Food Network But No Food

On Thursday night, I noticed the fridge was leaking. It could have just been time to defrost, since our freezer ices over every two weeks or so to the point that the door stops sealing and eventually must be held closed with a chair pressed against it, the way sinister villains lock their victims in their bedrooms in old movies. But it didn’t seem iced over enough to be causing that level of leakage. My landlady was over at the time, supervising the repainting of Marisol’s moldy wall and I showed her the fridge leak. Like she believed me to be some coddled idiot who has never lived on her own, she gently pulled out the plug with a Vanna White “Ta-daaaaahhh!” gesture and told me that I should put a towel on the floor and a pot in the fridge to catch the extra water and the next day to plug it back in and all will be well. Duh.

Only all was not well. When I plugged the fridge back in the next morning, the remaining ice in the freezer continued to melt all during the day and turning the cooling level up did nothing to stop the glacial catastrophe. Friday afternoon I asked Marisol if she had anything in the freezer that would go really bad because no repairmen will work on Fridays so we definitely wouldn’t get anything fixed until Saturday at the earliest. She said she had lamb in the freezer and that when it defrosted she would just cook it (which she did by boiling it, which I’ve never heard of) but she forgot about the OPEN BAG of calamari that had been in the freezer for over a month. She had simply slit it down the side and pulled out the calamari fillets she was going to use that night and then popped the bag right back into the bottom of the freezer, where it froze solid into the base layer of ice and was forgotten like the cavemen cadavers occasionally uncovered by avalanches. Of course it didn’t stay frozen.

It rotted as it melted and then the bag filled with the water that had been ice. The freezer filled, then overflowed into the catching tray beneath the freezer, which also overflowed. The oily, fishy foam coated the inside of the fridge, then the floor, and I went from mopping normal water with nothing worse than the scent of old ice off the floor, as in a normal weekend defrosting adventure, to mopping rotten calamari goo. I tried to pull out the overflow tray but there was at least a pound of water in it, much of which sloshed onto the floor, my feet, legs, and my awesome and super essential Chaco flip flops before I got anywhere near the sink. Everything smelled like rotten calamari, which is an oddly industrial smell, like one of the strong bases you use in high school chemistry that you suspect is silently corroding the glass beaker at a rate too slow for human eyes to track. I washed everything in hot bleachy water (ironic because bleach I think is also a corrosive base, right?), which gave the calamari a dunked-in-chlorine aftertaste.

The repairman that was supposed to come last night didn’t show up and even our landlord, who is never particularly dedicated to uniting us with efficient repairman was a little appalled at this guy’s total lack of communication. We’ve rescheduled for tomorrow, which means I am on my third straight day of eating only eggs, which don’t need to be refrigerated here, and warm apple juice. I’m not feeling too hot.

Sadly, neither is Marisol’s puppy. I’m not sure if he, like me, still smells rotten calamari when he exhales because the insides of his lungs and nasal passages are coated in calamari oil, or if he accidentally lapped up some of the lethal brew before I mopped it up, or if it is related to his first rabies shot, which he got on Thursday, but he’s had diarrhea and nausea all day. I swear puppies actually somehow make themselves cuter (see photo) when they are sick or sleeping so our protective instincts are even stronger.

Into our stinky apartment, we welcomed the satellite guy, who gathered all fifteen or so of our English language channels from the several thousand available channels, and moved them into the first row of easy to find channel slots so we don’t have to search far and wide for channels now. We uncovered some buried gems, too. We could not find my beloved Al Jazeera English even after nearly a half hour of effort (though we found Al Jazeera Children in Arabic!) but we found Nickelodeon, BBC English and, pearl of all hidden pearls, THE FOOD NETWORK! It is actually an Arabized version called Fatafeat (which means crumbs), and is like the Food Network for viewers with ADD. It skips from show to show staying with each host and each set for only one recipe, then leaping compulsively onward, from Giada De Laurentiis to an Arabic stew cooked outdoors, to ceviche with Martha Stewart to tomato feta salad with the Barefoot Contessa. It didn’t even follow a theme or ordered progression from appetizers to soup to first course, etc. I was sort of dizzy by the time I turned it off to go to bed but I think I could get used to it, and by get used to it, I mean spend hours watching it every day and never leave my apartment again (as soon as it stops smelling like calamari).

In fact, I am going to try to teach my body to live off a steady diet of Food Network. No more eggs and warm apple juice, just Rachel Ray and Sara Moulton and Mario Batali and that Arab woman who made stew on her patio with an assistant who looked like she was wearing a graduation robe. I might even stop breathing, since the air only further coats my lungs and nose in calamari particles, and pump Food Network goodness straight into my bloodstream. I will have to develop special Fatafeat gills.

I go home to the US in just one week so all of this nonsense has to get fixed ASAP!