Vesta's View - August 2010

There are lots of things I love about this site. One of my personal favorites, though, which really only my mother and I will appreciate, is how it’s helped my mom and me remember things. I can’t tell you how often I call her up, or she calls me up, and the conversation goes something like:

Hey, you remember those pita chips you made for that party a while back?
Oh, yeah, those were yum.
Totally delish. How did you make them?
How did I make them?
Yeah, how did you make them?
I think I baked them? Maybe at 350 or 400?
With oil on them? I thought you put oil and salt on them.
Did I?
Didn’t you?
I can’t remember. That sounds good, though.

And so forth. I can’t tell you how many recipes or ideas for recipes or ideas for entertaining have been lost in my mother’s and my bad memories. Now I get to write it all down! A challenge, still, since most of the time we don’t use real measurements or remember how we did things even immediately afterward, but it’s a start.

Though on the flip side, I now sometimes hear, “I’m not going to tell you. I don’t want to read about this on Vesta tomorrow!”

2 containers of frozen chili

1 container of beef stew

1 container of lentil soup

1 container of ratatouille

4 containers of homemade chicken stock

10+ bags of breast milk (anyone who has ever had to pump knows how horribly heartbreaking this is)

Bags and bags of pureed food for Baby E (sweet potato, spinach, pears, peaches, blueberries, beans, peas . . . )

2 freezer bags of fresh corn off the cob

1 bag of frozen shrimp

2 frozen pizzas

Everything in our fridge

And use of our freezer and fridge. Sigh.

So on Thursday morning, J woke up and made me my coffee in the kitchen. He came back to our bedroom where I was lying in bed with a now-quite-mobile-Baby E, who was climbing all over me. He was holding out one of her silver rattles which I keep in the fridge since they get pretty cold and Baby E’s teething gums like them that way.

“The whole fridge smells metallic-y. We shouldn’t keep these in there. Smell this.”

He brings it to my nose.

“I don’t smell anything. Are you sure it isn’t just the nasty smell from the new gaskets?”

(Our gaskets, please note, are new because our refrigerator broke two weeks ago and was out for a week before our landlady and the repair guy saw eye to eye and determined it was the old gaskets that were causing the fridge to leak cold air and therefore put the motor on overdrive. A gasket, for anyone who doesn’t know (and I certainly did not), at least in a refrigerator, is the squishy plastic-y stuff that goes around the door edge and makes it stick to the body. New ones smell AWFUL.)

“It’s definitely not the gaskets. Do you really not smell it?” He repeats this whole thing with another silver rattle. I sort of smelled something on that one, so while he showered, I took Baby E to do some investigating. We opened the fridge and it smelled fairly “normal” in the new-gasket-sense of the word. But I knew the freezer often smelled worse and that our fridge has an inexplicable hole leading from the freezer to the fridge, so I opened that door.

And as soon as I did, there was black smoke, sparks, a little flame, and loud panic noises (those were in my head. The rest were real and coming from the little mechanism that pushes in and pops out to tell the freezer to turn the light on when you open the door). Cradling Baby E’s head, already terrified a spark had jumped onto her, I ran into the bathroom and started shouting THE FREEZER IS ON FIRE. J ran into the kitchen, opened the door and saw what I saw. But thankfully his panic button didn’t go off also, and he stayed cool enough to think to turn off the breaker switch to the fridge, which killed the fire. We called our Super, who came up as soon as he got in, and confirmed what we’d known: our freezer had caught on fire.

We got very lucky; our whole apartment could have been destroyed. Instead we just lost some food (okay, lots of food), but more on that later.

Any fire stories you all have?

Hi Vamps,

My apologies for being MIA. There were a few things at play:

1. Healing from hip surgery ended up being more exhausting than I’d anticipated.
2. My computer was acting up.
3. Baby E and I decided to become world-travelers this summer (or at least East-Coast-travelers) and as a result, I was often away.

No matter. VestaVamps is back now and I promise not to leave like that again.