The work fridge.
What a curious beast this is. It's home to hundreds of box-shaped Sainsbury's carrier bags, and no one knows what lies beneath. Then there are the requisite million pints of milk that go within seconds, the usual M&S salads and endless tubs of low-fat butter, Flora, margarine (say it with a hard G), etc. It usually ends up so full of old, forgotten, sad food that an email goes round announcing that everything will be chucked out if not claimed. So that's everything then.
Yesterday, a particularly rank ex-lasagna in a Tupperware container was making its presence felt. Which got me thinking - what's really odd about the work fridge is those things that while you might not think them unusual at home, it's a mystery as to why they're at work:
1. Big tubs of cream
Now either someone has bought it with the intention of taking it home, or they're having trifle every lunchtime, and don't baulk at being liberal with the cream. Mark my words, this vat of Elmlea will still be there in a month's time.
2. Jars of jalapeno peppers
Is someone making their own tacos? They're not really a salad garnish. So why?
3. Patak's marsala curry paste
We don't have a cooker. And it's not a sauce to be heated up in the microwave. It's a marinade, a baste. So who's the curry queen - and why?
4. Plastic cups with about a milimetre of fruit cocktail in them
Why keep this? It's uncovered, dry and there's only about a mouthful there. And when it got thrown away (by me) there was an outcry. Don't be silly. Either eat the whole thing or bin it.
5. Pesto
And lots of it. Who's whipping up inventive pasta dishes of a lunchtime? I've never seen anyone put a pan on to boil, mainly because it's impossible. I don't think it's possible to cook pasta in a microwave, or if it is, it must be foul. So why the pesto?
I'm going to hover and see what belongs to who. Then ask the question we're all asking: Why?!
12 comments:
You touch my pesto and there'll be hell to pay...
I'll bear it in mind!
What on earth is a Whole Grain Lean Pocket??
That's not actually our fridge. Just a pic off Google. But it does look a LOT like it.
Ours is predictably rank and overloaded with Sainsbury's carrier bags, but we don't have pesto or curry paste in there.
We DO have: lots of dried-up lemon halves (someone likes lemon in their tea, I think), a can of Green Giant sweetcorn, some Philadelphia with no lid (now absorbing the general fridge smell, I guess - bleurgh), Swedish "caviar" paste in a Primula-style squeezy tube (classy!), and somebody's antibiotic eyedrops which I think have been in there for a good six months. For ages we had an egg in its shell (boiled? raw? who knows?) rolling around in one of the shelves in the door, but that seems to have gone now, fortunately.
Not being a tea/coffee drinker and keeping my lunch safe in an insulated bag (I know) I rarely venture into the work fridge these days. But I don't need to open the door to tell whether it is Market day or not as there is always at least one early starter who stops off to buy very smelly cheese on the way to work.
And presumably a whole grain lean pocket is some form of branded pitta bread.
We have a canteen at work but you'd only eat from there if you were clinically insane, so we have a large larder fridge for the sane ones amongst us. Being in a food factory it has to be kept fairly clean and tidy.
What irks me is that the people on diets take in gargantuan amounts of salad which it takes them the entire length of their break to consume. Is that the best way to lose weight? And who puts half a bottle of Coke in there? Or a tin of pineapple? That's right, a tin, unopened, in the fridge.
Where ever I've worked they always smell the same - off milk
I left a sandwich in a drawer by mistake once, and found it six weeks later. Grey, furry and three times the size.
Go to a branch of Cooplands or Greggs for a sarnie instead.
(That could be the most northern sentence I've ever written).
We don't have those in Camden Town. I like Greggs but it's hugely unhealthy.
I'm disappointed. I imagined you to have your own mini fridge. A carpet golf set too.
Half lemons stop fridges from smelling, Kitten IABG. Fact!
You do have to throw them away when they're dried up though, and replace them.
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