For an appliance, our side by side fridge/freezer unit is getting a little old. Having dealt with twenty years of Thanksgiving leftovers without complaint, it’s been a dependable companion but late last Friday night it needed to take a few days off.
Our poor broken fridge.
By Saturday morning, ginger ice cream had turned to soup and the numerous bags of frozen vegetable bought the previous afternoon were decidedly soggy.
Yum.
Like children awakening on a particularly warm winter day, we were dumbfound by the unexpected thaw. But instead of melted snowmen, we faced rapidly defrosting chicken breasts and turkey burger patties.
We transferred as much of the food as we could into the small fridge in the laundry room. The rest was stuffed into a large rectangular cooler with a bag of ice in hopes of salvaging as much as we could.
After a somewhat eclectic lunch of defrosted pizza, ice cream soup and a box of reinvigorated toaster waffles, my parents went searching for a new fridge.
Unfortunately all available units were either too wide or too deep for our kitchen. My mom thought about getting one of the deeper fridges until she learned the model without the drink dispenser didn’t come in stainless steel.
And it was $200 more.
Why a company charges more money for less labor, less parts and a cheaper finish is a mystery to me.
Over the weekend, our fridge’s temperature continued to climb. In its feverish condition, it kept trying to cool down. Every so often we would hear a soft click or a faint pleaful hum but to no avail.
Like a person trying to find the cool part of a pillow during the peak of summer, frustrated to the point of near desperation, its efforts to find relief were futile.
We had our fridge serviced yesterday and the repairman managed to revive it from its comatose state.
In the end, out went my green tea hotteok from H-mart and the ham bone my mom planned to use for soup stock, along with many other dairy and meat products. Better safe than sorry.
I’m just happy the fridge works again. Now I can return to cooking and our loyal fridge will guard my goodies from bacteria and bugs
For reasons other than a blackout, has your fridge ever stopped working? Was it over the weekend or right after you went grocery shopping? Or was it worse like the night before you were going to host a party? Let me know your defrosted disaster in the comments below.