Bethk wrote:He was complaining there was too much food in the refrigerator and not any room for cold beer.....hmmm, why is it I don't see that as much of a problem? LOL
Brian is a beer drinker and I'm a wine drinker. We also have a lot of "drop by" friends, too -- even moreso since Brian retired. Anyone who drinks beer knows it always tastes better when it's IN ice. So basically, we usually have a cooler in the kitchen to keep beer and wine cold -- and, of course, occasionally whatever we're cooking a big meal or trying to chill something quickly, like say, macaroni salad. The cooler is behind the kitchen island so it's not terribly visible to others either.
At any rate, Brian was always buying a bag of ice or two for this cooler. This has gone on for years and years and years. The little convenient store about a half-mile away knows him well, and yours truly has also stopped a zillion times to buy a bag or two of ice on a regular basis.
Okay, temporarily on to another subject, we drink bottled water -- the kind in the smaller bottles that you buy in the big pack wrapped in the heavy plastic. I always feel guilty about using all those plastic bottles but when we don't buy the big pack of those small bottles, neither of us drinks as much water as we should. We have recycling pickup once a week and we recycle ANYTHING we can, but I still feel guilty about using so many of them.
Soooo, about six months ago, I had an idea. I filled about a dozen empty water bottles with tap water and put them in the freezer. Instead of buying a bag or two of ice, we put beer and wine in the cooler, put a bit of water inside, and use the frozen bottles in lieu of ice. About six of them usually fit in there with the beer and ice, so we have another half dozen or so in the freezer. In late morning, we switch out what is now a half-dozen bottles of water with another six frozen bottles from the freezer. And it goes on and on from day to day. We haven't purchased a bag of ice in six months! Not only have we saved the money on the bags of ice, but it's a real pain in the butt to stop and get -- and they're heavy, too. I can't tell you how many times I've broken a nail reaching in the store's "box" to pull out a bag or two of ice, as they're often times frozen together a bit.
The bottles of water take no time at all to freeze, so you always have a backup bunch of frozen bottles. We don't have a stand alone freezer but our freezer drawer at the bottom of the fridge has more than enough space for us to stack these bottles of water in a smaller walled-off section of the freezer that's on the right. Sometimes the bottles spring a leak eventually but we just recycle the old one and start a new bottle in its place. The labels wear off really quickly from the "iced water bottles" so we can easily tell which is a "real" bottle of water and which is one of the frozen ones when we want to have a nice cold bottle of water,
It may sound like a small thing to you but it's a big thing to us. Needless to say, Brian says I'm a genius. Another thing that is good about it is that even when the "ice bottles" melt, the amount of water in the cooler doesn't change like it does with melting ice. So if I put a big bowl of macaroni salad in the cooler to chill, I don't have to worry about the water level increasing and eventually getting into the bowl of food, which has happened over the years more times than I care to remember.
So buy a small cooler, Beth, and freeze some water bottles. That newly retired man of yours deserves to have his beer icy cold and at the ready!