MEL BUTTLE
“The freezer is banana purgatory”
On shopping day every week, I buy a small bunch of bananas. As I place them in my basket, I think to myself smugly, “I’ll make these into smoothies for breakfast.” As Sunday night rolls around, I will myself to turn over a new leaf, and be the kind of person who drinks smoothies, goes to boxercise and reads books.
However, the next week comes around quick as a flash, and that small bunch of bananas is a black, squishy mess.
No smoothies have been consumed, yet the same voice in my head that told me to buy the bananas comes up with a solution for the rotting fruit. “Why don’t you freeze them and then you can make some banana muffins?” Against my better judgment I listen to me, and peel the bananas that are now almost bursting at the seams and place them in a freezer bag for whenever future me finds the resolve to bake. Who do I think I am?
As you might expect from someone who finds making a smoothie a bit of a stretch, muffin baking day never arrives. The freezer is banana purgatory, that’s where those bananas will be residing until I wake up to myself, remember that I don’t own a muffin tin, and put the narnies where they should’ve gone from the minute they got spotty – directly in the compost bin.
Unfortunately, I have the same dynamic with quite a few foods, celery is another one. Celery is huge, it takes up prime space in the crisper. If I buy a piece of watermelon, the fridge is thrown into chaos, onions and sweet potatoes are relocated up near the yoghurt and the big jars that don’t fit in the door.
Celery has some audacity to be that big – it’s crunchy, stringy water that isn’t essential to anything except a Bloody Mary. Celery is literally all filler no killer.
‘Mel, why don’t you just hew the celery in-twain?’, I’d say mostly because
I’m a hot mess, and I probably got distracted by one of my comfort shows and lost a few hours in a mild dissociative state with a bowl of chocolate-coated cranberries on my lap.
On purchase day, celery ends up in whatever it was bought for – the base of a slow-cooked dish that’s destined to be tossed through pasta mostly. Then it’s curtains for celery unfortunately.
Sure it might get a cameo in a secondrate salad, but we all know what’s next. Wilting, bending and a slow trip to the compost bin. I wish I led a lifestyle where I could munch through a half bunch of celery before it got all floppy, but it’s something I’ve never been able to achieve.
Avocados and I don’t get on. They require almost as much forward planning as a mini break. Oh you wanted nachos tomorrow? Sorry you needed to buy an avocado sometime last week. You could try and get one tomorrow, but it’s either going to be a cricket ball or you’ll be playing avocado roulette buying a ripe one. You could strike it lucky and get a perfectly ripe but still tenderly firm fruit.
Or, if you’re like me, it’s probably all seed and filled with those weird little lumps and black flesh around the seed.
I guess it goes without saying I’m not a great judge of avocados. I mitigate this risk by buying a variety of avocados at different stages of firmness. Diversification they call it in the finance world I believe.
There are a few viral videos getting around social media about food storage. Apparently strawberries are best washed, dried, the green top trimmed off and stored on paper towel in an airtight container. That differs slightly from my method of chucking them in the fridge in the container they’re bought in.
They eventually get pushed to the back of the fridge behind leftovers and water bottles until I spot them days later and then work my way through the lot in one sitting, because waste not, want not.
Maybe this will be my week where I drink my strawberry, avo, banana and celery smoothie on the way to boxercise? I’ll let you know.