The Lazy Genius Podcast - #98 - The Lazy Genius Cleans Out the Fridge

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

We’re talking fridge clean-outs this week on the podcast. This is one of those episodes we wish didn’t exist but also need very badly. We’ll spend a few minutes going over the seven steps to tackling this chore, the tools you’ll need to be successful, and a way to make it happen less often and definitely be less gross. Helpful Links Don’t sleep on The Meal Plan! I’m closing the doors on it March 7th. If you want to revolutionize your meal planning game this spring, this is it! Here’s the Bizarro Meal Prep method I swear by when using up random ingredients left abandoned in my fridge. How to stock your kitchen to eliminate those straggler ingredients that never get used and tend to make a mess. Join me on Instagram! I’m there live every Thursday around 12:15 pm EST. Download a transcript of this episode! This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies. Your baby boom ends here. Save the everyday with Amazon. Hey, everybody. You're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 98. The lazy genius cleans out the fridge. This is one of those episodes we wish didn't exist, but also need very badly. But don't worry.

We'll spend a few minutes going over the steps, the tools, and a way to make this chore happen less often and definitely be less gross. First, I want to let you know, though, that this week, March 7th is the very last day. You can join our lazy genius meal planning community and get the meal plan system before the doors closed for a good long while. There's no date for the next time yet. but it's probably going to be like late fall, early winter of 2019. So that's another six months of stressing out over what's for dinner. So if you have any desire to get a better handle on meal planning your way, not the internet's way, jump on board.

You get super helpful printables, a video masterclass with me on creating your own personal meal planning system and rhythm, and a private Facebook group that has already been extremely helpful to its members. I've seen folks exchange recipes, give ideas on how to use like different ingredients, help with picky eaters, all of it. It's $39, an amount that you will save in food waste in like just a couple of weeks, if not less, or even just like one or two panic meals out, you know, when you can't figure out what's for dinner. It is such a great value and will change how you meal plan for sure. Check out the link in the show notes of this episode to see details. You can read testimonies from folks who

have used it and you can find a list of frequently asked questions if you're still on the fence. And that website is store.com the lazy genius collective.com slash the meal plan. Again, March 7th, Thursday is the last day. So scoot. Okay, now let's talk about cleaning out the fridge. It's a task no one looks forward to, but it's definitely one of those tasks that's beautiful when it's done. So let's go through the steps of cleaning out your fridge. So let's go through the steps of cleaning out your fridge and then a couple of habits you can get into that keep those cleanouts from happening as often. Okay, let's clean out the fridge. Step one, gather your tools. This is true for most chores. Go ahead and get everything you need to make this process as seamless and not

annoying as possible. If you're weird about touching gross stuff, I get it, get some rubber gloves. You'll need a handful of rags or sponges and try and grab like at least one. that has some grit to it for when we start to clean stubborn places. You'll need a cleaner of some sort. And this is up to you. You can go like hardcore with bleach, completely homemade with water and vinegar or something in between. I personally tend to use dawn dish soap and then sometimes even follow that with like glass cleaner if I want my shelves to get like really shiny. The cleaner itself is less important than the order and method you clean in. So choose whatever cleaning. you like. It's probably going to turn out all right. Okay, so let's keep gathering. If you anticipate that

you have a lot of stuff to throw away, go ahead and grab a trash bag or at least pull your trash can over to your fridge to make the walk, like not be a walk. So you can just toss stuff easily. Also, if you anticipate this process taking a really long time, grab a cooler to put any perishable stuff in if you're nervous about that. Now, I usually skip that step because cleaning my fridge is doesn't take more than half an hour, but your situation, it might look different. If you haven't cleaned it out in a while, you might be in for a little bit longer than that. No worries. Just grab a cooler. And because we want this process to be as delightful as possible, would you please put on some music? Nothing melancholy. No, you need a beat to make this tolerable. So step one, gather your tools.

Step two, take everything out. You probably knew this was coming, but still do it. You think it won't make that much of a difference to work around a few things here and there or to even go like shelf by shelf. But it's not worth it. I promise you so hard, it's not worth it. Just take everything out all at once and put it on the counter. We'll come back to going through that food in a minute because now is not the time. But if you want to speed the process along when it is time to go through the food, designate zones on your counter as you're pulling out your food. So one space is for stuff that's definitely going back in the fridge. One space could be by your sink or your dishwasher for plastic Tupperware containers full of questionable contents.

You don't need to dump that stuff out now, but putting all of those containers in one spot, it will give you a leg up when you start to sort and dump those containers. You can also make a zone for foods that need to be eaten like right now before they go bad. And of course, you can just have a zone inside your trash can of stuff that you automatically know is bad and you're just going to throw it away. because you're trying to be speedy with this step of taking everything out, now isn't the time to assess like each and every item that comes out. So the zones are really just for stuff that's obvious, which most of it probably is. If it's brown and gross, you don't need to decide. You just throw it away. If you see mold on the lid of the plastic container, you don't need to decide. That container needs to be

emptied, right? And cleaned out. But of all the actions that are best done in, in back, batches, like those things that you want to do all at once, like opening up all the Tupperware, loading all those things into the dishwasher, or putting them all in a sink of soapy water, you know, prepping all of the food that is on its last legs. Like, try to put things in zones that are better done in a batch later. So sort by the zones if it's easy. But if it's better to just empty out the fridge as fast as you can and just stick everything on the counter, that's fine too. One motion to remove and set down and repeat. Don't go. Don't go. through each and everything right now, unless it's obvious. And then in that case, just put it in the

right zone if you choose to use zones. Okay, but step two, take everything out all at once. Step three, wipe out the wetness and the food debris. This is kind of like that hack we learned when we clean the bathroom. You need to dust the bathroom before you clean it. If you add wet cleaner to your dry sinks, especially like around the toilet, you know, like the top of the toilet, you just end up moving dust around that is impossible to get up, like all those little blue, blue and black pieces all over everything. And like, where did this stuff come from? It wasn't here before. It was. It was just spread out and dry and dusty and then wet stuff hit it. So dusting your bathroom before you clean it is so fantastic. The same, well, I guess it's kind of the opposite,

but still the same concept. It's true of your fridge. It is likely that there are like little pools of random liquids along with like stems of parsley and dried grapes and all that stuff that's just randomly been collecting in your drawers and shelves in your fridge. If you just start spraying cleaner before you get all that out, you will be immensely frustrated by how little momentum you feel and actually getting the thing clean. You'll just move around junk. So soak up the wetness with a rag and get rid of all that weird food debris. You can do this a couple of ways. You can do it with a hose attachment on your vacuum, if you got a lot. And it's so annoying to try to scoop it all up with the rag.

Just go get your vacuum. It actually works really great. Assuming the area isn't like sobbing wet. You can use a bench scraper to at least get stuff off your shelves. A bench scraper is one of my favorite things ever. It's sometimes called a bench knife. But if you just look on Amazon, we'll put a link of one in the show notes. But if you just like Google bench scraper or a bench knife, you'll see what I'm talking about.

And it's like the best. It's the best tool. It's the best tool of all the tools. It's like such a, what's that word of something that is, doesn't get a lot of like an underrated tool. But like in sports, I can't think of my metaphors. It doesn't matter. You're all yelling at me.

You know what it is. I can't think of what it is. Now the bench graper, it might not work super well in your fridge drawers. Since those are like usually weird shapes and they sometimes have those ridges on the bottom. But it could use, it could be used for some areas. Or you can just like get another rack. and collect all the junk the old-fashioned way by just like grabbing it until it's gone. But regardless how you do it, get up the wetness and the food debris first.

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If a bottle of marinade leaked and now requires like a power tool to get up because it's so sticky, this is the time for that kind of stain. And here's how you get it up. Boil some water on the stove. If you use a kettle, you can like take the actual kettle into your fridge. If you don't use like a ladle or something. but pour some of that boiling water on the stubborn stain and then put a rag directly on top of it and it traps in the heat and it softens that dried food. Now you could do this by like wetting a rag with boiling water. I just want you to keep your fingers. So like just be careful. You know what

mean? Like you could write like half the rag and then hold the dry part and put the wet part on there. But regardless, hot water is your friend. It breaks up just about anything. Just be careful. Just be careful using it, that's all. But get up those sticky, stubborn stains before you clean any further. Step five. Deal with the food on the counter while the hot water does its work. Or you could even, like, go ahead and spray some cleaner in the fridge. Like if you've already done, maybe you don't have a hot water step. Maybe you don't have any stubborn stains. You could just go ahead and spray with some cleaner to, like, get it going a little bit. And while that happens, you can use that little bit of dead time to tend to some of the food on the counter. Okay, you have three categories of the food on the counter.

keep, trash, and immediately use. If it's expired, if you never use it, or if it is a different color than when you bought it, put it in the trash. If it's not, keep it. And if it's on the verge, then you need to use it immediately. If this goes quickly and you have time, you can go ahead and wash out all those disgusting tubware containers at once

and you can load the stuff in the dishwasher or put it in your soapy sink. just all in one fell swoop, you can leave your keep pile on the counter, obviously, because it'll go back in shortly. And then for the immediately use pile, now this is up to you. If you want some help on thinking through this concept, I have a blog post, I'll link to in the show notes about bizarre meal prep. And it is essentially turning almost bad food into food that you're going to eat. So you roast vegetables. You make a quick compost. out of wrinkly berries. Basically, a compote is like fruit and sugar cooked down.

It's not jam. Like, it's not going to last shelf stable. You don't have to boil jars and stuff. But you can put it on toast. That's delicious. Put it in yogurt, you know. Throw those wrinkly berries into muffins. The idea, basically, is just to use stuff before it goes bad in food that you'll

actually eat. Because if you put that food back in your fridge, you're probably not likely to actually make use of it. So if you know you're not going to cook up that food, if you know you're not going to do it, if you just know yourself well and you're like, I'm going to, I say that this kale needs to be eaten by tomorrow, but I'm not going to make it by tomorrow. Just go ahead and trash it. It's better than making your fridge full of rot again. And it is good information for the future. Maybe those foods aren't foods that you need around as often if you don't have a specific plan on how to use them.

Okay, step six. Wash the inside of your food. fridge. You've done all the hard work already and now comes the fun part. I mean, as fun as this gets, I suppose. The cleaning is going to be so much easier because you've already gotten up like all that debris and all the stubborn and suspicious liquids. So you can just like, you can clean your shelves in your drawers with a cleaner and a rag and be done. Now, you can take them out like if you want to and put them in a sink of soapy water if your sink is big enough to hold them. But if not, you can just spray it, wipe them down. That works great. And don't go for perfection here. The fridge does not need to look like it could go back on the showroom floor at Lowe's.

It just needs to be clean enough to make you feel like this process was worth it. And that's up to you. What that looks like is up to you. Again, you can use any cleaner you want. I would recommend using a thicker, like microfiber cloth or a sturdy sponge to really get some friction in there as you clean. You don't have to, but you know if you've got it, might as well use it. And then use a dry rag at the end to go back over your fridge and the shelves to get up any tiny pools of water that you left. If you put bottles and jars back in the fridge with that moisture with like a wet shelf, then the gunk that might still be on the bottom of a jar is just going to collect because gunk and water like each other a lot. So just try to dry it out before you put stuff back in. And now step seven, put everything back.

now I like to have another rag this is why I told you you have a lot of rags I do try to wipe off the bottoms of like the jars and the bottles before I put them back in the fridge just so you're not adding you know gunky bottoms to your clean fridge but other than that you just put everything back

where it makes sense and put things where that you want to see more often in the front things that you don't care about seeing in the back and on the bottom okay and that's true of like like produce you know what I mean like we put produce in drawers and then we're like, why did it go bad? It's because we can't see it. So if you think about it,

you can decide how you use your fridge. Like you can put stuff where you want to put stuff. So you could always just make the shelf in the middle in front of you full of your produce and then put like, I don't know, coffee creamer. That would be weird in a drawer it could spill. So maybe not coffee creamer. But like feel free to use your fridge the way that you need to, but realize that the stuff that you see is the stuff that you're more likely to use. Okay. So, So let's run over the steps again. Step one, gather your tools. Step two, take everything out. Step three, wipe out the wetness and the food debris. Step four, attack any of the stubborn stains with hot water, preferably. Step five, deal with the food on the counter while the hot water and the

cleaners do their work. Step six, wash the inside of the fridge, and step seven, put everything back. Now, here are two ways that you can avoid doing this chore as often. First, get in the habit of bizarre meal prep like every couple of weeks. Pull out what is struggling and cook it into something. You will get in a habit of not having as much stuff going bad as often because you're taking care of it on a regular basis. You're in a rhythm. And then the second way to avoid a major disgusting fridge clean out is to stop buying stuff you don't eat. I have done an episode about this before, but, and I'll link to it in the show notes, but stop buying ingredients you don't use. Just because everyone says, you should eat kale, it doesn't mean you have to keep buying and throwing away kale. Buy what you

eat. If you listened to last week's episode about the one simple step that changes dinner forever, you'll know about brainless crowd pleasers. Stock your kitchen with ingredients for those meals. Not all the ingredients you think you should have for like sometimes. You will avoid so much waste that way. And then of course a practical way to avoid so much food waste is to plan your meals. that way you don't buy foods that you don't need. And you like this segue? Lucky for you. I have a great resource for you in that.

Fancy that. If you want to check out the meal plan, which is the lazy genius guide to happy dinners at home, the link is in the info for this episode, or you can just go straight to the source, store. the lazy genius collective.com slash the meal plan.

It is available until this Thursday, March 7th, and then the doors close. We can't do stragglers. because our live video masterclass, it starts that next day. So it's Thursday. It's by Thursday or a solid six months from now. So don't miss it even if you're like the slightest bit entrusted. Okay, friends, that's it on cleaning out your fridge. I hope that you are inspired to attack that fridge, but also even more than that to start exercising some rhythms to keep it from getting to a hopeless state less often. Now you have a plan. I would love to hear any questions you have

about this episode on Thursday on Instagram. I will be there live around 1215 Eastern so you can follow me at The Lazy Genius. And I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about the meal plan too during that live. So be sure to join me. That's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Kendra. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life,

you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves.

Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.