It was actually a pretty cool house in a middle class neighborhood, and for the first time in a long while, I knew we were going to be somewhere for a while. But, home ownership came with sacrifices. We were on a tight budget. I did a lot of chores as they both worked. Mom was a bookkeeper and also did part time work in the evenings. My Stepfather as a lineman for IBEW, and took on extra work when they called for overtime, especially in the high summer and the dead of winter when they called for the linemen to respond for power failures. In the dead of winter, he and his brothers would climb poles and whack the lines with bats to break the ice so the buildup didn't take down the lines.
The folks used all kinds of tricks to stretch the budget the first few years in the house. One was Refrigerator Soup. Once a week, Mom would put her stew pot on the stove, take all the week's leftovers out of the fridge and open the Tupperware and go through the bowls and decide what was going in pot and what was going in the dog's bowls.
Then she'd add chopped up potatoes, perhaps elbow macaroni, or some rice. Next, depending on the content of the pot, we'd get a couple bouillon cubes, beef or chicken... and it would boil merrily away. Add a can of corn or green beans if needed and we had soup for dinner. It was usually really good, and nothing really went to waste, the fridge was cleared out for the coming week. I raised four kids myself and have to say they ate a number of bowls of fridge soup over the years. Waste not want not. I had friends that left stuff in the fridge until they had to throw the bowls away. These days, Miss T and I make much smaller portions when we cook, so there aren't that many leftovers, or we intentionally make enough for Two Meals and have the leftovers for lunch the next day. But when the kids were all still at home...
They took to calling it "Daddy Surprise."
