Someone suggested this topic in the lunchmeat thread, so here I am.
I’m pretty good about not letting things rot in the back of the fridge, but recently, I made some butter chicken from a spice packet, and it was…just…not right. I even tried diluting it - no go either. I realize this is more a recipe failure, but it was still not good eating.
I always break eggs into a separate cup before adding them to a pan or recipe, because I’ve had a few spoiled ones - and all of them were within the expiration date, as have the bad yogurts I’ve opened.
I bought a gallon of milk that sat in the refrigerator for 6-10 months. When I moved out of my apartment, I attempted to dump the contents of the milk container and learned a little something about the interesting properties of dairy. What came out was translucent with a slightly white tinge that was the consistency of water. What remained in the container was a huge lump of…something. I’m thinking yogurt, cheese, or some other dairy product had its beginnings in a similar discovery when a young caveman had to move into another cave.
Many years ago I shared an apartment with some friends. We all moved out a few days before the end of the lease, and because the others were moving to another city, I offered to go in to do the final cleanup. What I didn’t know was that they’d arranged to have the power shut off, and had forgotten to check the fridge freezer. It was a hot summer, and the pork roast in the freezer was green, fuzzy and stank like nothing I’d smelled before.
Root cellar-A jar of canned cherries from 1864. We knew they were canned cherries because the faded label said so. Without the label and just looking at the jar my first guess would have been rotted eyeballs preserved in old motor oil.
The first thing that comes to mind is when I was a kid, we had a second fridge in the basement. A carton of milk had been left there. By the time I noticed it, it wasn’t exactly square anymore, the sides were bulged way out.
I was kind of scared to touch it, and I damn sure wasn’t going to open it. Wound up taking it across the street and leaving it in the woods where nobody would be hurt when it detonated.
The second one was very recent. I’m sitting on the deck with Mrs Cheesesteak, who sets down two steel water bottles, and says “here’s some cold water for us to drink whilst we lounge on the deck doing the crossword.” I think “what a lovely gesture from my wife who isn’t trying to poison me.”
I take a big swig from mine and realize that it isn’t water. It’s something gross. I’m spitting and gagging and Mrs Cheesesteak, who still claims to not be trying to poison me, says she found the bottle in the fridge and figured it was water. As I dump the bottle down the drain, I inform her that water isn’t orange, white and lumpy.
I still don’t know what was originally in that bottle.
Hey, that was me, and I was also the OP of the lunchmeat thread. Nice to see how memorable I am among the other regulars here!
My wife is a very organized person who quickly throws out anything that’s no longer worth keeping, so we don’t really have many of these types of surprises, other than the occasionally moldy lemon or lime in the back of the fruit drawer.
I was a bit of a slob in my single days, so I’m sure I had many of these types of discoveries back then, but I can’t really remember any too egregious (maybe I blocked them out). I remember once leaving a half-empty bottle of Coke on my coffee table for days (weeks?). When I finally dealt with it, it was full of insect larvae.
Doesn’t quite fit the OP, but the absolute worst smell I’ve ever encountered, worse than discovering a dead small animal even, is when we were visiting my BIL’s lake house. It was a very hot sunny day, and I was walking along the lake and saw a container of worms on a bench. I had walked by the bench earlier and didn’t remember seeing it, so I figured someone recently left it. I needed some worms for bait, so I picked it up and opened the top, and that’s when I discovered it HAD been sitting there, baking in the sun, for a good long while. The smell of dead sun-baked worms hit me in the face, and made me violently gag. It was all I could do to hold in my lunch.
We have two refrigerators. A few years ago I noticed an odor in the basement. I assumed there was a dead mouse somewhere, but couldn’t find it. The odor got worse each day/week,
I mentioned it to me gf. Her sense of smell is not that great, but she confirmed an odor in the basement. We did a grid search, but found nothing. A dead animal (squirrel, raccoon, opossum) was assumed to be the source, but the odor wasn’t going away, it kept getting worse.
I did another search, and found the cause! Months prior my gf was rearranging our downstairs refrigerator/freezer. She took a lamb roast out of the freezer, meaning to bring it upstairs to the kitchen freezer. She placed it atop the basement refrigerator but forgot about it. OMG, was that nasty!!
The most gross thing was probably some moldy leftovers, but one memorable item was half an onion that was stored in a Ziploc bag – by the time it was rediscovered, it was a baggie full of purple liquid with a tiny piece of onion skin floating in it. I don’t think it was a purple onion, either.
I have heard enough horror stories about chest freezers in the basement to make me never want to have one myself, and understand why my parents never had one either despite having 3 kids.
I had opened a can of refried beans and put what I didn’t use into a container and put it in the fridge. The container accidentally got shoved to the back of the fridge and then forgotten about. I don’t know how long it was back there… probably months. I found the container again and started to open it because I wasn’t sure what was in there. The smell of refried beans that have gone bad is something I won’t easily forget. Yark…
Not the fridge but my ex-husband had a small bottle of orange juice that he didn’t quite finish and left in the car. The bottle rolled under the car seat to be discovered several months later after a very hot summer. When we found the bottle the remaining OJ was black and the sides of the bottle had started to bow out. Ex actually started to open the bottle before he thought better of it.
My mother had an old, old refrigerator that wasn’t very cold. Her caregiver and I used to defrost it every other week, because ice built up on the tiny freezer. I learned that plain cooked pasta, flour and water, in a container forgotten for weeks, could spoil and stink to high heaven.
