Sure, it sounds easy enough; place the uneaten food into little containers with matching lids and then save them in the refrigerator. In the next day or two, reheat the pre-cooked items in the microwave, set the cold dishes back on the table and voilà – another home-cooked meal at no additional cost! Brilliant! But, it never works.
See, at my house, once the food goes into the refrigerator, that’s where it stays until it has morphed into an inedible psychedelic version of its former state. Only when it has sufficiently become discolored and acquired a rancid odor is it removed. All the term “leftovers” means in my home is an opportunity to air out the house – and more dishes!
If we could just bring ourselves to throw the food away in the first place, we’d save a lot of time and money. But something in our psyche won’t let us. Forbids it, actually. Why? One possible explanation is that my wife and I were taught not to be wasteful. So, we dutifully scrape our leftovers into the little containers with matching lids and then stack them in the refrigerator. This we do in order to satisfy the “waste not, want not” code that is so ingrained in us. Then, we promptly forget about it until either we run out of little containers with matching lids or the putrid smell calls us to action.
By going through these motions, we feel justified when it all gets dumped into the garbage. As if sending the food for an extended stay in the cool confines of the refrigerator and allowing it to slowly rot and mold before we throw it away is somehow more noble than discarding it the day it was cooked.
Maybe we just learn not to cook so much. That seems like a feasible plan, right? It would save time and money and a lot of hassle. The problem is, if we did that, there would be no leftovers, and then what would we do with all those little containers and matching lids?
Bruce A. Borders, author and songwriter has over 500 songs and 9 books. Over My Dead Body, his latest ebook, is available on Apple I-Pad®, Amazon Kindle®, Barnes & Noble Nook® and Sony Reader®. For more information, visit http://www.bruceaborders.com or http://overmydeadbody.jimdo.com.