Fear my tiger pants!

So I’m thinking about going on a raw food diet. Not because I’m in any way worried about my health or making the leap from part-time hippie to full-blown flower wearing moon maiden, but because I am PISSED OFF AT APPLIANCES.

Last night the oven decided it was time to get really, really dirty. I was making one of those rising crust pizzas (which taste nothing like delivery, no matter what the commercials say) when the damn thing broke apart in the oven, coating the elements with steamy hot pizza goo. It burnt the crust, too. As it stands, I can’t use the oven for anything until I get good and intimate with an oven cleaner and some scrubby brush things. I’ve never cleaned an oven before in my life, and honestly don’t know how to go about it – my first instinct is to somehow damage the oven in a secretive way then call the landlord and asking for a replacement. That’s what people do with things they can’t fix, right? They get a new one? Just because I don’t want to clean the oven is a perfectly good reason to commit appliance fraud, wouldn’t you say?

Unfortunately, my raw food diet idea is going to have to be pretty limited to things that don’t require refrigeration at all, which means a lot of preservatives, which goes against the whole raw food thing. See, the oven is the least of my worries right now. Our fridge, for the last 4 months or so, has been stuck on the top-secret “deep freeze” setting. Every single thing you put in the fridge freezes solid. Vegetables freeze, split open, then freeze some more. All liquids freeze in their bottles – sometimes you’ll get a nice juice slushie, but most of the time my precious Diet Coke is a block of solid ambrosia that I have to vigorously manhandle before it’ll come trickling out in a stream of glory. I hate it. I can’t keep fresh foods in there; meat won’t defrost; frozen mayonnaise is a truly horrible thing, and I’ve had to clean up countless sticky messes made by beverages freezing, expanding, leaking, then freezing again.

We’ve called our landlord about it, but he just tells us we need to defrost the whole thing. Apparently when there’s too much stuff in a fridge the engine has to work overtime to keep it all cool – and then the thermometer freezes and thinks that this new frozen low is what it should be doing. The only way to fix things is to empty the fridge and freezer, unplug it, and let it sit there for a couple days. Sounds good, easy enough to do – but what about all the food in there? We’d need several large coolers, ice packs, and a standby freezer for all the mystery packages that I’m too scared to unwrap. While I certainly have the time to do all this (I still won’t willingly scrub out the oven though), I don’t have the necessary supplies or the money to go buying coolers all willy-nilly. So we’re stuck. I can’t have fresh veggies, my carrots split down the middle, frozen lemons do not juice, and I could probably seriously injure someone (or myself) with a solidly frozen tomato. This sucks.

Potato chips and microwave popcorn are considered raw foods, right?