the fridge one or both parents would be dead of botulism by now.
they always get SO PUT OUT too! “did you throw away that rotisserie chicken?” “IT WAS JUST BONES” “I WAS GONNA PICK AT THOSE BONES”
Put those bones in the freezer, so you can make chicken stock never!
Replace “bones” and “chicken stock” with “bananas” and “banana bread” and welcome to my freezer, as curated by Mr.B_Ham.
I have bones AND bananas in my freezer!
Be fair though, picking at the bones is the best part of a chicken. Sometimes I think we only go through the rigmarole of serving it warm in slices so that it will be prepared for cold shredding later.
“How old is this soup, mom?”
“There’s soup? It’s probably fine.”
This is my parents’ refrigerator, except with additional items shoved in the way back that were used once and never again. (Once I found a jar of minced garlic I remember using in high school! I was past university at the time.)
Also their pantry is a morass of mysteries. One time my mom and I were cleaning it out and found a CAN THAT HAD EXPLODED. At some point. We didn’t know when. It was awful.
(this makes my mother sound like an awful housekeeper, which she is NOT, it’s just that the pantry and refrigerator tend to accumulate weird items and not get on the cleaning schedule like other regular things like floors)
AND why is it that condiments shelves tend to accumulate weird bits of crud and crumbs and stray hairs? Like I stand in the fridge to brush my hair?
The absolute worst mess-maker is flax oil, which I take in lieu of fish oil. I buy the bottled oil rather than the capsules because $$$. It is super good for you and a better sustainability bargain than fish oil. (So there is some justification for the ensuing craziness.)
If the bottle is not thoroughly wiped down after you pour some (as if I would ever do this), the drips down the sides create solid yellow rings on any surface at any temperature below, say, 100 degrees. If you take hot water, Bon Ami, and a nylon scrubbie to these igneous formations, you MIGHT be able to remove most of them. Try doing that on a fridge shelf.
Word to the wise/rich: take flax oil CAPSULES.
Spices. They should smell like something when you open them, and be from a store that is still in existence (or that has been closed >10 years).
Right? Right! My parents have spices that they got when my grandfather moved in with them in the mid-90’s. I was helping my mom cook over the holidays and I went looking for the jar of cloves and found 3 of them, all half full, and all at least 5 years old. One of them was from a company that I know is has not been in business for about 10 years. It was frightening.
Her response was to just buy another jar and leave the other ones in there. Maybe I will sneak in and dump them next time I am home.
When I was visiting my mom for Christmas, we found little black dots peppering one side of her fridge; after meticulously cleaning them up and inspecting the black-sesame-seed jar for holes only to find more dots the next day, we figured out it was a leaking bag of chia seeds that she keeps around to feed to the dogs.
your mother
feeds chia seeds
to her
DOGS
It’s like I hardly know her anymore.
One of them is small, elderly, and finicky in the extreme, and the lengths she goes to in an attempt to feed him are unreal. He likes 1) runny yolks, 2) fried rice from Thai restaurants, and 3) chicken breast cooked with rice on the stove, but only if he hasn’t had it too many days in a row.
How did she find this out? Just keep trying to feed him things and variations on things until he accepted?
Well, the Thai fried rice came about naturally when he was younger, since she worked at a Thai restaurant for nine years. As for anything else, she’s retired, so I imagine that’s most of what she does with her day.
I’m sorry about this but I will not protect your mother when the revolution comes
That’s okay, she’ll probably forge a path for herself just fine and then fix all the survivors a nice paella.
no they will come for her first
I dunno, man – paella??
I was trying to find just some normal jam in my fridge last night. Maybe strawberry or some other berry type. Instead I found:
Tomato jam
Raspberry Ginger jam
Cranberry chutney my grandma made a few months ago
Cranberry ketchup
Tamarind paste
Tamarind date sauce
Red pepper jelly
Two types of fig jam
Pumpkin butter from like two years ago
Two nearly-empty bottles of ketchup
Organic chocolate sauce
The superior Fox’s U-Bet chocolate sauce
Too many capers
This is just what I remember off the top of my head. Somebody find me a fresh fruit.
Who needs fresh fruit when you have 2 kinds of fig jam? That sounds perfectly heavenly to me.
Have you tried topping a wheel of brie with fig jam? Because you should.
Look, I’m on a conference call, it’s 36 minutes & counting, there’s no way I can run out and get brie + fig jam + decadently seeded crackers, so I thank you not to be putting images like that in my brain!
Try mixing fig jam and goat cheese. Just saying, it’s everything wonderful in the world.
I’ve been nauseated for three days and can barely look at food and that still made my whole mouth fill up with spit. (There’s an image for you). Nom.
I only recently threw out a thing of peach butter that has moved with me TWICE because I realized it was lovely and beautiful but I kept it in the freezer and it was just never going to get eaten. Goodbye, peach butter.
Sounds like my home.
FOX’S U-BET, YES.
Do you live with my in-laws? Their fridge has all of these, and also at least five kinds of hot sauce and two or more open containers of sour cream. I get genuine glee out of throwing out expired things when I visit.
The last time I cleared out my mother’s pantry* at her request, I uncovered 11 cans of whole black olives. That’s not counting the dozen jars of green olives, the 10 or so small cans of sliced olives, or the handful of gourmet-mailing-catalogue jars of marinated mixed olives.
*And I do mean “the last time.” I am done, lady. I don’t want to know how many expired cans of soup and clams you have, especially if you won’t let me throw them out.
That would not happen in my house. Cans of olives last about two days and then I eat all of them out of the can like a sodium-deprived monster.
Well, she adds olives to evvvvverything (NOT COMPLAINING), but I think she had been buying new cans, adding them to the front ranks of the pantry, and using them, all without disturbing the Deep Pantry Matrix toward the back of the deepest shelves.
She has since moved to a smaller home with a smaller pantry, so this is probably not as much of an issue, but I’ll never know because I don’t sort out her pantry anymore. I determined that it is bad for our relationship to put me in a position where I’m required to argue with her about foodstuffs and expiration dates.
I want someone to do a dissertation on the Deep Pantry Matrix.
As an archaeology student, I had to urgently resist the impulse to grab a notebook and start jotting down expiration dates, out-of-date logos and brands, and rich veins of once-trendy food items I unearthed as I cleared the shelves. I’m pretty sure I could have dated most of that pantry with reasonable seasonal precision from a simple stratigraphy of its contents.
EXPIRATION DATES ARE CAPITALIST PROPAGANDA
You just keep telling yourself that as you eat the musty-smelling clam dip that my mother tried to get me to make and serve to the entire family – to children! – the weekend of my wedding. Those clams were years past their best-by date, and I was having nothing to do with them.
[I mention the wedding because, yeah, if there’s a time to serve iffy shellfish, it is not to a whole assembled family hours before a major event.]
That sounds like my mother, who regularly (every holiday and birthday) sends me little sandwich baggies of trail mix or candy or whatever that have obviously been completely stale for months. She’ll also send boxes or cans of food that are often a year or more past their expiration date. The worst was some dried fruit she sent me one Sept, which was from a trip I had taken with her in May and that she had been keeping in her pantry since; I took a bite of one piece and it was rancid. Turns out it was supposed to be refrigerated. You’d think by now I would know better than to try the food she sends me. I’m sure she’s not intentionally trying to poison me…
I also want to be clear about how little I am qualified to make fun of my mother for not using or tossing old food: when I last cleared the cabinets in my own kitchen, I discovered that a can of green chile sauce had leaked all over the shelf. On reflection, I realized that the price tag and brand dated it to a shop that had been out of business quite a while and that it was already old when I moved it (with other pantry goods) into this apartment several years prior.
The main problem with my kitchen: I have ingredients for authentic Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Lebanese, Greek, Mexican and American cuisine. THERE IS NEVER ROOM FOR ANYTHING.
Same! (Plus Thai.) Three full shelves of spices, two full shelves of sauces.
The spices are out of control. But we actually regularly run out of our three (four?) kinds of paprika and five chile powders and two kinds of cinnamon. The Indian spices are the biggest offenders- that’s why I own black and regular cumin and amchur powder and asafetida and black and regular cardamon and probably some other spices I’m forgetting about now.
And of course I need cumin and coriander and mustard and cloves and cinnamon and etc. in their whole and ground forms (even though I also own a spice grinder).
Went digging for fennel seed last night and hit both the caraway and the cumin seeds first…
There can never be enough jam. Jam lurks in the cupboards and breeds with other jam, the Seville orange marmalade cavorting with the seedless boysenberry, creating endless jam varieties. Add to this olives of every Mediterranean country plus California, five cans of tuna in olive oil, multitudes of salsa jars. NOW you are ready for an emergency.
Who wants to eat all this jam I made last year, I am about two months from having to throw it out :C
I’ll be right there.
Have a jam party! Just make a big pot of tea and a bunch of toast and make everybody eat that jam. Or send it to me!
Ask guests to bring a loaf of bread or a kind of tea or a fancy butter! I would keel over in delight if invited to such a party.
Although I’m on board with helping eat your jam, I am a little confused as to why there’s a deadline. Doesn’t properly canned stuff stay good pretty much forever? I’ve seen some sources that suggest that the quality isn’t as good after a year, but I’ve never noticed that much difference.
I will mail you a prepaid USPS box. Homemade jam should not go to waste. Or the tea, toast and jam party sounds awesome, just in case you don’t want to give total strangers your address ;-}
I learned all of those lessons from my own fridge – I had to.
My mom’s fridges were immaculate, and there were two of them – one in the kitchen, the other in the basement – plus a fully stocked pantry. She grew up during the Great Depression and my grandfather ran a general store – what can I say.
I am passive-aggressive about pantry management. Passive in that I want to manage your pantry but won’t ever say so. Aggressive in that if you give me an opening I will regiment that shit.
Pantry management is my favorite procrastination task. Last year at tax time I moved all my pantry staples from their original branded packaging into Mason jars with little tags attached to their rims with ribbon to identify them. I was able to successfully postpone tax filing for a full day.
COME OVER.
Once, my brother locked me in my cousin’s room as a prank (it locked from the outside because my cousin was a sleepwalker). As it happened, my mother and aunt were out shopping, and so since my brother wouldn’t let me out, I turned on my cousin’s Good Charlotte CD and just… cleaned his room. Cleaned it. Top to bottom. My mother thought I was deranged when she got home and busted me out.
WTF THEY DO NOT DESERVE YOU
My parents own practically zero knives. They make food all the time, but do pretty much everything with a Cutco pairing knife they call “the sharp knife” that they bought from a catalog in 1998. Then there’s the bread knife and the butter knives. I thought this was normal until I married someone who likes to cook and grew up in a kitchen with a whole block of knives for, like, multiple uses.
Also, once a bottle of soda is opened, it goes on the counter. Will it go flat? Absolutely. So maybe put it in the fridge? That’s crazy talk. The flatness of the soda is an existential reality we must accept in our lives.
Before my parents broke down and bought a knife set a few years ago, everything throughout my entire childhood was cut with THE GINSU. THE GINSU was one knife bought from an infomercial, and it could cut through the very souls of children therefore no one must ever touch THE GINSU.
This comment has me cracking up dying laughing AT WORK. I blame you for my coworkers’ weird stares.
I am in AWE, I never have met someone who’s been in the presence of THE GINSU.
I identify with the bottles/cans of soda on the counter. My dad will open a can of pop, drink 1/4 of it, put it on the kitchen counter, and NEVER RETURN. EVER.
But if you dare to drink it it is WHO DRANK MY POP, I WAS SAVING THAT.
Every time I go home I cry over the knives. Two dozen or more and not a one could slice a tomato.
I bought my mom a set of knives for her birthday last year. This year I am buying her a cutting board and knife sharpening service. This is an entirely selfish purchase, since I cook all the family celebratory dinners at her house.
I sharpen as a hobby and I’m actually pretty good, but like, there’s only so much you can do with cheap metal when you only get to work on them twice a year….
We had a vote at Christmas, and threw away my mom’s bread knife. (Don’t worry, we ordered her a new one…)
My husband brings his sharpening set to all family occasions, and sharpens everything he can find. At least it helps for the moment!
Your family gatherings sound very sincerely great. I want a relative who will sharpen my knives at family occasions!
Come on over! Bring your knives! It’ll be fun.
I had a similar intervention regarding my mom’s potato peelers. She had two, both either bought at an antique store or inherited from my grandmother’s kitchen, and both as effective as a crooked stick at actually peeling potatoes. Very effective at producing immediate-onset carpal tunnel, though. The new OXO peeler is a revelation.
I bought knives when I was living with my parents for one of those “You’re thirty and broke, go home!” periods because I could not stand the knives they had. I left the knives there when I moved out.
They put them in the dishwasher.
THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME THAT KNIFE SHARPENING DAY IS SOON
My stepdad has a zillion knives, some of which he spent probably an exorbitant amount of money on, and they all SUCK. But in his mind, spending money on it = this knife is the best. He doesn’t cook, so he has no other metric for knife quality.
(He also gets upset if anyone uses a sharp knife, because they WILL cut themselves and DIE. No matter how many times we explain that it’s much more dangerous trying to cut ANYTHING with a dull knife…)
The last time I went to my parents’ house my mother had a new vegetable peeler. I commented on this fact and she said, ‘yes, your sister disapproved of the old one, she said it was rusty and upsetting’. I sort of maintained a neutral mien (I’d never noticed anything out of the ordinary about the peeler in question, which says nothing good about me as a domestic technician). Then my mother looked a little downcast and said, ‘I wish I hadn’t thrown the old one away, it was your grandmother’s’. My grandmother died in 1968.
This is a perfect little vignette. I’ve read it like 3 times and am still amused.
Oh, now I wish she hadn’t thrown it away either. Would have been cute hanging on the wall I bet…
Are your parents mine? My parents have a mismatched bunch of knives that are almost all older than me, including some that I’m positive were my grandparents’ in the 50s. But do any of them cut decently? NOPE. One day I’m going to sneak in and just leave one very nice santoku.
My parents do all of their cutting with Costco steak knives. Unless it’s bread. Bread gets the serrated blade from a old electric knife. (And my mom is actually a good cook.)
You know, I don’t appreciate your tone regarding opened sparkling water. It’s special — IT SPARKLES, FOR GOD’S SAKE. You don’t just pour that out like leftover Aquafina garbage water.
But is it still special when it’s no longer sparkling? All the magic has gone!
It still has value! It used to be special, just like me. *sob*
TOO CLOSE
My parents’ kitchen is the exact opposite of #7. They act like the Shop-Rite Can-Can Sale is a compulsory event and spend an entire week (twice a year!) buying case upon case of canned tomatoes, canned tuna, chicken broth, soda, etc. and then complaining about lugging them home. I counted last time I was there and they had TWENTY-EIGHT cans of tuna. I would accuse them of being hoarders, but they actually eat all of this stuff.
(Also, they have a serious snack problem, which is odd because they are not overweight. Two people live in that house, yet they have four open half-gallons of different flavors of ice cream, sugar cones, waffle cones and waffle bowls. It is winter.)
When the end times roll around, I will be sheltering at my parents’ house.
Sometimes you want another flavor of ice cream before the carton is finished!
In The Great Mom Olive Count I mentioned above, I also started counting cans of tuna but had to stop because… well, honestly, it was bumming me out.
That sounds flippant, but it’s genuinely true: I could feel the mounting tally of tuna cans dragging my spirits lower and lower. That was doubly true because at some point (which I saw in reverse-order as I emptied the shelves), she stopped buying tuna in cans and switched over to the packets, so I knew that these cans were pretty old.
It doesn’t bum me out so much because I see the always-full pantry as a symbol of adult success. When I come home after 14 hours of work and stare into the bare cupboard and wonder if I should order take-out *again*, I feel like I’m unable to care for myself and the parents’ pantry seems very reassuring.
It’s the waste that gets to me: knowing that she’ll keep buying more cans, stacking them up, using 2 for every 3 she buys, letting the rest sit and spoil in the dark as the years and sometimes decades mount up.
But we all – at least, all of us who can afford to – fill more than our simple nutritional needs when we shop. I don’t quite know what my freezer stash of parmesan rinds and pumpkin seeds says about me, and I don’t know what those stacks and ranks of now-expired tuna say about my mother.
So we have the same family, huh?
My mom hides her special seltzer in the closet underneath the basement stairs because “your father will drink them all and dammit why can’t he just drink water? He doesn’t even LIKE grapefruit all that much.”
Edited to add: my mother recently sent me a jar of lavender salt that I got her in San Francisco in 2010. “I’m worried about your father’s blood pressure” was her reason for never using it. I’m not sure if it’s even edible anymore.
it’s just salt that has had dried lavender buds in it, right? sounds fine to me! salt is a preservative.
My mother, weirdly, has a special hoard of Super Golden Crisp. We tried explaining that she doesn’t need to hide it because EVERYONE ELSE HATES IT, but old habits die hard, I guess.
#6 is quite true although not for the reasons given. Leave a potato alone in the dark and it will continue to grow, quietly, for as long as you let it lie. “Grow what” you ask and I have to say I don’t know but they get to be about a foot long pretty quickly if you don’t disturb them. Don’t disturb them.
Christopher Kimball? Is that you?
except that if they rot, they can actually liquefy with rot, which is horrifying, oh my god.
My mother-in-law is a legit horder (the A&E people would LOVE her house, too, b/c it’s all fancy stuff and minimal mouse poop but maximal newspapers), and the very first time I met her, when she was just my boyfriend’s mom, I got fascinated with how many jars of jam / jelly / chutney she owned. So, we pulled them out of all the hiding places to inventory them. And then she walked into the kitchen and busted us, and from the look on her face, I knew it would have been better if we had actually been having sex on the kitchen counter than inventorying her stuff. Oooops.
In answer to your question, it was 76. 76 jars of jam / jelly / chutney. And this is why she is never allowed to store anything in our apartment, garage, basement, etc.
(I realize this post is what, two years old now but I had to like your comment so you had the same number of likes as your mother-in-law had jams.)
My mom is terrible at fridge/pantry management and it drives my father nuts because he used to work in restaurants and hotels. So every month or so he throws half the stuff in the fridge away and brings half the cans in the pantry to the church.
It is not the same level as the pastor gifts I’m sure, but holy shit the coaching gifts (soccer and hockey in this case) so much fancy hot chocolate. I also have teachers in the family so basically I never want for Tastefully Simple products.
My boyfriend’s family owns a gourmet foods market, and the only thing we disagree about is how often the fridge and pantry need to be cleaned and reorganized.
I think they only need to be cleaned/reorganized… once or twice a year, if you’re being really diligent?
He thinks they need to be cleaned every time he opens the door and looks for something to eat (roughly 2x a day).
Oh man, I relate. All of my parents (2 parents + 2 stepparents) are musicians, and they all teach a few students. Christmas is OUT OF CONTROL. All the fancy hot chocolates. All the whimsical music note shaped chocolates. All the lovely homemade cookies and almond bark.
Mallory your parents are really good-looking! I mean, obviously, because look at you, but still!
#hopethat’snotweird
Your parents are my parents. Am I secretly a time travelling Mallory Ortberg? I need JK Rowling to tell me the truth.
buy some corn meal and wait for the mouse to arrive during the next cold snap. those aren’t flax seeds in the corn meal. then realize that everything in the pantry is now covered with mouse breath/leavings and needs to be thrown out without mercy. never keep anything in the pantry again, for fear of the mouse’s return. done!
Condolences. My friend gave me a “humane” trap and I swear they think it’s a nightclub riser. Climb on top, bust out some gogo moves, poop twenty times and go back to eating my rubber gloves. Kinky mice, these are.
hahahaha! nn-ch, nn-ch, nn-ch! ha! i actually have ventured back into the “keeping things in pantry,” and (is this ironic?) it’s mostly unopened jams :/ FWIW this winter i’ve been dabbling peppermint oil around the baseboards of the house, refreshing every other week or so, and they have not been back. and the house smells like a candy cane – refreshing!
Unopened jams are very hard for mice to eat. (Opened jams, however… I know a story about jam sealed only with paraffin, and a mouse who was too excited to stop eating it even when interrupted… It’s a good story.)
This is why I just got a cat at the Humane Society. Who promptly hunted down and killed the Pantry Mouse (but not before coming to show me, letting it go/catching it again). Good kitty. You can stay.
Hmm. RE: the jam, perhaps your parents can explain to me how I ended up with four unopened cans of bread crumbs in my pantry because it’s a mystery at this point. Maybe there’s some kind of virus.
My boyfriend apparently cannot see food items that he is not specifically looking for, so he neither uses, nor throws away food that has left his short-term memory. A year ago when I was staying over I wanted a snack and grabbed a jar of peanut butter and an apple. I didn’t check the expiration date, which may be one of the bigger mistakes of my life. It expired in 2006. Do you know how gross 8-years-expired peanut butter tastes? BECAUSE I DO
When I moved in a few months ago I also found and threw out 5-years-expired frozen fruit and frozen meat that was in the deep freeze when he got it from his sister 6 years ago.
This is my greatest fear so I dismantle my freezer tetris like once a month. I reassure myself that I’ll definitely use that year-old bag of edamame, then shove it back in and forget about it.
OH MY GOD the same thing happened to me when I moved in with my bf only it was croutons! From like, eight years ago! And they tasted SOOO BAD. Kind of like rancid oil. Shudder.
Correction on #3: Nothing ever goes bad. Leave it in the fridge forever.
Once I opened a less-used cabinet in my kitchen and out sprang a bundle of veiny pinky-purple tentacles studded with pale horns and spurs, reaching out to grab me, trembling with their hunger for me. I actually screamed, AHHHHHHHH!, because suddenly my evening had turned into a Lovecraft tale.
When I recovered my composure, helped by observing the tentacles from a distance and seeing that they had stopped moving, I dug out the contents of the cabinet and found a little clutch of long-forgotten potatoes that had been lurking in there who-knows-how-long, sending out their shoots in search of light and life. By the time I opened the door and set the long tendrils of roots free to spring out, some of those shoots were as long as my arm. It was eerie.
Well, now I am following you in hopes that the lightning that struck that comment strikes again, and I won’t miss it when I scroll idly through all the other posts. Beautiful.
Noooo, Foiled by WordPress!
the lightning that struck that comment
MY WHOLE LIFE IS THUNDER. Um, I mean, lightning. LIGHTNING.
For anyone who actually reads this column: Mallory is not actually our child. We first came into contact with her when she was traveling with a group of carnies (‘circus folk’) and they said they were not her real parents either. She followed us home and although we have moved repeatedly it does no good. The truth is that we have two refrigerators, both state of the art, both always filled with gourmet-style grocery goods that we purchase from a for-benefit grocery store run by street urchins. We use these groceries to fix delicious and healthful meals, most of which we deliver by van to elderly shut-ins at no charge. We have never had any item at any time that was within a week of its freshness expiration point, let alone having one that ran past. My wife is a double-secret panelist on the Food Network’s ‘Chopped’, and i was raised by organic Swedish farmer/chemists. I now regret having taught Mallory how to read and write at the age of twelve. I would comment on her having bit the hand that fed her, but she would probably claim it was past its sell-by date.
Mr. Ortberg, you are my favourite person.
Are you going to try to blame Nancy for the way Mallory turned out? Because your response implies you share the blame.
This is genuinely my favorite comment in the entire history of The Toast.
Like, shut the doors and turn out the lights, nothing is ever going to top this.
I’m so glad you came here to rebut these malicious allegations. I am especially glad that your parents were organic.
WHO TAUGHT YOU TO CREATE A COMMENTING ACCOUNT
It was Laura! She just admitted it on Twitter!
Muah ha ha
He probably won’t be able to remember his login information either. At least not for very long.
OH MY GOD can we talk about this for a minute? Because I was lulled into a false sense of security by my dad’s facility with computers, and right now I’m trying to set up social media and a new website at work and it is like PULLING. TEETH. with the two 50ish ladies I work with and their total inability to remember ANY PASSWORDS FOR ANYTHING, EVER.
Suddenly everything about Mallory makes a lot more sense
Exactly.
SHRIEKING WITH LAUGHTER
YOU IS ALL THE FUNNY! Seriously, this was laugh out loud great.
Also, Mallory is extremely talented and appears to have been raised by a lovely set of parents. Bravo, sir!
YOUR WHOLE FAMILY IS PERFECTION. *throws self away*
DAD MAGAZINE STRIKES BACK
My cousin knows how to reply on a blog. That explains what it is so cold here in Micigan, Hell has frozen over .
I know John Ortberg and this is all true!! ;O)
omg TOO MANY RELATIVES ON THIS THREAD
WILL ALL ORTBERGS, BERGS, HALLS, HARRISONS AND BOATRIGHTS PLEASE EXIT THIS THREAD IMMEDIATELY
That’s it, I’ve found my favorite dad in the history of dads and it’s not even my own dad.
Well, now we know where Mallory gets it…
You gave me a great laugh today, Mal! I can so picture what you’re writing! I’m betting your kitchen is well-stocked with spices and herbs and “cookable” at a moment’s notice??
did you read my reply–right above yours? why would you encourage this sort of libel?
my kitchen is ABOVE REPROACH
oh my god I want your parents and my parents to go on a double date
Tell me I’m not the only one waiting for the “double-secret panelist on the Food Network’s ‘Chopped'” to comment?#fridgegate
WE SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
plates, you don’t have enough plates. ideally, you would have enough plates to feed about 700 people in one sitting, even though that number of people could never reasonably fit in the house.
you missed that one.
So, my grandparent’s kitchen.
I asked my mother once why my grandparents had the largest kitchen I had ever seen in a residential home. “Well, they both like to cook,” my mother said. Which totally explains why there are two sinks, two ranges, two dishwashers, THREE OVENS, a counter island the side of Rhode Island, and endless cabinets holding enough dishes to set a restaurant’s worth of tables. Not to mention the extra fridge and freezer in the laundry room.
But it doesn’t stop there. See, grandpa was a grocery/restaurant supply wholesaler, and in the habit of taking things home from work when he thought there might be a use for them. After he died, when my grandma decided to move to an apartment and my parents bought their house, we had to clean out the basement. We found enough glassware and dishes to outfit THREE restaurants, enough canned food to survive the zombie apocalypse, and not one, but TWO industrial deli meat slicers. Oh, and all the family wedding china going back four generations and across a half-dozen branches of the family tree.
What! Brain exploding, worlds colliding. My parents go to your dad’s church! (We actually like to think of him as Pastor Roger Sterling.) But now I know about the contents of his fridge!
“Pastor Roger Sterling”
WELP
When I was young and stupid, I moved in with my cousin and her family who graciously allowed me to have a mini-fridge in my room so I could keep my food separate from theirs. I did a big grocery shop, filled that fridge up, and promptly never opened it again.
I duct-taped it shut to move it to a new house nine months later and guiltily left it in the alley for garbage pickup.
things i learned from my parents’ kitchen:
1) buy as many bags of vegetables as you possibly can. ignore the fact that you have a giant market-garden and are picking bushels of produce every week. eat a few choice items from the garden. leave the rest to rot in their plastic bags. throw out the bags full of greenish-black slime weeks later yelling at your family about wasting food.
2) when you realize your fridge is always going to be so full of rotting food that you can’t fit anything fresh in it, buy a bigger fridge.
3) you do not have to refrigerate nearly as many things as you think. just boil the soup, turn it off & leave the lid on. you’re good to go for days this way.
4) when all the produce becomes too much to put in the fridge and ignore, fire up the canning kettle and subject your children to days and days of sweaty, sticky, overheated tomato-peeling and green-bean-snapping as you prepare for the impending apocalypse.
5) the kitchen is nice but what you really need is a root cellar, where you can safely store the giant rotting alien-squash that you grew but will never ever eat until it liquefies into putrefaction.
6) the root cellar is also a great place to store the dozens of beautiful glass jars of garden and orchard produce you canned, as well as bushels of sprouting/rotting potatoes and a large family of fat mice.
Mallory, I stay at your house one night every April with the other Winsor guys before we head for the hills. I have to say you are absolutely right. Being from the east coast, Chuck and I can never fall asleep upon late-night arrival, so its either wine or Ambien. One night we couldn’t find any unopened wine except a bottle hidden in the back of the pantry. We drank the whole bottle in about 30 min. sitting on your front steps. The way it should be drunk. The way to get drunk. Your Dad made some quip the next morning about it being some special bottle they were “saving” (now I know why: to sit half-empty on the counter with tin foil stuffed in it). I’ve always felt bad about that until now. Thank you. And the fridge? Every time I have been there, the shelves are totally empty. No food to be seen. Anywhere. Do they every cook, we ask? And the door is so stuffed with inedible crap that the fridge almost falls over when you open the door. I think that’s why Chuck started baking bread when he arrives. He’s just freaking hungry.
Tommy, everyone in the house thinks you and Chuck have a drinking problem. This year’s Winsor weekend is an intervention for the two of you.
I know Chuck’s last name because I’ve spent more than five minutes with Mallory’s dad.
Mallory, whatever it is that makes your parents do that with their fridge doors is a thing my parents also do with their fridge doors. HOW MANY JARS OF GREY POUPON DO YOU NEED, DAD? OH? ANOTHER? FINE. PUT IT NEXT TO THE 10 YOU ALREADY HAVE.
Also my dad hoards cans and cans and cans of water chestnuts but I have never once seen him use them in any cooking at all in the history of ever. It’s the weirdest thing.
Also the hidden candies in the nightstand. My mom does that. She thinks we don’t know. But we always knew.
HIDDEN FOODS! Gah, my Dad was the worst for this! He would buy cookies, hide them and then when they were stale he’d casually leave them in the kitchen for the rest of us.
He also had to buy things in twos. Two of everything. Like he was the Noah of the grocery world or something.
My dad also always had secret cookies! My mom does not buy things like that, so if you looked on one of the top shelves, as my dad is tall and doesn’t have to climb on a chair to get things off the 2nd shelf up, you might find a secret box of oreos. If you find them he will pretend he is all surprised, like ” How did that get in there, I have no idea.”
so much of this could be about my parents. the only reasons I know it’s not are: a) I am an only child, b) my parents do not look that photograph, & c) there weren’t nearly enough references to Laughing Cow cheeses (both their “triangle cheese” spreads & Babybels) & a constantly rotating assortment of crackers & dips from Trader Joe’s.
Remind me to bring them an unopened jar of jam.
BRB, going to follow him right now…
(Sorry.)
(I realize this post is what, two years old now but I had to like your comment so you had the same number of likes as your mother-in-law had jams.)