So, I’ll admit it. I’m a slob. Typical young bachelor; my kitchen is a mess. I do love to cook; I’m just not so great at cleaning up afterward.
So I noticed, about a week ago, an “off” smell near my kitchen. Didn’t smell exactly like rot, just something overly…earthy.
I tore my refrigerator apart searching for the source. Nothing. I was afraid a mouse or something had died behind my fridge or something like that.
Today - I was clearing mail off my counter and I noticed a polycarbonate container. It was buried underneath two plates.
“Hm”, thinks GameHat. “When did I use that last?”
“Oh shit, I used that to mix cornbread THREE WEEKS AGO”
Yes, I’ve had a plastic container filled with water, corn flour and raw egg sitting on my counter for three weeks. When I finally found it today - man it was pungent. Shit had a freaking foam layer from the insane fermentation going on.
That container is soaking in soap and my apartment still smells like a brewery.
You don’t ever want to have hidden potatoes, y’know like forgotten in the corner of the shelf or something, go bad. Rotten potato is a smell unlike any other.
Way back in college, my roommate and I moved into a really crappy pay-by-the-month house over the summer. It was a flophouse. Ramshackle as all hell, and the “apartment” we inhabited was really one of the bedrooms and, I dunno, the breakfast room, of an old house that had been divided into a ton of tiny, tiny studio apartments. It served as temporary housing for all manner of college students, itinerant workers, creepy drifters, semi-homeless types, etc. Slanted floors, shared bathroom, the works.
One day, we started noticing a horrible smell. Uh oh. Decomposition. Rotting flesh. Nothing else smells like it. And it was STRONG. We took out the garbage, cleaned out the mini-fridge, and basically tore the place apart. Nothing. We started wondering if an animal had died under the house.
It got worse. Then came the flies. There were flies everywhere. We started wondering if some guy living next door had OD’ed and died. All sorts of scenarios occurred to us.
Then I remembered the shrimp. We had gotten a few pounds of shrimp from the Gulf a few days before, and boiled them up. They boiled over, and we cleaned it up, but apparently quite a bit of shrimpy juice got under the burners on the stove. We pried everything up, and encountered quite a lot of decaying shrimp goop, now a lovely gray color, and absolutely WRITHING with maggoty goodness.
And if they build up enough gas inside sometimes they explode and spread the smell all over your tiny efficiency kitchen. I don’t let them go that long anymore.
Old beans, particularly black beans, make a horrifying stench after a couple of months. I also had a very bad experience with letting spaghetti water sit for a few days. I never realized that it would funk up so much…
Rotten potato has nothing on rotten kumara. I caught one early this weekend - it had sprouted grey fur over the others in the bag, but fortunately only one was rotting.
Just to add - I think that flying kumara from NZ to the UK is an abuse of the environment, and a waste of fuel. But you just can’t go past a good roast kumara (specially with NZ lamb, which I don’t object to).
What to do
There is nothing like the smell of having a refrigerator die and moving it out to your garage and then forgetting to remove the bag of once frozen broccoli.
Experienced it again when someone at work decided to put a thawed bag of broccoli in the vegetable drawer and forget about it.
I love broccoli but it stinks when freshly cooked, let it decompose a little and it’s just as bad as bodily decomposition.
I have a bag of kitchen scraps in my garage in a container that I was composting via the bag method. I did this once with a smaller bag and a smaller amount of scraps and that was pretty ripe when opened. I am afraid to actually open the bag now because it’s been cooking for so long. I think I will have to take it out to my driveway and mix it with some soil in a big container preferably on a day with a nice breeze.
Word. I had some go bad on me back in my old apartment. I described the smell as, “if dirt could die and rot.”
Here’s a couple that aren’t about smells: I once left a jug of milk in my fridge so long that it turned clear. All the whiteness had settled out of it somehow, leaving clear liquid behind. That one went to the dumpster unopened.
And another how-long-has-that-been-in-there fridge discovery: I went to take a swig of orange juice from the carton, not thinking about how long it’d been since I last bought orange juice. When it hit my mouth, it was fizzy. Orange juice isn’t supposed to be fizzy! Bleh! Argh! Ptui!
When we lived in New Orleans, we kept our deep freezer on the back porch. In the height of summer one year, our golden retriever discovered a once-frozen microwave pork dinner that had apparently fallen out of the freezer many days earlier and hid on the porch rotting in the NOLA heat and humidity. He then ate it, of course.
He came running inside, smiling oh so proudly and happily, with his face covered with once-pork slime and maggots, and the stench of the pork dinner wafting from his mouth. He then proceeded to throw half of it up in the kitchen, and then run upstairs and throw up the other half on the carpet right outside my office door. :smack:
It took weeks to get the smell out of the house. I think as long as I live that will be the worst former food stench I will ever encounter.
Potato sprouts, leaves and stems are poisonous. Perhaps your mice ate the sprouts and died. the Master speaks The question is actually about green potato chips but it discusses the poisonous charcteristics of potato greenery.
After graduate school, I moved in with my girlfriend (now wife) in her father’s basement. We set up a nice little apartment for ourselves, with a bedroom, bathroom, and little living room with a microwave. There was also a really old fridge that had come with the house; one of those old tombstone shaped ones with the latching door handle and the freezer inside the fridge. We figured we’d use that one for our own food and lug it upstairs to the kitchen to cook.
The freezer had not been defrosted in god knows how many years. It was a solid chunk of ice. As in, the frost had built up so much that it had actually glaciated under the pressure. So I went in one day armed with a hair dryer and hammer to de-ice the freezer. Some hours later I had an empty freezer… and leftovers. In an old plastic tub with an expiration date of something like 1977 (this was 2003). I have no idea what it was; it was unidentifiable, just a gray blob of… something. At least now I know what leftovers look like after 26 years.
Another one: many years ago my mother made spaghetti. Me, I like parmesan on my spaghetti, so I grabbed the canister from the pantry and poured it on. Funny little black specks fell out of the canister along with the cheese. “That’s funny,” I thought, “what could that be?” So I looked closer: ants. Hundreds of little dead ants all over my spaghetti. I didn’t eat that night. Put me off parmesan for a while, too (and if you’ve ever seen me pour the stuff on, that’s saying something).
I once made a pot of french canadian pea soup that I deemed to be “too watery.”
I was on the way out the door to my GF-at-the-time’s, so I turned off the stove and threw a handful of rice in there to soak up the extra liquid, replaced the lid, and thought no more of it.
You’re expecting a “three weeks later” type thing, aren’t you?
Nope - I returned home the next day to a suffocating kitchen and a pot that could not be salvaged, because the stink had permeated it so thoroughly. I almost puked as I dumped that thing out.
I guess there was something living on the surface of the rice that would be no problem, plunged into boiling water. Cooling, nourishing soup on the other hand – that environment provided an ideal place to cultivate a virulent bacteria.
Also, I once cleaned the cupboards at a new place and discovered a jar of home-made jam that had overturned and spilled on a top shelf. Wouldn’t be that disgusting, except that it turned into an accidental glue-trap/attractant for mice. Bllllllegh. A super-sweet mini-scale rodent La Brea.
I once made up a huge batch of freezer French Toast, lovingly wrapped each slice and packed it away in a big Tupperware container in the chest freezer in the basement. Apparently after a big trip to the grocery store, when I was stowing things in the freezer, I took the container out to rearrange things, and never put it back in. In the summer. One day we heard a loud 'POP" from the basement, and when we went down to investigate, the stench was horrible. The gases that had built up in the Tupperware had finally blown the lid off. We dragged it outside, threw the disgusting French toast away, and sprayed as much Lysol in the basement as we could. But that Tupperware box was the challenge. It was a huge box, very expensive, and the smell just would not come out. I tried every remedy suggested…baking soda, charcoal, newspapers, vinegar, bleach, ammonia (not at the same time) lemon juice…you name it, I tried it. The smell finally got down to a tolerable, faint level, but it was still there, so the container got relegated to use storing Purina Cat Chow. One day, about ten years later, I realized it didn’t smell any more! I guess ten years of cat food did the trick.
The house we were renting in New Orleans took a about 1.5 feet of water in the storm. This was in late August, which is HOT.
So, hubby and get back in, oh, October or thereabouts.
My baking drawer was a spore and mold experiment. Did you know that black mold just *loves * rye flower? There was also red mold growing on the rye flour bag. I remember wondering whether I needed more protection than the paper facemask I had on.
The fridge takes the cake, though. Now, the fridge did not take in any water because the previous tenant had made a stand out of 2x4’s about a foot high and had hoisted the fridge on that.
The weekend before Katrina hit was my birthday and my husband wanted to cook for me all weekend. Our fridge was packed with goodies: shark steaks, lasagna fixins, lambchops…etc. The smell was indescribable and so was the puddle that had dribbled on the floor in front of the fridge: it was liquefied meat, writhing with maggots.
We ductaped the whole thing shut and got a few (really good) friends to lever in off the stand without ever daring to look in. It smelled bad enough on the outside.
