Today was fridge/freezer cleaning and defrosting day: under duress, mind you, it’s a job I loathe. But when I tried to open the freezer this morning, and a sheet of ice the size of an Antarctic ice floe sheared off, it was definitely time.
Lots of stuff needed turfing-out of course. Fossilized capsicums and carrots right down the back…a half-jar of rollmops that had rolled in their pickled grave a few too many times, mouldy pita bread etc etc.
But the freakiest thing was a packet of chicken rissoles!
I think I recall my daughter giving me the rissoles about two months ago when I was babysitting the scrogs. She assured me at the time that they LOVED chicken rissoles. I don’t recall whether they ate them or not…
But anyway, there were still six of them in my fridge. Two months later. Unwrapped. On the tray that they originally arrived in from the supermarket.
And they didn’t smell off at all. :eek:
WTF is up with that? How come these rissoles hadn’t ‘gone to Jesus’ in the months since they were first opened? How come they didn’t stink to high heavens? HOW MUCH FRIGGIN PRESERVATIVE SHIT do they add to allow a CHICKEN RISSOLE to last in my fridge for two freakin’ months??
Damn scary stuff I say! I’d much rather open my fridge to a foetid stench indicating that the shit has GONE OFF rather than find the stuff months later with no apparent deterioration.
Refrigerators are big dehydrators. Something left in the fridge uncovered will have all the moisture sucked out of it before it rots. If they were wrapped in plastic where they could stew in moisture and bacteria/mold that survives the cold, then you would have quite the science project going. You can age cuts of beef and large fillets of fish by covering them in packed salt and leaving them uncovered in the back of the bottom shelf for a week or more. It’s why some produce does OK in the fridge and other produce shrivels and dies quickly unless stored properly.
Many, many years ago I was living on my own on the upper two floors of a rental house. The woman who later became my first wife was over, as was my cousin, who’s always been more like a sister to me.
I don’t remember the occasion specifically, but they must have been helping me clean the kitchen, and they decided to reorganize my stuff too. They went down into a lower cabinet where I had bowls and other containers stored, and found a Tupperware bowl with a lid on it…which contained weeks-old leftover macaroni and cheese!
Don’t ask me how, but apparently I had absent-mindedly put it in there instead of the fridge. You can about imagine the state it was in. I guess it’s a tribute to the tight-fitting lid that it hadn’t emitted any gross smell in all that time.
This incident would be remembered and retold at my expense for years to come.
September 2008: I was living in Houston when Hurricane Ike hit. I actually flew out of town (planned vacation, not evacuation) the morning it made landfall; I was sitting in the Starbucks at Bush Intercontinental Airport with two dozen other people, all of us nervously watching the TV screens, hoping they didn’t ground all flights. I made it out an hour and a half before the airport shut down.
The power in my neighborhood went down that very day, and stayed down for two weeks.
I was gone for a week. Houston was 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity the whole time I was gone.
When I got back, the power was still out. I first checked for any broken windows, water damage, looting, etc. I was pleased to see that, aside from some slight leakage around the windows and door, my home was not water damaged at all. However, it was 90 degrees and humid inside the house. Unbearable.
Trusty flashlight in hand, I made my way into my darkened kitchen. I could smell that the loaf of bread on the counter had gone over. I remember being very glad that I had taken out the garbage the morning I left. I made my way to the fridge. In hindsight, I do not know why I did this. I opened the door and shone my light into it.
It was the single ghastliest sight I have ever seen or smelled, and I’ve seen a rotting human corpse. Positively Lovecraftian. Highlights:
Even though I’m pretty good about refrigerator cleanliness and hygiene, the sides, back, and glass shelves were all entirely covered in black slime.
A plastic tray of strawberries had a wispy, foot-tall vertical white beard of mold growing from it, like a Troll doll.
A tub of Cool Whip had exploded, its lid sitting upside down next to it, the contents turned to a livid green, bubbling mass.
Both crisper drawers were full of a black bilge so rank, so rotted, and so homogeneous that I could not remember what kind of vegetables had been in them.
A pack of sliced deli ham had gone exactly the color of creamed spinach.
A gallon of 1% milk now consisted of 2/3 whey-colored water, and a floating substance that looked like Bailey’s Irish Cream. I strongly suspect my then-roommate used to drink straight from the jug, and inoculated it with something.
The smell was indescribable; the work of anaerobes going to work in a hot, sealed, lightless, anoxic, nutrient-rich environment for a week undisturbed. I promptly vomited into the trash can, which still marks the last time I vomited sober.
Well, this won’t hold a candle to a hurricane fridge, but: once I was cleaning stuff out of my fridge, and I came across a plastic milk jug, which still had milk in it. Except it didn’t. All the milk solids had settled down to the bottom, and what was left was clear. It was disturbing.
You’re lucky that lid was tight. Once at my yesterjob. somebody, as a prank, stuck a bowl of pasta on a ledge behind a desk in the shipping office, which was part of the breakroom. It stunk up both rooms and smelled like the worst shit you can imagine. They had the doors propped open to no avail. When I was let in on what it actually was, I was was able to sit at a table in the midst of it. A coworker accusingly said “If you didn’t do it, how can you stand it?”
Thankfully my freezer now is self defrosting. However before that I spent a couple of hours cleaning the fridge and defrosting the freezer. I’ve been known to find some pretty strange things as odds and ends get put into bags and frozen without labeling because of course I will remember what it is, and never do. So this day was one of those days…toss out the stuff I no longer have a clue about, why on earth do I have a pickle jar that is empty except for the pickle juice? etc etc etc! My excuse is there were 3 people living in the house and some of those would eat the last pickle and leave the jar in the fridge. There’ something way in the back that is growing green fuzz…what the heck was that? so when I was finished the fridge and freezer were sparking and I once again knew what it all was.
My adult son was going to take some beer can’s to the liquor, from there he would take the garbage (all the unknown stuff) to the local dump. So it all got tossed in the bed of his pick up. He got to the liquor store took the cans in for the refund, and while he was standing at the counter the clerk "oh oh, those people just stole the bag out of your truck. He laughed and told her what it was. Then when he got home he told me about the theft of the garbage. I had to laugh, and I sincerely hoped that the thieves would mistake any of it for actual food! My overall feeling though was embarrassment…Then I felt silly for being embarrassed.
I was relating this exact story to a friend last week, who was trying to decide to clean or toss a cooler that hadn’t been cleaned out. She cleaned it… but much gagging was heard.
I found a hummingbird in my grandfather’s freezer.
I was home from college for the weekend. My mom, at the time, worked 2nd shift, which meant she got home around midnight. I had rolled in right around then because I wanted to catch her before she went to bed. We immediately started scrounging around in the kitchen for a snack – we all lived with my grandparents at that time. Anyway, I wandered into this pantry room my Gramma had off the kitchen, opened the freezer, and spotted a zip loc baggie with what looked like a big chunk of weed in it. Of course, I pulled it out to investigate and what I discovered was not weed at all but a dead goddamn hummingbird.
I hold it up, “Mom. What. the. fuck. is. this?”
Momzilla: “I. have. no. idea.”
Next morning at breakfast, Grampa’s sipping his coffee and I say, “Oh, yeah. By the way. What’s with the dead hummingbird in the freezer? You realize it’s too small to eat, right?”
Grampa nearly spits out his coffee. He tells me he was sitting there on the porch, watching the hummingbirds, when it appeared that this one died right there on the perch. “You don’t see ‘em sittin’ still very often, so I kept him to show people.”
Grandfathers. Ya know? Seriously. SMH
Later, I was writing an article about hummingbirds and came across a tidbit factoid that says sometimes hummingbirds take little naps because they have sick fast metabolism. I think my grandfather actually* killed the hummingbird by freezing it to death*. :eek:
My junior year in college, I had a dorm fridge that we used as a beer fridge in a rental house. We had a six week break around the holidays, so I dutifully unplugged and cleaned out the dorm fridge, wiped it down and then, for some insane reason, tossed the damp towel in there. And promptly forgot about it.
Flash forward six weeks: my roommate shows up with a fresh 12-pack to start the new term, opens the dorm fridge and screams like she saw a dead body. The towel had grown so much mold, it looked like a dead cat. Seriously. I investigated and screamed too. Then we figured it out.
And I threw out the fridge. OneCentStamp, did y’all clean that fridge out or just take off and nuke it from orbit to be sure?
I think it tried; unfortunately, my R’lyehian is not so good.
We put on gloves, dragged it outside, threw all contents straight into the dumpster, hosed it out, and then scrubbed it out with very, very strong bleach water. Like probably a full two gallons of bleach in five gallons of water. Then left it out in the sun for a couple days. My power didn’t come back on until I’d been back for a week anyway, so there was no point in bringing it back inside and plugging it in.
I eat everything and keep track of what is in there. If I do find something left too long and it goes bad, I usually eat it anyway.
When my wife’s mother died and we cleaned out her place, the one thing that smelled the strongest of cigarette smoke was packages of meat in the freezer.