Hitting Bottom

Just when you think you are "over it" - meat loaf strikes. It wasn't really the meat loaf. It was weighing the ground turkey and ground beef. I'd never owned a kitchen scale in my life except once a very long, ill fated time ago when I was on weight watchers. It sat in my cupboard unused and eventually ended up on a table in a yard sale. Tonight, I weighed the meat on the scale that Gillian had bought and I might add, left behind. She probably doesn't realize it yet. (Honey, if you are reading this, it would cost me more to send it to New York than for you to go to Target to buy a new one.)

Tare. Never had heard of it. Had no idea what it meant. No clue. But tonight, I sat the plate on the scale, hit "tare" and watched as the weight of the plate turned to zero so that I could determine 12 ounces of ground meat. Just as I was taught by Gillian. Where she learned it, I don't know.

After assembling the meat loaf, I decided I'd better clean out the fridge to get ready for the week ahead. The cream line yogurt container sat waiting for me on the shelf. I had planned on finishing the yogurt off with Gillian's raspberry jam and granola after she'd left for New York, but I didn't.
So, I washed out the moldy container and decided to hold on to it. It could be a handy way for me to carry soup to school, I thought.

Then I remembered the night of the big pronouncement.

She had been digging in the lower corner cabinet with the built-in lazy susan, when she announced in utter frustration that we were "in a tupperware crisis."
Lids didn't match bottoms and vice-versa. I had taken to buying the zip-lock and glad style disposable containers. Some clever marketing executive had made sure that the lids were just slightly off in size so not to allow interchangeable brands.
On the night that the crisis hit, it seemed we had lots of glad lids and no matching bottoms.

I usually resorted to putting foil or plastic wrap over the top of the lidless containers. It never occurred to me to toss the useless, bottomless lids.

My mother never threw out any of the trays from her constant diet of frozen food. Stacks and stacks of little black, plastic trays sat in her lower cabinet.
I used to be frustrated with this idiosyncracy of my mother's.
Gillian was frustrated with mine.
I guess we really do become our mothers.

Gillian also preferred to put cheese into separate tupperware containers in the refrigerator. Bleu, camembert, brie, and goat cheese all got their very own little container. Drove me nuts. I, on the other hand, would scoop up the left over cheese wedges from our fattening appetizer habit and put them all together in a ziplock bag. Gillian found this to be unacceptable since the aroma from the different cheeses would then mix together.

I thought about all of this as I washed out the cream line yogurt tub and tucked it away on to the lazy susan in the lower corner cabinet.

There were all those bottomless lids laying there on the shelf.

Hmm....do they still have such a thing as tupperware parties?