Every once in a while it happens: you shove something into the back of your fridge and forget it’s there, only to rediscover it weeks or months or even ( :eek: ) years later.
I have one particular refrigerator problem: I live alone, and don’t drink milk all that often. But occasionally it’s necessary as an ingredient for some recipe or other, so I buy some. As soon as I’m done cooking, I forget about the milk and it sits…and sits…and sits some more.
Today I was cleaning out my fridge and decided to get rid of my latest carton of milk, purchased some indeterminate number of weeks ago. The milk had separated and turned into yogurt, and the plastic was bulging from whatever gas had been released. I did not want to open this sucker, but I had to make sure it wouldn’t explode in the dumpster. So I went to the sink, opened, and started pouring…
Oh, the humanity! Take any rancid milk stench you’ve ever experienced and multiply the foulness by…oh…ten, at least. Much gagging. I had to evacuate the kitchen when I was done. Anywhere you go in my apartment you can catch a little whiff. The windows will be staying open until all the stench is gone, regardless of how cold it gets.
I’m a little afraid of taking this thing in the elevator down to the trash room, now. Hopefully no one gets in with me.
I just got rid of the following things that had been sitting untouched for a month or so:
[ul]
[li]Mashed potatoes[/li][li]shrimp and corn chowder[/li][li]12oz of tomatillo sauce[/li][/ul]
Fortunately, they were all in plastic containers that I didn’t mind tossing (and they thankfully hadn’t exploded), so I was spared what I imagine were pretty heinous smells.
This morning I took a peek into a container of cottage cheese that I thought would still be good. I thought wrong. It appeared to have about an inch of yellow pus floating on the top.
In answer to the question “Does yoghurt go bad?”…
When I finish a container of Nouriche, I give it to the dog to chew up / finish up. Recently I found a container that he had pushed under a chair without finishing. I turned the thing over into the sink. What came out was a alien lifeform. And not a pretty one.
But the worst ever was when a friend of mine sublet his apartment for the summer while he was out of town. The lessee moved out without telling my friend, and the electricity was off for about two months. The lessee left a chicken in the refrigerator.
Well, I didnt mind our roomie making kimchee, it was safely buried out in teh field…but she brought it into the house now it is finished.
You can smell that garbage outside the sealed glass jar it is in, and I have had to throw away a bunch of stuff that it totally ruined like a kilo of brie, cheddar cheese, mascarpone cheese, 5 lbs of tofu[ ] my parmesan cheese, and a selection of baked goodies for mrAru to take to work for lunches. :smack: something on the order of $100US more or less, we had just bought groceries for the next couple weeks :mad:
Well they do frequently in Korea, so I was informed.
It is layers of peppers, cabbage, onions and dead roadkill with lots of kosher salt. Lactobacillus does something absolutely obscene smelling and it needs a steady cool dark place to rot in peace, so burying large ceramic crocks of it is supposedly how it was classically made.
I have no freaking clue. I make my own sauerkraut, pure kosher salt and shredded cabbage aged in a crock in one corner of my microscopic kitchen. It never gets that funky rotting garbage/beached whale in the baking sun smell that korean chemical warfare gets. I know it should be illegal due to the various NBC warfare laws :smack:
Can’t you ask your roomie to keep his/her kimchee in a separate little “cube fridge”? They’re certainly cheap enough, and you could just unplug it when not needed.
Just make sure there’s not a raw chicken in there when you unplug it.
Incidentally, I know from a former coworker’s experience that there are professional refrigerator sniffers. When things get really bad, you hire one of these guys to sniff your fridge, tell you what went wrong and what to do about it. In the coworker’s case, the verdict was that the odor of spoiled grapefruit juice had gotten into the insulation. The solution was to set a bowl of used coffee grounds in the fridge. It worked.
Recently, my roommate’s father gave her some vegetables from his garden.
She ate a few of the veggies, then left a plastic bag of various peppers (mmmmm…various peppers) on top of the microwave, in a colander.
A few days ago, I notice the top of the peppers starting to grow white fuzz - I tell her so when we’re both in the kitchen, so she can maybe pick out ones that are still good. She picks up the bag, and as it turns out, what was hidden from view had completely liquified. Ewwww…
I’ve done the same thing before with zucchini that I forgot I had. I left one in the fridge in it’s plastic produce bag, and let it go long enough so that it completely liquified and fell through the wire rack it was on onto the shelf below…not pretty.
A small plastic storage container of the remnants of a can of cream of mushroom soup got hidden behind the wine rack in our fridge.
Six months later, when we pulled out the bottle (sparkling apple cider) for my birthday, the container came to light.
Ever seen black, chunky soup?
I didn’t even contemplate opening the container. My husband wanted to. I tied it inside a grocery bag and hid it inside a bag of scooped poop from walking the dog just to be sure that my husband didn’t succumb to the temptation to pop the lid.
I just cleaned out and defrosted the work fridge. It hasn’t been done in the three years since we’ve been in the new building. The freezer was a solid block of ice, and an aggregate of cold spilled food that coated the floor of the fridge and had begun to mold.
What I tossed out though…
A plastic bowl of what I THINK was penne at one point, that had decomposed into a fuzzy black quivering mass.
A tub of cheese spread that was covered in a green fur.
A container of 1/2 and 1/2 that expired in December of 02.
Two bottles of ranch salad dressing that expired in November of 02.
A bag full of moldy bread
A bag full of (what I think was) lunchmeat.
I think I still need some situational debriefing, and maybe some counseling.
When I was about 16, my parents and I noticed a weird smell permeating our apartment. We tried to track it down but to no avail, so when it didn’t go away after a few days we told the manager about it. It turned out whoever had lived in one of the neighboring apartments had left some raw beef sitting around when they moved out. I’m told the manager couldn’t even go inside because the stench was so bad. :eek:
Mmmm, kimchi. Gimme gimme gimme. That stuff is GOOD. Kimchi soup is the best if you’re coming down with a cold - damn stuff’ll kill any germs. Luckily we have Korean neighbours downstairs, who keep giving us pots of the stuff. Oh, and that fantastic Korean nori, with sesame oil and rock-salt. Ooh, that’s good eatin’.
] my parmesan cheese, and a selection of baked goodies for mrAru to take to work for lunches. :smack: something on the order of $100US more or less, we had just bought groceries for the next couple weeks :mad: