The Guilty Party

Anyone brave enough to look inside my refrigerator is likely to discover not just one but two open containers of certain items. Like mayonnaise or pesto. It drives my husband nuts. He can't understand why I would dive into a new jar when there is still some left in the almost all used up one that had been there for several weeks.

There is a convoluted logic to my bad habit. When I go to all the effort to make some magnificent, incredibly delicious meal for him, I would hate to ruin it by not using the most flavored, fresh ingredients. Especially if I can't remember how long they have lingered in the fridge. My former mother-in-law was notorious for saving every last bit of every last thing so as not to waste anything ever. On a regular basis, she accidentally food poisoned my former father-in-law with science projects that she resurrected from her refrigerator and served for dinner. It got to the point where he would pick up his plate when she put it down in front of him, raise it to his nose and sniff loudly to be sure that it didn't smell "odd".

This would never have happened in my parents' house since my mom hated to cook and dispatched the dreaded task of making dinner with the fastest speed every seen in a kitchen. It usually involved reaching in the freezer and plopping a bag into boiling water. Once I left home, and she learned that I loved to cook, she refused to ever go near the stove again. Needless to say, her greatest delight was going out to restaurants.

I do have a trick though to be more thrifty. When I open the new container of pesto, I try to mix in a couple of spoons of the old container's contents just so I don't feel too bad about wasting food. And just about the time that the old container is done, I go out and buy another new one. So my husband can open the refrigerator and go nuts, shouting, "Okay! Who's the guilty party?"  He knows, believe me, he knows.