Houston, We Have A Problem

We're experiencing a heat wave in St. Louis - 43 degrees on Wednesday; possible 55 degrees today! Compared to the icy wind of the last week or so, this is balmy. Everyone is breaking out their shorts and t-shirts, running up to the volleyball courts and getting out the fishing poles only to find there is still a skating rink open over the sand and ice mostly covers the lakes.

Honestly, this weather couldn't be more inconvenient for me - our deep freeze may be dying. With it warming up, I can't get a bunch of coolers & ice together so I can put it all in the garage.

After the kids are in bed, we (Hubby and I) selfish adults like to have "scoop". This is a custard cup (6 oz.) full of orange sherbet - and I mean full, as in how high can I pile the sherbet on before it falls over and makes a mess? Really, you would think we could admit to ourselves that if we wanted that much sherbet, perhaps a larger bowl would be in order. Nope, not us. As long as it's only a custard cup, we're being prudent in our calorie intake.

We usually keep this "healthy" ice cream alternative in the upstairs freezer so it is easier to scoop out; thus, easier to create skyscrapers of sherbet. However, to our dismay, on Tuesday night, a new container had to be retrieved from the deep freeze. That was a bummer because when the sherbet is rock hard, we give up on trying to scoop out a lot and only have an actual cup.

When Hubby began to dish up the sherbet with ease, my first thought was, "Why is that so easy?" A not so good feeling started to form in my stomach. I pointed this anomaly out to Hubby, we looked at each other, then immediately headed for the basement.

I opened the freezer and there was still a three inch layer crust of ice around the top edge and cold air was coming out. It was weird though because some stuff was really frozen and others were starting to melt. Granted, the melty stuff was mostly items that defrosts quickly - sherbet, frozen orange concentrate, frozen lime concentrate, frozen lemon concentrate, frozen daiquiri concentrate. We concentrate a lot.

I got an empty storage tub and started loading it up. I grabbed all the concentrate first because we use that to make our lime-berry smash & famous margaritas - can't be losin' ingredients for that! Then, I went for the Butterbraids - you can't get those just anywhere, ya know. And finally I picked up the chicken, pork steak, hamburger, fish sticks (kids - you gotta feed them), etc.

We found all kinds of stuff at the bottom of the freezer. There was at least one package of bulk chicken that had busted open and was all freezer burned. There were packages of meats and side items that said they were best if eaten by July of 1981. We found a box of long forgotten Girl Scout cookies - I didn't care what the "best if" date was, we were keeping those. Four boxes of Texas Toast garlic bread were hidden in there - four boxes!!! We even found Elvis! Kidding on that last one, but suffice it to say a freezer cleaning was a little over due.

Spacial girl (that's me - I specialize in filing nooks & crannies - could I put that on a resume, "Spacial Specialist"?) got the majority of the savable food in the upstairs freezer, sent two bags of unsavable/undesirable food to the trash can, and put the remaining savable food in Ken & Roxie's freezer. Thank goodness really good friends live right around the corner - who else can you call at 10pm with this kind of crisis? Although we took all of Roxie's ice, it was for a good cause - meatballs and pierogies are irreplaceable.

Had I still lived in Wisconsin, we could have just put everything into a snow bank outside the back door. As long as the Bumpes' dogs don't get your Christmas turkey, you're good. Honestly, I'm not sure anyone has a deep freeze up there. Why pay for something to take up space in your basement/garage, when nature provides a free one nine months out of the year?

Anyway, when Hubby asked me what we were having for dinner Wednesday night, I immediately said, "Spaghetti - we have four boxes of Texas Toast to eat."

Dinner was served with three pieces of toast per person. Just kidding, I don't want to waste yummy garlic bread! And, dang it, no meatballs - I forgot there were in Roxie's freezer.

Now, how else can we use up the Texas Toast (only 26 more slices to go)? Make dinners consisting of chili, lasagna, mastacolli, or any other Italian dish. Cut it up into little pieces & call it an "appetizer" for Bunco group? Oo, oo, we can string a piece in each window and the exterior doors to ward off vampires. I suppose the possibilities are endless.

Silver lining:

1. The appliance stores didn't have any financing deals we liked or applied to our purchase so we decided we would eat up the food we had and wait for a better deal. Another thought was to save and pay cash for a new freezer. Save? Cash? Foreign concepts for sure.

2. After not buying a freezer we realized we could try to save the freezer we have by fully defrosting it (it is more than five years old and it's never been defrosted) and then checking the freon levels. What a "duh!" moment. As in "Duh, try to fix something before you throw it away." If it works, God was definitely watching out for us on this one. If it doesn't work, God still gave us the good sense to realize a deep freeze is nice, but not a necessity.