No harm in starting a topic about uses for Lipton's Onion Soup mix here, though! If one of you doesn't start it, I will next time I use it.
Yesterday was the great refrigerator / freezer defrosting exercise. The freezer had frost an inch deep in places, and some of the cooling vanes in the refrigerator were frozen together. Thanks to a functioning generator and hair dryer the actual defrosting process took far less time than emptying the freezer and the top shelf of the refrigerator, where the cooling vanes are. To keep things cold while the defrosting operation took place I filled a large cooler, a smaller cooler, and one of the sinks. There was still stuff left over, so it went into plastic bags and sat atop the couch, wrapped in a towel.
I found, among other things, a piece of beef I'd bought last fall for a Thai-style recipe from @JAZ's Instant Pot for Two cookbook and been distracted from trying. That piece wasn't well wrapped, and may be too freezer-burned to use at this stage. I also found a package of chicken thighs, better wrapped, labeled 6/19/19! Those were kept out and will be tonight's dinner. Here's the freezer after defrosting and repacking:
He's right: we have too much food. Must stay away from the meat section of the grocery store until we work our way down through most of this. That includes the little town of Calipatria!
Last night's dinner wasn't those chicken thighs because (a) they were still frozen and (b) we tried to tame the heat in the previous night's delicious green chile stew. We spent much of the day discussing what to do with it. He wanted to add pasta. I wanted to add potatoes. We settled on rice as a mutually acceptable test for part of it. Then I pointed out that there are already boiled potatoes in the refrigerator, because I'd started to do Crash Hot Potatoes for dinner and then those plans had been derailed. What the heck. We tried dicing those potatoes and heating them up in the stew. I also added more water and tomato paste as the stew was warming.
It helped, but not enough. Corn tortilla chips helped, but not enough. Sour cream of course cools it down but neither of us really wanted that last night.
What do you do to tame runaway spice-heat?
