Come On. You Know You Wanna Look.

This post has been edited. Some of the original content has been removed due to my being informed that one of the blogs I had referenced had been dumped for reasons totally beyond me....not the fact that it was dumped....but the REASON it was dumped. Which is dumbfounding. And I'm grateful it was dumped. And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

Ha! So I follow a bloggista who is a Homeschooling Raw Vegan Foodie. I am not vegan, nor am I a foodie, for the most part. Although I do love my food. And I love looking at pictures of food. So I love her blog and stalk it regularly.

This bloggista, Green and Crunchy, should be a food photographer. The chick likes to arrange her food all pretty and take pictures of it. MAJOR. And she has adorable children. Five of them. Just like me! Only hers are more photogenic than mine. Anyway - she has a bad ass blender and an awesome dehydrator and she likes section plates. She takes pictures of her section plates loaded with raw food. And I want section plates. She also uses glass straws. And I want glass straws. And she uses something called tippins. I want tippins. And I'm not sure what tippins are. But I want to be the proud owner of a tippin or two. And her photogenic five children apparently gobble up whatever she sets on their adorably lovely frickin' section plates and I want that, too!! Because I deserve it!!

Anyway - so this crazy vegan foodie chick posted pics of her refrigerator. THE INSIDE OF HER REFRIGERATOR. And I looked. And I liked. And I found it interesting in the way you find basically anything interesting when you are procrastinating. It isn't as interesting as vampire porn (a tool of procrastination of which I am quite fond) but its nowhere near as boring as flipping through the phone book (which I have been known to do in order to drag out lunch). So, like I was saying, I found the contents of her very clean refrigerator quite fascinating and couldn't tear myself away. Green and Crunchy has labels and everything in her refrigerator. I want to label everything in my refrigerator. By now? If she's reading? I am probably creeping Green and Crunchy out a little bit.

I'm not going to post pics of the inside of my fridge. But I will tell you what's in it. And you will find it interesting and fascinating because you are probably trying to avoid doing something lame and boring and unfulfilling....so be prepared to be amazed.....by my refrigerator.


We'll start with my top shelf (yes - we are going shelf by shelf - you can just settle that rear end of yours down into the chair). On my top shelf is my Big Dog Emergency Sized The-World-Is-Going-To-End-In-2012-And-Who-Wants-To-Be-Sober-For -That? Margarita Bottle. And it is good stuff. It is not a mix. I cannot stand a margarita mix. It isn't quite as good as a homemade margarita with fresh lime juice...but it ain't half bad for a bottle and it gets the job done on a weekend. The brand is Salvador's Premium Margarita. I highly recommend it.

Next? Wheat germ. Three large jars of wheat germ. You're probably thinking we eat a lot of wheat germ. You're wrong. We eat it so rarely that when a recipe calls for it I go, "Wheat germ? We don't have any of that. Let me go buy a great big jar." Then I get it home and put it into the refrigerator and say, "Looky here - we already have several jars of wheat germ." The fact that I am sharing this story with you will not stop me from buying more wheat germ a week or so from now. That is the sad truth of it.

I do the same thing with canned sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. I don't serve either one. But every year at Thanksgiving I say to myself, "What if we run out of homemade cranberry sauce or sweet potatoes and I've nothing to serve my guests? Let me go to the store and buy back-up canned sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. Then let me bring it home and put it in the pantry next to the 20 or so cans I already own because I have this exact same panic attack every single Thanksgiving...." Again. Some things I can't control. I will not be able to avoid performing this holiday ritual.

So where were we? Oh yes. Top shelf. Is loaded with 2 big gallons of milk. Milk! Do you hear that my Vegan Sweetheart? It is right next to the liquor. My kids love the milk as much as I love the liquor. And the kefir. And the yogurt. And the cheeses of every variety. We are considering switching to raw milk. It is just so dang expensive.

Jasper is currently living on kefir. He hasn't chewed anything in weeks. When he was 3 I took him to the doctor for I honestly don't remember what. And I saw a different doctor than we usually saw. And he wasn't prepared for me. So he couldn't quite hide his shock over the fact that Jasper was still breastfeeding. "There is a narrow window of opportunity to introduce him to solid food!" he'd said. "Geeze," I said. "He's been introduced. We said, Jasper, this is solid food. Solid food, this is Jasper. They just don't care for each other." And the doctor? Was stunned. So I kept going, "We put stuff in his mouth. It makes him drool." The doctor was not impressed. "He spits it out. But," I added proudly, "he sorts it, first." The doctor was speechless. So anyway, here we are, Jasper is 5, and he still prefers his food to be in liquid form. And even though he is fully weened (that is not me in the you tube video of the woman breastfeeding an 8-year-old - I PROMISE) - he shows signs of being a breast man. But anyway, maybe we missed our window of opportunity with the solid foods, after all. But please don't tell that jerk of a doctor.

Jasper has several Big Stories in his background, and one of my favorites is the time he ordered breast milk in a restaurant. He immediately caught himself and became embarrassed, it had just been a knee-jerk reaction, sort of like last year at Halloween when he ran to the first house and screamed "Happy Birthday!" instead of trick-or-treat. But anyway, it was interesting to watch the waitress while she obviously considered just how far she'd go for a tip.

See how I keep digressing? So also on the top shelf - a 2.5 pd bag of spinach. We lika da spinach. We go through one of these bags a week. Spinach blueberry smoothies, spinach salads, sauteed spinach, spinach wraps, spinach juiced with lots of stuff......Camille is my only non-spinach eater at the moment (Jasper, of course, drinks his).

The next shelf has butter, cottage cheese, sprouts, avocados (like Green and Crunchy - we LOVE our avocados over here), leftover salad, 2 jars of organic natural peanut butter, 2 jars of organic jellies and preserves, and some refried black beans. The black beans are dehydrated and marketed by the Santa Fe Bean Co. They're really good and really fast if you failed to plan ahead and cook your own dang beans.

The next shelf has some soaking chick peas for a raw chick pea salad I'm making tomorrow (recipe of Green and Crunchy), tomatoes, feta cheese, eggs from our Rhode Island Reds, and some leftover pasta and asparagus.

The bottom drawers are full of fruits, salad fixin's, ginger, squash, carrots and some celery. My doors are mostly condiments, sauces, and salad dressings. However, the best salad dressing is olive oil, lime juice, and garlic. Yum! We try to avoid high fructose corn syrup if at all possible. I'm thrilled to see it making an exit from the shelves of my grocery store!!

My freezer is full of our summer garden's sweet corn, tomatoes, and coffee and nuts of every variety. I also keep my flour, oats, and rice in the freezer. There is a big huge Costo box of Morningstar Veggie Burgers (I know! Processed soy products!!) and some breads. Other stuff, too, can't even tell what it all is.

Our outside freezer is almost empty at the moment - ready for another load of beef that we will process after Thanksgiving. We don't eat commercially raised meat. Our kids are backwards from most kids. Most kids won't eat anything if they can freely associate it with what it really "is". For example, a hamburger is a cow, a pork chop is a pig...they really don't want to know this information.....whereas my kids won't eat anything they haven't personally seen walking around wagging its tail or spreading its tail feathers :).

On the floor of my kitchen sit 2 huge baskets of freshly hand-picked tangerines from Aunt Maxine's farm next door. Can you say carrot/orange juice in the morning?? Sweet. Might throw some pineapple in there, too.

There are bananas and organic apples on my counter. Onions, potatoes, and garlic hanging on the wall.

There now. Wasn't that a fine way to waste 10 minutes? What's in your fridge? Really! I wanna know!! I've shown you mine. You show me yours.

Sardine Mama - who, quite ironically, seems to have no actual sardines on hand. Just a coupla cans of herring :).