Monday Night Dinner

We live in a heathen consumerist society, and when it gets me a fridge delivered on a Sunday morning I’m just fine with that. As I told my mother, blue laws only apply to things you might want to buy on a Sunday, like alcohol*. I know my mother once dramatically stalked out of a Sears and swore she would never set foot in one again, but I have nothing but nice things to say about our local Sears. For one thing that side of the mall is the easiest place to park, but mostly because I walked in to Sears on Saturday morning and by 12:30 on Sunday afternoon I had a fridge up and running in my kitchen. Nearly a week later and that still feels a little miraculous to me.

The fridge is shiny and new and so clean I’m a little afraid to put things in it because I don’t want to be the person who causes the first spill. It’s also larger than our old fridge because we had a choice between smaller and more expensive, and larger and cheaper for two fridges that were otherwise more or less identical. After determining that it would fit through the kitchen door provided we could figure out how to take the kitchen door off of it’s hinges (my roommate and her father worked this out on Saturday afternoon because given a choice I leave that kind of thing to other people – look, I can do it, but much like hammering things and killing bugs I’d rather someone else did it), we went larger and cheaper (also top door, not bottom drawer because the bottom drawer fridges were exponentially more expensive, and the ones that were in the same price range as the top door fridges had doors not drawers on the bottom freezers and that seemed very inconvenient).

I used the death of our old fridge (not quiet or graceful) to dump most of the stuff that was in the freezer and start fresh, and the freezer is currently so empty that every time I open it I feel like I hear a faint echo. The fridge is less empty, because I didn’t actually end up losing that much food – it was post-Dinner and the end of a week when I had known in advance we weren’t going to be eating at home on Thursday or Friday anyway – but it’s still large and looks barren. That’s not something I say often about my fridge, particularly not in the middle of the summer when everything ends up in the fridge just to keep it from going bad before we have a chance to eat it – cherries, grapes, blueberries, two kinds of melon, peaches, sliced whole wheat bread, mango-pecan breakfast bread, lemons, potatoes, etc.

I have friends who looked in my fridge on Wednesday night and laughed at me when I said it was barren and empty, because my barren and empty still includes bowls of fruit, a carton of eggs and two kinds of yogurt. I still can’t quite get over the clean! and empty! I’m almost looking forward to next weekend when I stuff the fridge full of pans of chicken, and a pot of soup and bread and cheese, I feel like it’ll finally look like my fridge instead of someone else’s unnaturally clean and neat fridge.

* Although, for the most part this is effectively no longer true in Massachusetts. The blue laws repeal was left up to the individual town government, so I suppose it’s possible there are some hold outs where you can’t buy alcohol on a Sunday, but I suspect they’re few and far between and as far as I know not anywhere near me.

Cajun Chicken Salad
Buttermilk Biscuits
Watermelon

Cajun Chicken Salad
I was feeling low key, and there’s all this gorgeous produce to be eaten and not enough meals to it in, so I put it in salad – fresh lettuce, peaches, avocado (yeah, okay not local, I know) and lemon cucumber, plus bowls of radishes and tiny grape tomatoes on the table.

Recipe previously given: Cajun Chicken Salad

Buttermilk Biscuits
There’s needs to be an excuse for biscuits?

Recipe previously given: Farewell to Summer Dinner