A few weeks in the past round dinnertime, neither my husband nor I have been within the cooking temper. We didn’t really feel like ordering out, and, since we hadn’t received our second vaccine, we didn’t need to go to a restaurant. I mentioned to him what one in all us says to the opposite at instances like these: “Should we just fend?”
“Fending” is our family’s phrase for selecting across the kitchen, seeing what’s there, and making a meal of it. We’re not full savages—i.e., we don’t stand subsequent to the fridge at any outdated hour shovelling meals into our mouths. No. We eat collectively at a desk, which has been set. We would possibly even open a bottle of wine. But there isn’t a prep, except for perhaps heating stuff up. It’s very seemingly that we’ll eat completely various things. I might need leftover rooster fried rice, some lox and cream cheese on Triscuits, and the tip of a jar of pickles. He would possibly deplete the rooster salad, Tuesday’s chili, and the final of the roasted cauliflower, which, by the way in which, continues to be good.
I received interested in what different individuals known as this exercise. I polled pals. Turns out there are many fenders. Also scroungers, scavengers, and foragers. One buddy’s household known as it hunt-and-peck. Then I put the query to Instagram, and in a number of days I acquired greater than seventeen hundred responses. Here are my favorites: California plate, spa plate, eek, mustard with crackers, having weirds, getcheroni, goblin meal, gishing, phumphering, peewadiddly, picky-poke, screamers, trash panda, rags and bottles, black-cow night time, blackout bingo, miff muffer moof, anarchy kitchen, mush gooey, fossick, going feral, going Darwin, schlunz, goo gots, oogle moogle, you getsty, jungle dinner, grime night time, mousy-mousy, and having Pucci. Two totally different individuals used the time period “ifits,” as in “if it’s in the refrigerator, it’s fair game.”
Several individuals appreciated acronyms: OYO (by yourself), YOYO (you’re by yourself), MYO (make your personal), FIFI (discover it and repair it), and CORE (clear out fridge of every part). Someone informed me that her grandmother known as it “eating promiscuously.” Someone else, as a child, known as it “orgy.”
There have been additionally some non-English expressions for fending. In Persian, it’s khert o pert, which suggests “odds and ends.” In Quebec, it’s touski. That’s brief for tout ce qui reste—“all that’s left.” In Portuguese, it’s farrapo velho. Translation: “old rag.”
One particular person informed me that, in her household, fending was often called “zoobecki,” which was “icebox” spelled backward. Which is true, in the event you squint.
