Rules & Regulations

In any household, whoever is "the cook", or the "cleaning lady" has a system. Things are in place for a specific reason, unless you are like me and riddled with OCD. But that's neither here nor there. I have system. First, never, under any circumstances place ice cube holders on top of the toaster. The next time I peel off melted plastic on top of the toaster, you don't get fed. Plain and simple. Another unwritten rule that Madelene hates is, do not leave the remote control on the couch. Do not leave the remote control 'floating' on the bed. Self explanatory and one of the main reasons why this gets screamed out, "Where's the remote control?!?!" Mad yells at me and says, "You have too many rules and regulations here!"  ....And I do. The refrigerator is a whole other can-o-beans, if you will. I have no idea why she insists on wrapping up the tiniest ends of a used up lime, or a centimeter of a leftover onion and perhaps a clove or two of garlic in the same tiny dish. "Well you might need one so it's right there in the front."  But they're all together in this messed up dysfunctional family of odd combinations of food. I might want to review my life in that regard. So, I chuck em'. My mother did the same when my Dad used to do this. He'd save the tiniest little piece of tomato and store it for later use. Mom would chuck it. Fact is: it. never. gets. used. again. End of story.

Over on the cleanliness side of pet peeves, it seems that Mad has figured out a very natural way to disinfect the sink drain by placing a half a lemon in the catcher. I can see that since lemon does kill germs, but now she is placing limes in there ---- which has sugar in it, which creates the attraction of ants. "Can you stop putting limes in there?"  And she assures me that she won't. The  next morning ------ limes. I also respect anyone who saves their bottles of seltzer/sodas/and whatnot, but when my sweetie does this, the piles of bottles seem to stack up to the point of submitting an application to that show Hoarders. "Let me just chuck these in the recycler." She says, "No! I want to get money for them."  So months later, she receives like $5.00. I would pay someone $5.00 just to remove them from my pantry. One day I took all the bottles that were piled up and threw them into the recycling bin in our complex. She comes home and says, "Wow, you took these to the recycling machine at ShopRite? You hate going to ShopRite. I'm proud of you!" I looked at her, nodded and threw down $4.35 on the table. "There you go. See? I did it."  She stares at me while I'm walking toward the kitchen and says, "It's too bad that Stop & Shop doesn't accept those bottles, Deb." God help me.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

For more of Deb's articles, please visit: www.debrapasquella.com or join her on Facebook and Twitter. Check out her cooking blog for some of her famous recipes!