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From the original "When in Doubt, Use Parsley" by Gloria Coughlin

November 26, 1966

To the average woman the first step in preparing for a holiday dinner is cleaning out the refrigerator before going out to empty the shelves of the local super-mart.

Have you ever taken stock of just what you have in your refrigerator at the end of the week, and why you have it?

For the most part it's leftovers that you have saved, and they have a perfectly valid reason for being there. It's a well-known fact that eases your conscience to save them for a week. After that long they look much worse and you feel better about discarding them.

Would you like to take a look into the average refrigerator on cleaning day?

• 4 bottles of ketchup--one full and three empty. You don't like to throw away the empty bottles because there's a chance that you might decide to make Bar-B-Q, and you can rinse the bottles out with a little water and add it to the sauce. This saves you a fraction of a cent.
• 3 jars of pickles. There are 2 pickles in each jar; you have a perfectly logical explanation for this. You buy a new jar of pickles and place it in the refrigerator along side an old jar of pickles that has 2 pickles left in it. When someone wants a pickle, they naturally take one out of the new jar because they're much more appetizing than the two old pickles floating around at the bottom of the old jar.
• 5 mushrooms. These you saved in hopes of matching them up with a steak some day when you're all alone. The steak never materialized, and the mushrooms now look like dirty erasers.
• 5 sticks of partially used oleo. Every time you need oleo, the recipe calls for 1/3 of a cup or 2 tablespoons. You're in a hurry so rather than take the time to measure, you just grab a fresh stick, and chop it off at the proper mark on the label.
• 1 carrot. Save it, you might want to grate it up in a salad. The only trouble with this idea is that you don't remember that you've got the carrot until you are savoring the first mouthful of salad.
• 6 egg whites. They're left over from a cake that you baked the week before. You've been saving them to use for a facial or a meringue, but you haven't found the time for the facial or the ambition to make the meringue. Furthermore, they are now in such a complete state of deterioration that you don't even know how you're going to scrape them out of the jar.
• Batteries. You read somewhere that you can put transistor batteries in the refrigerator and rejuvenate them. The problem here is that you can't find the radio, so you really don't know too much about how the batteries are coming.
• 2 tablespoons of pizza sauce. This is just enough to cover one English muffin. Big deal! Seven people in the family and you're saving enough pizza sauce to cover one muffin.
• 1 wedge of moldy Parmesan cheese. You aren't sure if it's aged or processed cheese that you can eat when it's moldy. You don't want to risk food poisoning but you hate to throw out a delicacy.

  It's a vicious circle gals; throw it all out and what have you accomplished? You're going to have the same situation next week. A different variety, a little more or a little less, but there's no way out. So when you spend 20 minutes getting the tamales hot, putting them on a tray, and taking them in to him, only to find him sleeping in the chair, don't get upset. Just wrap them up and put them in the refrigerator. You can throw them away next week.

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