No, it’s not the same, I agree, but it does make the bread last longer. But that still doesn’t answer what the point of a breadbin is!
Oh, yeah; that reminds me. Our mom always used to put all kinds of nuts (in the shell) in our stockings. We wouldn’t eat any of them (we had candy!), so she’d put the nuts back in the freezer for next year. At some point, we must have been getting decade-old nuts in our stockings. I’m not really sure why she bothered.
I grew up in a fortress: doors that required a key to get IN or OUT, loaded firearms by the doors, no friends allowed in the house. No, I did not grow up in a drug house. My father had vending machines & brought $2-3K in coin into our house every day. We sorted & wrapped the coin in our basement. I went to the bank with him after school to deposit the coin. None of this could be talked about with friends.
I thought every kid learned how many coins were in a roll before they went to kindergarten.
My family has celebrated Christmas on December 18th for as long as I can remember. The entire family gathers at a designated house, exchanges all gifts which go to someone who doesn’t live in their household and has the Christmas meal. (Presents for small children are left at the house in which they reside, to be opened on Christmas morning.)
I find bread seems to go dry quicker when chilled; obviously your mileage varies.
Traditionally, bread bins are supposed to keep the bread longer by maintaining a humid environment and by excluding bugs or other pests such as mice.
In a modern setting, cupboards and plastic packaging probably do this equally well, if not better, and a bread bin is just a storage receptacle for items of baked goods - which may or may not be found convenient.
I always thought the point of a breadbin was to keep mice away from the bread.
I used to have a breadbin. I kept junk food in it. Mmmm, Twinkies, Little Debbies Swiss Rolls, Snickers bars, cellophane wrapped brownies; how I miss them.
Santa usually left our family’s Christmas presents in the garage, not under the tree.
We keep our pancake syrup and honey in the fridge.
This behavior stems from one particular incident when I was a kid.
One summer we and an fairly bad ant infestation the house. After breakfast one day the pull spout on the syrup was left open accidently after it was put away. Ants were taken care of via an exterminator. Fast forward a few weeks and Mom makes waffles on Sunday morning. The ants were fairly small and we didn’t notice them until my younger sister started freaking out. She must have been 3 or 4 at the time.
My waffle was already cut up and smothered with butter, syrup and very small dead ants. No one actually ate any, but it was a close call.
So while I know why it’s best to keep syrup and honey in the fridge, I’m sure my kids will eventually find out it’s a pantry item for most people. Then I’ll lay the ant story on them.
I have lived in apartments that necessitated putting ALL foodstuffs in the fridge, even flour. Yes it’s odd, unless you like sharing your food with critters before you get to eat it.
I buy 4 loaves of bread at the beginning of the week and throw three in the freezer. Take one out to defrost as you get to 1/4 of the first loaf.
I encourage my kids to keep their tooth brushes and towels in their own room, since it’s harder to mistake yours for someone else’s that way.
When we were younger, my mom would hit the supermaket everyday after work to buy things for dinner. That’s not necessarily weird, but since she had four kids, and I have four kids, I’m seeing it as a huge waste of time. I hate the supermarket.
He does. Mom keeps talking about putting the house on the market, but she assured me that she would be buying a Rudy-Ready house. 
Again, actually, I agree. Bread does go drier when frozen. However, you have to take this into account:
- I don’t really care about bread. Bread to me is just a receptacle for holding my sammich, or whatever. So it doesn’t have to be moist and delivious.
- There is really only one person in the house who eats bread like that, and that is me. My SO likes his bread fresh from the bakery and all that.
- I only throw it in there so it won’t get moldy or turn green.
And thanks for the info on the breadbin! I was genuinely curious.
Wow, I always thought refrigerating bread was wierd – and re-using a towel? ICK!
My family did a lot of wierd things, probably too many to list. The one that stands out the most, though is that we always invited the religious nuts inside. I don’t know why, it was just fun. We would let the JW’s, Mormons, whomever come inside and we would feed them and talk to them. Neither my Dad nor my mother were particularly religious, but they always let those people come in and talk away for hours on end. I still do it, although where I live now, we don’t get many of them.
As for me and mine now? Well, my daughter assures me that our habit of my always making a (homemade, not frozen) dinner and sitting down as a family every night is weird. Not one of her friends’ family does this. I donno, seems odd to me. But then again, I actually like my kids and enjoy spending time with them.
My mom had some sort of phobia about soda. It didn’t have much to do with our health, teeth, or whatever… It was just never in the house. EVER. Growing up I was so confused by this I had to ask my dad about it once… He said he didn’t know… Just his family and as far as he knew my mother’s family didn’t have this odd phobia… When I asked my mom she just didn’t really want to talk about it. “We just don’t get it, that’s all!”
ok mom.
When I went back to visit one time after I’d moved out by a year or two I was shocked… I mean shocked to find a can of Pepsi in the fridge.
It was odd… I never figured it out. My family is odd.
I admit I don’t get the towel thing. I re-use my towel for a whole week. I have two towels, one to wrap my hair on and one to dry my body. I do laundry once a week…there’s two of us only, so that’s often enough. I don’t have a washer/dryer in my house, so it takes an evening to do laundry, and I don’t need to make any more work for myself.
My mother did this as well, planned her dinner meals in advance yet shopped for them (for the meat portion, at least) every day–I always assumed it was to get the freshest meat possible, altho we had a large freezer and a week’s worth of meat (for two parents and 3 kids) wouldn’t have taken up all that much space, no?
We virtually never had fruit around the house. My mother didn’t care for fruit and unless she was baking a pie or making a fruit salad (for a picnic or party; we didn’t enjoy these treats regularly), we just never had big bowls of apples/bananas/oranges/pears sitting around as nearly all my friends did at their houses. I got fruit at school as part of the lunch program, or later if I bought it myself from my own first-job wages. To me, it was really a treat and damn near a delicacy to have fresh fruit!
But I still don’t buy a lot of fruit myself unless my sons specifically request it. I guess Mom’s habits were ingrained in me deeper than I think.
We only used a towel once too when I was a kid but I now I use it for 5-7 days. Less wasteful. (Grew up in NW Ohio) Bread was kept in a breadbox and we did do something I’ve seen no one else do. We kept our medicine in one of the kitchen cupboards. All of it, aspirin, cold meds, vitamins. It was all right there in the kitchen. Oddly, I still do that today. I guess so I can just grab a glass of water (no, I don’t drink bathroom water, it tastes weird 
)
Even when we would move, my folks would reserve a kitchen cupboard for their meds. Granted they need much more space for their pharmacopia now that they’re older.
Here’s one my husband’s family does - keeps dental floss in the kitchen cabinets for use right there in the open in front of everyone. We have a floss in our kitchen too, but I guess my husband is sick of my looks of disgust so he doesn’t use it.
Must be an Ohio thing. We did the same thing.
We had one kitchen cupboard shelf designated as a mini-pharmacy, and one of my girlfriends does now too. I think the reasoning is that if the kitchen is a central pass-thru where Mom (or other chief medicine-dispenser) is most likely to be, so it’s just more convienent. Now that I think about it, the only meds taken regularly at my house sit on my computer desk for the same reason.
Bread does go stale faster when refrigerated (not frozen, though). From here :
Growing up in British Columbia Canada we had the same thing.
Now that I think of it there wasn’t a single medication that was found in the bathroom.
I always figured it was because our bathroom didn’t have a high cupboard and with three kids my folks needed a hiding place for the dangerous stuff.*
*Well once I found out it wasn’t the standard that’s what I figured.