I moved into my apartment (which I affectionately call either The Rectangle or The Menagerie) just over ten years ago. And while it is a small apartment by most standards, it was so much bigger than the ridiculously tiny apartment I had first moved to in Japan. So much so that when I moved everything in here, the apartment still looked almost completely empty!

Of the few things which I insisted on buying for the new place, the refrigerator was the one I refused to budge on. Not even a little! It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was literally three times larger than the dorm room fridge I had in the previous place and it had an ice machine! An ice machine!!

Modern Japanese refrigerators tend to have a lot of drawers, which used to be a bit odd for me, as around the time I moved to Tokyo, most American fridges were just two or three doors! Sure, there were fancier ones with drawers or sliding shelves, but I’m talking about typical refrigerators here.

The concept of all these drawers was so foreign to me, as a matter of fact, that, after signing all the tedious paperwork, I actually took pictures of the showroom display of my new fridge, complete with its fake, cardboard cut~out products, so that I would know where everything was ideally to be stored. Of course, the locations of everything has changed as I’ve actually lived with the fridge, and stuff gets moved around day to day…but it still remains the largest refrigerator I have ever owned, and I’m thankful for that.

However! As you can see from the picture above, I insisted on a white refrigerator so that I could use it as a message board. It has a perpetually running list of groceries on it, ofc, but it also has daily notes about when a grocery delivery is, what time lunch will be on any given day, or messages between Mr. Scout and I. Best of all, when I’m trying out recipes, I can write them on the glass front of the fridge in myriad colors, making changes as I go along!

For adapting recipes from imperial measurements, or scaling down larger recipes, it has become indispensable to me as a place to not only do recipe arithmetic, but also to stand back and look at a recipe before starting…to see if it feels right. Not to mention being able to quickly turn around and see what ingredient is next!

What is your favorite appliance (large or small!) in your home? And / or: how do you feel about your refrigerator? Let me know in the comments below! I love comments! And (as always) I really like likes. ❤︎