The Empty Fridge — Easy English Story

Transcript

Introduction

A: Hello, and welcome to Recursio Easy English Stories. Today’s story is called “The Empty Fridge.”

A: This is a B1 story about a Friday evening, an empty fridge, and a dinner that almost didn’t happen.

A: Listen for these phrases: to do the grocery shopping, a shopping list, to run out of, to be out of stock, to go bad, leftovers, to throw something away, to cook something simple, and It’ll do.

A: After the story, we’ll go through all the useful phrases and practice them together.

A: You can practice today’s phrases in Recursio — the link is in the description.

A: Let’s begin. It’s Friday, seven ten in the evening.

What’s actually in there

A: Rita opened the front door with her bag still on her shoulder and her phone in her teeth.

A: She had been at work since early morning, and the last two hours had been exhausting.

A: In the hallway she stopped and remembered something.

A: Tomas was coming at eight.

A: Tomas was her nephew. He was fifteen, he was staying for the weekend, and she had promised him dinner.

A: Rita put her bag down and went into the kitchen and opened the fridge.

A: For a few seconds she just looked.

A: Half a bottle of milk. Two eggs. A piece of cheese in a bag. Some butter.

A: A jar of something at the back that she didn’t want to think about.

A: And a plastic box of leftovers from Tuesday.

A: She opened the box and saw a small green spot on the pasta.

A: It had gone bad, so she threw it away.

B: You can’t give a fifteen-year-old two eggs and call it dinner.

A: She said it out loud, to the fridge, because there was nobody else in the apartment.

A: Then she stood there with the empty box in her hand.

A: The kitchen was very quiet.

A: She had run out of almost everything.

A: She had run out of bread, and rice, and vegetables. She had also run out of ideas.

B: Okay. Fine. We’re doing this properly.

A: On the counter there was a phone, and on the phone there was a food delivery app, and she thought about it for four seconds.

A: Then she thought about the price, and about the fact that Tomas would eat anything, and she decided to do the grocery shopping.

A: The store on the corner closed at nine, but on a Friday the shelves would already be half empty. She needed to go now.

A: She took a piece of paper and wrote a shopping list.

A: Pasta. Tomatoes. Onions. Bread. Cheese. Something green.

A: Then she added “chicken?” with a question mark, because she didn’t want to spend too much.

A: She looked at the list. It wasn’t a beautiful dinner, but it was a dinner.

A: She put on her shoes and went out.

Aisle four

A: The supermarket was crowded with people shopping on their way home.

A: Most of them looked as tired as Rita felt.

A: Rita took a small cart and started with the pasta.

A: And that was where the evening got more complicated.

A: The shelf where the pasta usually was had almost nothing on it. Two boxes of something very small and yellow, and that was all.

A: A young man was putting bottles on the shelf next to it, so Rita asked him.

B: Excuse me, do you have any more pasta? The long kind.

C: Sorry, we’re out of stock. The delivery didn’t come today.

B: When will you have it?

C: Tomorrow morning, probably. The truck comes at six.

B: Is there anything else? Rice, maybe?

C: Rice is in aisle two. There should still be some there.

B: What about these little ones?

C: The soup pasta? We have plenty of that. Nobody buys it.

B: Right. Thank you.

C: Have a good evening.

A: Rita stood in aisle four and looked at the two boxes of small yellow pasta.

A: Then she took one and put it in the cart.

B: It’ll do.

A: The rest of the shopping went better.

A: Tomatoes, yes. Onions, yes. Bread — the last one, a little hard on one side, but bread.

A: Cheese, a big piece, on sale.

A: She looked at the chicken for a while and then didn’t buy it.

A: In the vegetable section she found a bag of spinach with a yellow sticker on it.

A: The sticker meant it had to be sold today. Half price.

A: She checked the leaves. They were fine. She put it in the cart.

A: Then she stopped beside the rice and looked at her shopping list again.

A: Almost nothing in the cart matched the dinner she had imagined on the way home.

A: But there were tomatoes, an onion, spinach, cheese, and some kind of pasta.

A: She could make something from that.

A: Her phone buzzed. Tomas had sent a message: “Leaving now. Do you need anything?”

A: Rita looked at the bread in her cart and wrote back: “Just bring your appetite.”

A: It was a phrase her mother used to say before family dinners.

A: Seeing it on the screen made Rita feel a little less worried.

A: At the checkout, the woman in front of her had a full cart and a lot of small coins.

A: Rita looked at the clock. Five past eight.

A: The woman with the coins was not going to be hurried.

A: She sent Tomas a message: “Stuck at the checkout. Ten minutes. Key under the plant.”

A: Then she paid, put everything in one bag, and walked home fast.

Something simple

A: Tomas was already there, sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard and his phone in his hand.

C: Hi. Your plant is very obvious, by the way.

B: I know. Every burglar in the city knows about the plant.

A: Rita put the bag on the counter and started taking things out.

C: What are we having?

B: I don’t know yet. The pasta I wanted was out of stock.

C: What did you get?

B: This.

A: She held up the box of very small yellow pasta.

C: That’s soup pasta.

B: Is it?

C: My mom uses that in soup.

A: Rita looked at the box, and then at the tomatoes, and then at the box again.

B: Okay. Then we’re making soup.

A: And here is the thing about that evening.

A: Rita had wanted to cook something special, because she saw Tomas four times a year and she wanted the weekend to be good.

A: Instead she was going to cook something simple, with only a few ingredients.

A: And it turned out that was the better plan.

C: Can I do something?

B: You can cut the onion.

C: I always cry.

B: Everybody cries. Cut it anyway.

A: So they cooked together, in a small kitchen, on a Friday night.

A: Tomas cut the onion badly and cried about it, exactly as he said he would.

C: This is a terrible job. Why is this my job?

B: Because you asked.

C: I asked to help. This is not helping.

B: Smaller pieces.

A: Somewhere between the onion and the tomatoes, Rita stopped being tired.

A: She put a pan on the stove and looked in the cupboard.

B: We have a problem. I’ve run out of oil.

C: Is that bad?

B: No. Butter’s better anyway. Don’t tell my mother I said that.

A: She cooked the onion in butter until it went soft, and then put the tomatoes in.

C: How do you know when it’s ready?

B: You don’t, really. You look at it and decide.

C: That’s not a recipe. That’s guessing.

B: All cooking is guessing.

A: She put in water, and the small yellow pasta, and at the end the spinach with the yellow sticker.

C: What’s the green thing?

B: Spinach. It was half price.

C: Is it still good if it was half price?

B: I checked the leaves before I bought it. They look fine.

A: Tomas grated the cheese, and ate some of the cheese, and grated some more.

B: Stop eating the cheese.

C: I’m testing it.

B: You’ve tested it four times.

C: It’s still good.

A: The whole thing took twenty-five minutes.

A: They ate it out of two big bowls at the kitchen table, with the hard bread cut into thick pieces.

C: This is actually good.

B: You sound surprised.

C: I’m a bit surprised.

A: Rita laughed. It was the first time she had laughed all day.

B: I was going to make something better. There was a plan.

C: What was the plan?

B: I don’t know. Something with chicken. Something that looks like a photo.

C: This is better than a photo.

A: They finished their bowls. There was still some soup in the pot.

B: Do you want more?

C: In a minute.

A: And then, because there was still soup, and because it was Friday, they sat there and talked about school.

A: About a teacher Tomas didn’t like, and a girl he wasn’t going to explain, and a video game Rita didn’t understand at all.

A: The soup went cold in the pot, and they didn’t notice, and it was half past ten before either of them looked at the clock.

A: Rita put the last of it into a plastic box.

B: That’s tomorrow’s lunch.

C: Leftovers.

B: Good leftovers.

A: And on Saturday they ate some of it, and it was better than it had been on Friday, the way soup usually is.

A: On Sunday afternoon Tomas went home.

A: Before he left, he stood in front of the open fridge, the way teenagers do, looking at nothing.

C: You still don’t have any food.

B: I have soup.

C: You had soup.

A: He had finished it that morning. Of course he had.

A: After he left, Rita sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a piece of paper.

A: And she wrote a shopping list, because on Monday she was going to do the grocery shopping properly.

A: Pasta — the long kind. Rice. Oil. Vegetables.

A: And at the bottom, she wrote: soup pasta.

Phrase review

A: Now let’s go through the useful phrases from the story, one by one.

A: And if you’d like to remember them afterwards, you can save them in Recursio and review them over time.

A: First: to do the grocery shopping. Not shopping for clothes or shoes — this is the food shopping, the weekly one.

A: Rita decided to do it instead of ordering. “I do the grocery shopping on Saturdays.” “Whose turn is it to do the grocery shopping?”

A: Next: a shopping list. The short list you write before you go, so you don’t forget half of it.

A: Rita wrote one twice in this story. “Did you make a shopping list?” “It’s not on the list.”

A: Next: to run out of. Something you used to have, and now there’s none left.

A: Rita had run out of bread, rice, and oil. “We’ve run out of milk.” “I ran out of time.”

A: Next: to be out of stock. The store sells it normally, but today there isn’t any.

A: The long pasta was out of stock. “Sorry, that size is out of stock.” “It’s out of stock online too.”

A: Next: to go bad. Food that has been in the fridge too long, and now you can’t eat it.

A: The pasta in the box had gone bad. “The milk has gone bad.” “Eat it before it goes bad.”

A: Next: leftovers. You cooked too much, so tomorrow you eat it again.

A: The soup became leftovers, and Tomas ate them. “There are leftovers in the fridge.” “I had leftovers for lunch.”

A: Next: to throw something away. To get rid of it — into the trash.

A: Rita threw the old pasta away. “Don’t throw that away — I’m still eating it.”

A: Next: to cook something simple. Few ingredients, no recipe, twenty minutes.

A: Instead of something special, Rita cooked something simple. “I’m tired. Let’s cook something simple.”

A: And last: It’ll do. Not what you wanted, but you’ll take it.

A: Rita said it in aisle four, about the wrong pasta. “It’s not the color I wanted, but it’ll do.”

Mini recall

A: Now a short recall. I’ll describe the situation, you say the phrase. Then I’ll give you the answer.

A: You go to the store to buy food for your home. What are you doing?

A: Doing the grocery shopping.

A: You had milk, and now there’s none left. How do you say it?

A: We’ve run out of milk.

A: The store doesn’t have the thing you want today. How do they say it?

A: It’s out of stock.

A: The food in the fridge isn’t good to eat anymore. What happened to it?

A: It went bad.

A: The food you didn’t eat, saved for tomorrow. What is it called?

A: Leftovers.

A: It isn’t perfect, but you’ll take it. How do you say it?

A: It’ll do.

Outro

A: That was “The Empty Fridge.”

A: Today’s phrases were: to do the grocery shopping. A shopping list. To run out of. To be out of stock.

A: To go bad. Leftovers. To throw something away. To cook something simple. And It’ll do.

A: If you’d like to review these phrases and remember them, open the link below and practice them in Recursio.

A: Thank you for listening. And if your fridge is empty tonight, perhaps something simple will do.

A: See you in the next story.