Welcome to Hollewood! I’ve been meaning to start a blog for awhile now. In my mind, our blog would serve two purposes. The first is documenting my culinary adventures of Refrigerator Surprise. The second is a baby blog…except we don’t have a baby. Yet. More on that later.
Refrigerator Surprise started on Valentine’s Day 2013. I hadn’t been to the grocery store in ages, but it was a holiday so I wanted to make something better than Annie’s Mac & Cheese for Eric. I threw together quite a random array of ingredients from the pantry and the fridge. Pasta, chicken stock, fat free cream cheese, kielbasa from a few nights prior, and some jalapenos that were awfully wrinkly. There were probably some other interesting surprises in there too. The crazy thing was, Eric LOVED it.
Before we were married, I wasn’t much of a cook. I was busy, broke, and not usually home for dinner. After we tied the knot, I started using recipes. I remembered them and would cook from memory. If I was missing an ingredient, I could substitute and the dish would still turn out OK (or sometimes better). Somewhere along the line, I stopped using recipes for weeknight dinners. It seemed that anything I threw together tasted pretty good.
Oh yeah. I also have an obsession with not throwing food away. I love recycling leftovers, sometimes two or three times. Pork tenderloin on the grill night one becomes spicy pork quesadillas night two becomes spicy pork on a salad for lunch day three. People tell me that fruits and vegetables go bad. I prefer the phrase, “less fresh,” and guess what? The aforementioned wrinkly jalapenos still taste like jalapenos. When you cook fruits and veggies they get limp anyway, so does it really matter if they’re snap-fresh when you toss them in the pan?
So that’s the backstory on Refrigerator Surprise. I solemnly swear that nothing I’ve made has ever made me or Eric sick. When I post photos of food, I’ll let you know what’s in it and how I made it. Stay tuned for the next post on why this is also a baby blog…sort of.