Ran Out of Room In Fridge - Garbage Disposal Is Great

Returned from the grocery store this morning with a couple of small items that needed to be stored in the refrigerator.  It was impossible to find any open space, so I piled the stuff on top of other stuff.  Maybe you've had to do that at times too.

I was going to have a late morning snack of cereal, so I pulled out the gallon jug of milk that was almost full.  I looked at the date and it was late April and I had the milk stored in the back of the fridge under the cold air outlet from the freezer.  It was so cold that I could feel a chunk of ice in the bottom of the jug.  Bummer.  I was going to chance the milk still being good if it smelled and tasted OK, but...  ...

So no late morning cereal snack.  Figured I'd just have a large glass of OJ.  Gallon jug was about 1/3 full, but the date on the OJ was about 3 weeks ago.  It might still have been good, but I decided not to chance it, so I rooted through the freezer and found a mini-cheese danish.  That worked out for a light snack.

I decided that since I already had 2 jugs that I needed to discard the content of, I may as well see if anything else in the fridge should also be eliminated.  If you've read any of my older blogs about food, you probably know that I enjoy cooking and always have a lot of left overs.  I ain't the best guy around when it comes to eating left overs.

The picture above shows the empty containers from items that I fed to the garbage disposal.  Broccoli salad - 2, cole slaw - 3, macaroni salad - 2 and a container of hot dog chili; also shown are the milk and OJ jugs.  I also found two small plastic bags of meat to throw away; one was sausage and the other ground beef, about 1/2 pound each.

I also discovered a 3 lb container of sour cream that I hadn't opened yet and the date was still good.  I put half in another container and used it to make Lipton Onion Soup Dip.  That'll come in handy with some chips for lunches or snacks.

While I had all that stuff out of fridge, I was able to go through and clean all the shelves and the drawers.  Now I ain't gonna say that the fridge looks new or anything like that, but I do have empty shelf space and there are no out of date food items left in there.

Feeling good about my cleanup, I used half my cabbage head to make a new batch of cole slaw and found a container of my home made hot dog chili in the freezer.  Needless to say lunch consisted of a chili, slaw dog w/onion soup dip and some Fritos Scoops chips and a big glass of iced tea.

JD, full from lunch with open shelf space in the clean fridge here in the BToS

PS - This is a good 4 minute video about food expiration, use-by and best-by dates.