My best friend once told me that my refrigerator kind of freaked her out. It wasn't a cleanliness issue; rather it was my disregard for conventional rules about what-goes-where. Case in point: I've never understood the whole "crisper" thing for storing fruits and vegetables. Haven't refrigerator designers ever heard of the old adage "out of sight, out of mind"? Or maybe refrigerator manufacturers are in cahoots with the convenience-food industry; I wouldn't be surprised if Dateline or 60 Minutes end up doing an expose showing the CEO of a major appliance maker dressing down product engineers for making the designated vegetable storage area too accessible. "If someone wants an apple, make 'em work for it," is what the appliance magnate will be caught saying on the grainy undercover video tape.
If you're on a diet, the last thing you want is to be on your knees, struggling to open a cheap plastic drawer so you can to dig through a cluttered, uninviting mess only to find a poor, bruised-and-battered plum crushed at the bottom of an 8"-deep heap of fruits and vegetables. If you're going to eat healthy, then you gotta make it easy, folks. I may walk a mile in a thunder storm (or more likely: whine and plead until Alpay walks a mile in a thunder storm) to get my favorite double-chocolate muffin, but if I'm going to be good and have a few lousy celery sticks, I better be able to grab them without a lot of drama.
Happily, making good-for-you food inviting and accessible is easy; it just takes re-thinking where things go and how things are stored in the fridge. We use a variety of bowl for this purpose--small ones for quick snacks like cherries, figs, cut vegetables, and cucumbers, which we eat Turkish-style (peeled and sprinkled with salt and fresh lemon juice, sliced length-wise almost to the end,then wrapped in a napkin so you can holdand eat it like an ice-cream cone). For vegetables that are more often used as ingredients--onions and peppers, eggplants and tomatoes--we use a large, shallow bowl (see photo at the beginning of this post). And what about the awful crispers? Actually, we've found them to be very useful for storing fresh, loose-leaf spinach, which has a tendency to wilt and get yucky if stored in plastic bags. We just wash the crisper drawer and lay a paper towel on the bottom, and fill with a quantity of spinach that would do Popeye proud.
