A Look Inside an OCD Refrigerator

Not long after I started buying an inordinate amount of vegetables, I realized something: veggies are kind of a pain in the butt. Every time I wanted a little broccoli I had to wash it, cut it, and dispose of the remnants.

It's one thing for me, the stay-at-home-mom, to sit around and wash and cut vegetables all day, but it made Zach grumpy. And late. He likes to take a bowl of veggies and hummus to eat at lunch, and it was cramping his style to have to wrestle with it every morning. His solution most of the time was to forgo washing the produce, which I wasn't OK with. I also wasn't OK with my fridge being a tangled mess of produce bags, errant green peppers, and rotting onions that I forgot due to the mess my fridge had become.

So a few months ago I started taking 30 minutes or so on grocery shopping day (a.k.a: "Thursday") to wash, cut, and container (yes, I'm using that as a verb) the vegetables for the week.

Behold, the OCD Refrigerator:

Did I clean up my fridge specifically for this picture? No. I looked at it, declared myself a freak and decided to document it. Does it look like this all the time? No. But it does on Thursdays!

See those two square containers on the bottom shelf? One is filled with washed baby spinach and the other is filled with washed and cut broccoli, cauliflower, and beets. The two round containers in the middle? One is collared greens and the other is kale (I am experimenting with a kale green monster this week). In the right bottom drawer is washed cilantro, along with loose apples, grapefruit, and oranges. The left drawer is a bit of a mess with a couple bags of squash and zucchini, but it's OK - there's a method to the madness there. 

Even though it's a bit of a pain to take the time to do this, it saves so much time in the long run. This also allows me to see how I'm doing with my procurement skills. Did I buy too much? Too little? My goal at the end of the week is to have a basically empty refrigerator. I don't want to waste food because I couldn't see it and it went bad. (How far will I go to have an empty refrigerator Thursday morning before my grocery trip, you ask? Far enough to stand there and shovel three-and-a-half spoonfuls of cottage cheese and two spoonfuls of plain yogurt down my gullet as my "breakfast dessert." That's how far.)

So, is it a little OCD? Probably. But if it makes healthy eating a little easier, I'm all for it.

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Workout of the Day:

TBD. I have a workout with the ladies up at church today, and I'm going to let them choose which one they want to do.