Who lives in a fridge like this?

OK, nobody actually lives in our fridge. Or I hope not.

There's a competition going on over at I Ate a Pie, and all the cool people, such as Dietgirl, are entering. So I have leapt on the bandwagon.

We inherited the fridge from the previous owners of our house. As we didn't own any appliances, we thought this was pretty handy, and rather generous. Then when we painted the kitchen, we pulled it out of the very tight space it was in... to reveal a gaping hole in the plasterboard wall. I think we might maybe fix that properly before we come to sell the house.

We have just gone to the shops today - specifically, Lidl - which is why the fridge is so full. It does not actually lean to the right, however full it is. (If you really want, you can click on the pictures for big versions.)

Top shelf: lots and lots of lovely protein. To the left, we have some eggs and four big tubs of Linessa (Lidl own brand) low-fat fromage frais, which the husband eats for breakfast in industrial quantities. It's very nice, but I hardly eat it for some reason (maybe because it's probably quite sugary). Two pots of Hartley's fruit jelly, which is mine - they're only around 70cal each, and satisfy my sweet tooth. Five tubs of Linessa cottage cheese, which I tend to eat on its own for lunch - one tub is about the right quantity. A collection of live yoghurts (plain for me, vanilla for J) which also get eaten at breakfast. And orange juice, which is J's.


(As a semi-professional eco-worrier, I stress quite a bit over the number of empty plastic pots this small household generates. We recycle almost everything, but we haven't found anywhere that will take yoghurt/cottage cheese/fromage frais pots, and so they make up most of what we throw out. Any ideas? I've tried planting seedlings in them, but I don't need THAT many flowerpots.)


Middle shelf: Flora Light margarine, with mushrooms on top in the blue plastic thing. Bread (wholemeal sliced loaf), cherry tomatoes, and cheese (mild cheddar). It's just normal full-fat cheese. I have decided that we don't eat enough of it to make it worth getting the low-fat stuff. Next to those are some leeks, and the end of a loaf of multigrain bread baked at home from a bag of mix. It's got wholegrain wheatflour, rye flour, sunflower seeds and flaxseeds (and I added some more flaxseeds myself) and makes delicious bread without much trouble. Only trouble is, I've been trying to eat less bread... well, the slices are smaller than normal bread... There's also a bowl with the remains of some homemade vegetable soup. I keep leftover broccoli stalks and odds and ends of vegetables in the freezer and make some every so often.


Under that, we have a bag of potatoes, a giant sweet potato (yum!), some broccoli and the box in which J keeps his sandwich ham.


The crispers are stuffed to the gunwales with vegetables, because we eat a lot of those. I've noticed lately that I can't really be bothered eating apples (and so forth) - I'd rather get my daily dose from vegetables than fruit, unless it's fruit I really like. But all the fruits I really like are either expensive and unseasonal (berries, nectarines), or a bother (pineapple, pomegranates). So veg it is. We do buy fruit but J eats almost all of it.


The left-hand drawer usually has salad and the right has things you cook, but this depends what we can cram in. There's definitely Cos lettuce, spring onions (J's latest enthusiasm), celery, various-coloured peppers, cucumber and more cherry tomatoes on the left. And a courgette. On the right, carrots, red onions, a cauliflower, and a cabbage (and there are more onions further back, and half an aubergine).

The door! This is the repository for all sorts of strange things that I never normally look at. So we've got lemon juice, tomato purée, mango chutney (Marks and Spencer's, no less), two kinds of mustard, light mayonnaise, pickled onions, low-sugar apricot jam, sweetcorn relish, rasperry jam, two bottles of wine, mineral water, pineapple juice, and skimmed milk. I don't think I've personally used any of it but the milk and the mayonnaise, and maybe the mustard. And some parmesan cheese you can't see. The fizzy wine's been there quite a while, waiting on a sufficiently special occasion - I think it wins the prize for what's been there longest. We have a fairly regular turnover of stuff, and since there's just two of us, we don't tend to cook in quantities that leave leftovers.

Oh. There's also half a block of butter and some cream cheese for making cream cheese icing. I bought those, because I do the baking around here. I also (let's be honest) eat it. But it's like the cheese: you pick what you're going to be super-healthy about. As you can see, the baking-related items are practically the only "unhealthy" things. I don't bake very often - it's a treat thing - and so far, I have not got experimental enough to try some of the tricks for making healthier cakes, such as substituting apple purée for the butter. Maybe that's something to try in future.

It surprises me how often J and I don't eat the same things. Not so strange, given that I'm vegetarian and he isn't. But apart from the vegetables, almost everything in here belongs to one of us specifically. J never eats my jelly or cottage cheese; I never drink his juice or eat his pickles. Maybe all couples are like this.

Although we do keep some things (tins, dry foods) in a cupboard, I did not edit the fridge in any way. J has some beer, but being English he keeps it at room temperature. In the downstairs loo. Yes, I think that's a bit odd too, but he claims it's the perfect temperature and they're safe from being knocked over...

And that's the end of the tour!