What a mess! My kitchen — and hands — that is.

It was Sample Day at Whole Foods Market. (Actually, every day is Sample Day. This is a Good Thing.) I tasted a cherry-almond-vanilla snack/dessert. It was good. I picked up the recipe and found all the ingredients.

Then came the hard part. Quarter and de-pit two pounds of cherries? That took forever and I got cherry juice all over! (Two things:  I didn’t read the instructions at the store and I had never made anything with cherries.) That was last Sunday and I still have stained hands and fingernails. Not a pretty sight. I’m not doing this again without a cherry pitter.

Next came mixing the rest of the ingredients in the food processor — that I don’t own. I used to own one but I gave it away after letting it gather dust on my counter for a few years. (See it does happen: you give something away and then a decade or so later, you need it!) I used my blender instead. Ack! Wrong again. Everything got mushed instead of mixed. I was supposed to spread the mixture on top of the cherries. Didn’t happen. I globbed on the mixture and there it sat.

I stained my hands blood red for this?

When I tried to spread it out, I ended up just moving the glob around. Fine. I put the cherry dessert into the frig and then I cleaned up the mess I made.

This is why I think food tastes better when someone else prepares it. I may have to stick to the store samples for my desserts.

Yesterday I went to Whole Foods Market in southwest Austin. (Love having one on the south side!) I walked in with four items on my list and two grocery bags.

I couldn’t find one of the items on my list but I still managed to exit with three full grocery bags. They had a bag with a new design so I bought one and I needed it, as it turned out.

It was Sample Day. When advertising works on me, it really, really works. Yummy.

Alert the media. I peeled my own kiwi.

Buying already-peeled fruit is one of my guilty pleasures. It costs more, but I consider it well worth it to be able to sit down and eat mushy fruit without getting my hands all, well, mushy.

But yesterday, yesterday I decided I would just try to peel the kiwi myself. This time I used a peeler. (I’d call it a potato peeler but I cook potatoes without peeling them now. It’s the kitchen utensil formerly known as a potato peeler.) Last time I used a knife and did not get the peeled results I wanted. Peeling kiwis with a knife took a lot of the fruit flesh with it.

Using a peeler, I did okay. The third kiwi gave me some trouble. The peeling part was fine, but then I tried to slice it. The center was hard and resisted my cutting efforts. I stood the kiwi on end and tried to cut it like a pineapple. And got mostly mush.

I ended up eating that one standing over the cutting board. Two out of three isn’t bad, so overall I consider it a success.

Maybe the trick is in knowing which kiwi to buy, knowing how to pick the ones with soft centers. I haven’t figured out how to do that, so that secret is safe with whoever knows it.

It took a few days for our refrigerator to convince us it was really breaking down. Actually, it had been clunking along for a couple of years. Every time the compressor would stop, it gave a “ka-clunk” sound. But it still worked.

When it stopped ka-clunking, it wasn’t working so much. It was still cooling, but not enough. After a few ka-clunk-less days, we finally put our food in four or five ice chests in the dining room and waited for our new refrigerator.

The new one came and it was broken. Our food spent more time in the ice chests. The replacement refrigerator came and it worked. Yea! After six hours or so, we started putting our food in.

Well, some of it. After all those days in the warmer-than-usual refrigerator and all those days in ice chests, maybe we didn’t really want to keep all that food.

Ready for the next set of soups.

Out went the leftovers. Out went the eggs, meat and mayonnaise. Out went the mushy (formerly frozen) soup. Out went the jars with last year’s expiration date. (Oops.) It just wasn’t worth getting sick or even the worry about maybe getting sick. Hubby took the rejects to the compost pile and I washed all the containers that we separated from their refrigerator and freezer contents.
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I came home from work the next day — to a normally cooled refrigerator, no less! — and hubby had emptied the dishwasher. And left all these containers on the counter top. Because . . . after 12 1/2 years of living in this house, he “doesn’t know where they go.” I guess he thought they lived in the freezer permanently.

Now, if we were talking about those containers and me, I’d say there were too many to put on the container shelf in our kitchen cabinet and that maybe I’d have to consider making some soup right away (not going to happen) or putting some of the containers in the freezer, empty. But we’re not talking about me, are we now?

(Last refrigerator post. I hope.)