"refrigerator" news and stories

Julia Child's 10 best bon mots. Photo: Chow

Chow sums up its 10 favorite Julia-isms in time for tonight's release of "Julie and Julia". Our fave? "When a sommelier asked her to name her favorite wine, she replied, 'Gin.'"

Holy adorableness, Batman: Bakerella's pie pops.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, jumps on the Diner's Journal blog to weigh in on the non-anonymity of new critic Sam Sifton.

Freakishly beautiful Meneghini refrigerators, via Apartment Therapy.

Speaking of John Hughes, over at sibling site Moviefone they've summed up the 10 best cinematic moments in eating.

BoingBoing finds a great Snopes article about Van Halen trashing a concert venue after finding forbidden brown M&M's in the backstage area. Apparently David Lee Roth used the candies as a litmus test of a venue.

I have found that the more storage space I have for the food, the more food I'll keep socked away. For example, we got a new refrigerator last summer. I was giddy with excitement when we bought it, thrilled that I would finally have a fridge that wasn't stuff to the gills. However, in very short order, it was just as packed with food as the previous fridge had been despite being a full 1/3 bigger.

Recently, I've been trying to be more diligent about using up the things we have instead of purchasing food on a whim, and this week, there are a number of home cooks and food bloggers specifically endeavoring to do the same thing. A Mighty Appetite's Kim O'Donnell is keeping things organized and she has more than 100 households across five countries participating in the Eat Down the Fridge Challenge (there's even a honor roll and a Facebook group devoted to the effort).

If you've got a number of things tucked away in your fridge, freezer and pantry, consider playing along this week and see how many meals you can make from the food that you already have.

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Your fridge consumes about 8 percent of a home's electricity, reports Planet Green, but there are plenty of ways to keep its energy use down - cleaning the coils, covering food, etc.

Here's a new one: install carpeting. A new book, Carbon-Free Home, suggests covering the fridge with insulation boards which are in turn covered with carpet or corkboard. Apparently this can reduce energy use by about 50 percent.

Check out the Planet Green site for the (very simple) four-step instructions. Or take a look at the Chelsea Green site for much more detailed directions. Neither site, however, suggest whether shag or pile would look better next to your ketchup bottle and Chinese takeout cartons.

Have any of you tried this?

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In the interest of diminishing their carbon footprints, a few hardy souls on the frontier of the sustainable living movement have decided to ditch their refrigerators, reports The New York Times. Although 99.5 percent of American homes have at least one fridge, anti-fridge advocates say they make do just fine without.

One couple lives with just a small freezer and a cooler, kept chilled by two frozen soda bottles of water, which are rotated back to the ice chest when they begin to melt. I guess this would work OK, assuming you're home enough to rotate the bottles regularly - that might but a damper on your social life ("Oh, I'd love to stay, but I've got to go home and rotate the ice bottles!"). They say fridge-free living makes them more conscious of what they eat, relying less on packaged foods and planning ahead more so that meat from the freezer has time to defrost.

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Wondering why your refrigerator and freezer or using so much energy? Follow some quick and easy instructions to keep these machines running more efficiently, even during a power outage.