How do you arrive at a definitive diagnosis of food poisoning?
I ask because years ago I had several episodes of violent vomiting and abdominal pain shortly after eating. I assumed food poisoning, but it turns out I had a gallbladder full of stones.
Yeah i can’t imagine anyone would have a problem with this. This seems like an extremely safe uncontroversial use of leftovers (personally I’d eat them if they’d been left out of the fridge, or if they’d been in there a few days, though probably not if they’d been left out AND then left in the fridge a few days)
If you are concerned about microorganisms want to try and make sure it reaches boiling point, so for quite a while 5+ minutes, I guess? It depends on the volume being reheated. You want to see it actually bubbling (and even then there is no guarantee the whole thing has reached boiling point). I would not reheat in plastic containers personally due to the chemicals they release when heated, I’d put in a pirex glass bowl (covered unless you want to redecorate your microwave 
)
Though after only one night, when they were put straight in the fridge I would not be super particular about making sure it was boiled.
I’ve also frequently eaten food that was left out overnight, and never gotten food poisoning from it. I have had food poisoning exactly once, from some fried chicken at a large picnic. And i know it was food poisoning from the chicken because enough people got sick that someone surveyed them and determined what they’d all eaten.
symptom details
I had one episode of vomiting and a few bouts of diarrhea a few hours after i got home.
It wasn’t bad enough to scare me off either fried chicken or food that’s been left out. Fwiw, I’m aware of food safety rules and follow them scrupulously when i cook for my Temple’s “meals on wheels” program, but i take a lot of liberties at home, with my own food.
I have never gotten food poisoning from home-cooked food – I don’t go on picnics often – nor from eating left-overs but rather from eating commercial food. The two that I easily recall involved no vomiting but had stomach cramps and copious diarrhea (no blood or mucus).
One was at a taqueria that had opened up nearby and both Desertwife and I had symptoms. The only thing we’d had in common was the frijoles de olla. We reported them to the health department; they never closed the couple years we were there but we never went back.
The other was a ‘ham and cheese roll-up’ that I had as a mid-shift meal in the casino where I was working. It was several alternating layers of deli-sliced ham and process cheddar rolled into a cylinder, put into a sandwich roll, then toasted until it was heated through and the cheese melted. I’m guessing it had been handled too much or perhaps left out too long but I never had that again, either.
A friend has a huge family. For Thanksgiving they rent a hall and all the older women make turkeys and sides for their table.
One year a the people at one table all ended up very sick the day after thanksgiving, with a few people hospitalized. The woman who cooked for that table went on and on about the virus they all caught.
Smell isn’t a perfect guide, but it’s a heck of a lot better guide than “expiration dates”.
And food poisoning is a lot more common than most people realize. Sure, most folks will never need to be hospitalized for it, but all those times you “ate something that disagreed with you”? Or had the runs for a day? Or most “24 hour bugs”? Those are mostly mild cases of food poisoning.
A definitive diagnosis would involve stool and blood samples being tested, as well as cultures being taken of any remnants of the suspected food, or its packaging.
An informal and less than perfectly accurate diagnosis of food poisoning would involve observation of things like vomiting and abdominal pain, which, yes, could be gallstones, but hoofbeats, horses.
As I understand it, the main problem with informal diagnoses of food poisoning is not that they mistake something else for the genuine thing, but that they often misidentify the specific cause/vector. Various foodborne pathogens can take anywhere between a half a day to several weeks between consumption and onset of symptoms. Add in the residual toxins from things like B. cereus and that range extends from several seconds to several weeks.
Point being that statements about what did (and by extension, did not) give you food poisoning can be wildly inaccurate. Of course if you never got food poisoning at all, ever, then you can probably make more reliable statements about what didn’t cause it.
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Bad smell is a more reliable guide that something is not safe than absence of bad smell is any kind of indicator of safety.
That is: if it smells bad, it probably is bad for you. If it doesn’t smell bad, but you didn’t handle or store it properly, it might still be bad for you.
So in actual answer to the OP. This link says 3 minutes will boil a cup of water:
https://silverkingbrewing.com/cooking-recipes/how-long-to-microwave-water-to-boil
Obviously curry will have different specific heat capacity, and probably more than a cup of leftovers? But that is a ballpark (my 5+ minute suggestion seems like it would be enough)
Leftover food that has been cooled down and chilled properly is generally safe to eat cold straight from the fridge (not aesthetically to everyone’s taste, but I sometimes enjoy cold leftovers). Reheating to ‘piping hot’ potentially eliminates some borderline risks of food poisoning where the storage might have been less than optimal, but generally, if everything else is right, the amount of reheating required is anywhere between zero and ‘until it’s as hot as you want it’
Whenever I first encounter a new microwave I’ll be using for a while (in the break room at a new job, say), I calibrate it by seeing how long it takes to boil a mug of water (watching it closely one time), and then when I’m heating a meal, I estimate how many mug-units it’s equivalent to.
At my current workplace, there are three microwaves I can use. One takes about 2:20 to boil a mug; one takes just about exactly 2:00; and I haven’t used the third enough to say for sure.
Well, other then that one time that public health officials got involved, i really don’t think I’ve ever had food poisoning. I’ve sometimes had stomach bugs, but generally not at the same time as the people i share meals with. And i don’t get stomach bugs very often. My bane is respiratory illnesses, which i catch easily and take a long time to throw off.