Get in my belly

Name: Tim
Age: 33
Occupation: Cooker
Grocery shops: Twice a week
Cooks: Three times a week
Eats out: The other times that I don’t cook. Or a lot.

Favorite condiment: Mustard. There are five types in my fridge, from your typical Dijon, to German sweet, whole grain, extra spicy, and another extra hot German variety. and Sriracha gets a lot of play.
Favorite beer: Lately, Ommegang’s Belgian-style ales, NY-made, well-crafted beers
Favorite wine: You can see a lot of bubbly stuff in there. There is cava, a sparkling chenin blanc from the Loire, Lambruscos, and it’s rosé season, so that too.
Favorite takeout: Lately into Zaytoons, which is a sort of dirty local middle eastern spot with a serviceable shawarma sandwich.

Grossest thing in there: Probably a tie between the months-old half-drunken bottle of red Gatorade from a hungover morning, and the half-eaten Greek yogurt and overly sweet store-bought granola (try to make my own) although the champagne mangoes on top probably give the edge to the Gatorade. Also: the nacho-style cheese barely visible in the back of the top shelf. I actually kinda like the stuff. More a most embarassing thing as opposed to a grossest.

Other things of note: a foie torchon that I made a while ago covered in duck fat. And the Campari and gin visible on top of the fridge which illustrate my current Negroni obsession… also visible is a jar of pickled peppers from last years fire escape garden.

Name: David Szanto
Age: 40
Location: Montreal
Occupation: Food Writer and Consultant
Grocery shops: 3x/week
Cooks: 6x/week
Eats out: 1x/week
Favorite condiment: I am not Sophie and I will not make this choice.
Favorite beer: Munich (a rousse from Réservoir, the brewpub down
the street)
Favorite takeout: rotisserie chicken from the Portuguese grillade
shop up the street
Grossest thing in there: overworked baking soda

Other items of note:
Pineau des Charentes — on hand for emergency Louisiana Sidecar makings. The (finally) final serving of celery root remoulade (one of those fucking things lasts forever…). Chunks of roasted pumpkin (or a pumpkin-like thing), bought raw from the Vietnamese-Portuguese grocery store next door. Judging by the 1-kilo slab I bought, the original vegetable must be two or three feet across and have to be hacked up with a scimitar. Sriracha, Matouk’s, El Yucateco Chipotle sauce, canned chipotles in
adobo, Chili Garlic Paste, Sweet Chilil Sauce for Chicken, Tabasco, Maçarico piri piri. I burn in heaven.

[David, did you make that bowl in the freezer?]

Not bad for a postdoc.

Name: Mark
Age: 31
Location: Cambridge, MA
Occupation: Scientist
Grocery shops: once every three weeks
Cooks: once every two weeks
Eats out: every meal
Favorite condiment: ketchup, Inner Beauty hot sauce (other habanero sauces close behind)
Favorite beer: anything cask conditioned or Harpoon IPA
Favorite takeout: pad thai
Grossest thing in there: when the potatoes soupify inside and become a loose bag filled with nasty smelling liquid and then you pick them up and the bottom sticks and the skin tears and the nasty liquid pours out. I have smelled nothing worse in my whole life. Not in there now, but once upon a time…

There’s Bolognese sauce he made in there. Cheeses on the top shelf: “Some good gruyère, 2-year-old yummy Manchego from Cardullo’s in Harvard Square, and some other random things but all good steady mild/dry/salty/sharp stuff. I don’t really do blue cheese.”

Not pictured: A LOT of chocolate all around Mark’s apartment.

My favorite part of Mark’s apartment is his cookbook shelf:

Name: The Foo household
Age: 27 + 32
Occupation: Student + Art Appraiser
Location: San Francisco
Grocery shops: weekly farm box supplemented by just less-than-weekly grocery trip. This week’s farm box includes the following items that you can see in the photo: carrots, mandarins, baby bok choy, potatoes
Cooks: few times a week
Eats out: few times a week
Favorite condiment: magic japanese salad dressing (upper right of fridge door, red cap and stripes). otherwise I mostly like to buy condiments, use them once, and then let them go bad. Like the June Taylor ketchup and spiced pear butter that I can’t bear to throw out. Pickles regularly become moldy before going to the trash. In fact I can pick out about 4 containers of pickled items from the photo.
Favorite beverage: 12 yr Jameson + Ron Zacapa 23 yr Rum (sorry you can’t see the liquor cabinet in this photo). Fridge-wise, most common beverage is Lactaid (I have a fake psychosomatic lactose intolerance — and see, there are two containers of it) and Crystal Geyser sparkling water (but right now we don’t have any of it).
Favorite takeout: almost never happens
Grossest thing in there: Fishballs from Ranch99 that my mom bought that are too freezer-burned to cook but I feel guilty about throwing out. And probably at least one bottle of spoiled wine. Luckily A. cleared the fridge of most moldy stuff a few days ago. Oh and there’s that reddi-whip that we bought for the vat of spiked hot chocolate we made at a party once. Yes, we made hot chocolate from real chocolate and then we put whipped cream out of a can onto it. Not my idea.

I stopped putting vegetables in the vegetable drawers because then I would forget about them and they would go bad. Since I haven’t figured out what I can put in them and not forget about them, they are just empty. Oh shit I just remembered that the chard from the box this week is in the drawer. See? I already forgot.

Container at the very top of fridge right is leftover fried chicken + mac n cheese + collards from hard knox last night. I didn’t have it for lunch today because I was eating leftover rigatoni + lamb sausage from aperto from two nights ago — I figured a fork-based meal would be easier to handle than fried chicken for a work lunchroom activity.

Name: Anonymous
Age: 60s [I think. --Ed.]
Occupation: Food writer
Grocery shops: Frequently. Sometimes several times a day.
Cooks: Frequently
Eats out: Frequently
Favorite beverage: Diet Coke

Besides the Ronnybrook milk, Stoneybrook yogurt, cream cheese, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and various kinds of butter I see in there, there’s also Ziyad brand butter ghee (of unknown age), 18-year-old Vermont maple syrup, Tête du Moine on a Girolle, homemade gravlaks (made in late Oct/early Nov), and 3 boxes of Medjool dates from Bautista farms hidden in the back.

There is A LOT of ice cream in the freezer. Some homemade (some of those made with liquid nitrogen), some not. Is that goosefat in the jar at the bottom? This freezer is definitely at a very precarious equilibrium. One more frozen pea and the whole thing’s gonna come crashing down.

And yeah, that’s duct tape holding it all together.

I had this idea a couple of years back to document people’s refrigerators. (Other people like to peep into bathroom cabinets, I prefer the vegetable drawer — what can I say?) If people are what they eat, then what do their grocery shopping, leftovers, and condiment collections say about them? The images would be well shot, displaying all the contents within (or not), and I would pick up enough Web 2.0 skills to make rollovers for a sort of Pop-Up Frigid-O feature. But time passed, I’ve still got circa-1999 HTML-tagging skills, and I’m too lazy to drag the Canon Rebel XT around, but I’ve lucked into some interesting fridges recently, and I figured there was no time like the present to embark on this little anthropological experiment.

This one might look familiar from a recent post, but I’d left out all the important information.

Name: Matt
Age: 28
Occupation: Mortgage trader
Grocery shops: Never, unless you count beer as groceries
Cooks: Never
Eats out: Every meal
Favorite condiment: Mustard for sammies and hot dogs
Favorite beer: Harpoon IPA
Favorite takeout: Whole Foods
Grossest thing in there: N/A