My Freezer Inventory And Mr. Hawthorne Needs An Intervention.

I try to keep a clean house. I try to keep things organized. Really. I do. But I am confronted with immovable objects and irresistible forces. I have to run interference all the time. It's 4 against 1 in this household. More if you count the dogs. Except for Dixie, of course. I'm always planning for what I need to do. I have Christmas next month. And you KNOW all the baking I do for Christmas. I start on December 3. December 2 is Middle Hawthorne's birthday and I bake him a pumpkin pie (his choice) and deliver it to him (300+ miles away). I get back on the 3rd and bake 2-4 items every day until I'm done. I store all these cookies and candies in the freezer downstairs in the utility room. I have a problem this year. My freezer is full. Mr. Hawthorne is freakish when it comes to sales at Food Lion and Harris Teeter. He CANNOT, for the life of him, pass up something on sale. I worked on him for the last three days when he was off from work. On the third day: "I need you to come downstairs with me and help me take EVERYTHING out of the freezer, so I can inventory it all and put it back in, in order. You have no idea what's down there." "Yes, I do." "What?" "Meat." "What kind of meat?" "All different kinds." You see, I'm getting nowhere fast. "You're going to damn well help me. Now." "Why can't you do that tomorrow when I'm at work?" "Because I have RAYNAUD's and handling frozen foods is PAINFUL plus you're the one that insisted on buying all this." Oh." (I actually blogged about my Raynaud's here. Yup. It was a slow cooking day.) So, we go down to the freezer in the utility room and I start at the top shelf, throwing UFO's (unidentified frozen objects) onto the floor, while he just stands there, stupidly. "Can't you help? At all?" "Looks like you have it all under control." By the time I finished, my fingers were white and numb, although painful. Go figger. All Mr. Hawthorne did was to find my pen which I constantly dropped (numb fingers?) and lost, while standing in one place. He wrote nothing down. He took nothing out of the freezer. He put nothing back in the freezer. He just STOOD there. Sometimes, he would read the expiration date off a meat product. And the barbecue chicken thigh fillets we had the other night? They were from November 2005. I was expecting freezer burn, but this is a deep freeze and it was all good. I swear. I need a medal or something. Bear with me. I must tell you what is in my freezer. Top Shelf #1: 2 quarts veal stock 5 qts. chicken consomme 4 qts. pork stock (great for a bean soup) 1 qt. beef consomme (Note: Need to do more beef stock.) 5 pkgs. soft shell crabs (dozen in each pkg.) 2 pkgs. Schwan's baguettes (3 in each pkg.) 2 boxes Schwan's asparagus spears 1 pkg Alaskan Wild Salmon 2nd shelf: 4 hens (39 cents/pound from July 09) 11 (ELEVEN!!) pkgs chicken breasts and tenders (5-6 per pkg) 2 pkgs chicken legs and breasts 1 pkg chicken thigh fillets from November 05 (slipped through cracks) 2 pkgs split breasts 3rd shelf: 4 pkgs pork country ribs 2 pkgs baby back ribs 2 pkgs pork loin backribs 3 pork tenderloins 2 veal loin chops 10 pkgs bacon 4th shelf: 1 venison tenderloin 1 venison hindquarter 1 beef shoulder 1 pkg beef tenderloins (about a dozen fillets) 1 qt BBQ lots of shrimp packages 1 chucker 1 smoked pheasant Bottom shelf: Lots and lots of individual packages of shrimp. They fill up the whole shelf. Door: homemade applesauce strawberries we picked in Currituck croaker fillets country ribs country ham 2 rabbits my potstickers And some other shit but I just got too tired to write it down. You know, this worked when there were five of us living here, with two strapping young men who have insatiable appetites. But now? Not so much. Mr. Hawthorne, I think, has realized he has a problem. This was an intervention on my part. I can't stand this. I know he likes a good deal, but the amount of food here is ridiculous. It's like he grew up in a family of 18 and he's the youngest and everybody's fighting over food and he now needs to be sure he's got enough food and he will never be able to not eat, and "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" Oprah? Are you listening? I have a hoarder! And we need help. I think I might have made an impression on him. He told me he'd try to do better. Pffftt. Anyways, I need to clear out two shelves so I can store my Christmas baking. I wrote this original post November 11 and I'm just getting around to posting it now. Update: How's it going, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. Mr. Hawthorne is picking up deer meat as I type. And we went to Harris Teeter the other day for milk, eggs, and veggies. They had Alaskan Snow Crab Legs on sale. He started to fill the cart with 3 bunches of legs. Do you have any idea how much space a bunch of crab legs takes up? Let's just say, a lot. I had to restrain him. "But you never see them for this price!" "Where do you think you're going to put them?" "Oh." See what I have working against me? Is there a support group for this sort of thing?