Smelly Fridge III: Revenge of the Smell

Tonight I reheated some green beans and was greeted by the ghastly smell I thought I had removed with several bottles of expired mustards and marinades, and a bad container of "refried" (not really fried, not really DONE, I am still learning beans from scratch) beans, earlier. Winds up that the LID of the refried bean container (glass container, plastic lid) had absorbed the odor, and the butter with which the beans were cooked had, too. Reheat, and WHAM! Nasty. Both were garbage. So were the beans. I went through the fridge and freezer afterward, sniffing all the grains (contaminated, including whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour for pancakes, yummy no more, brown rice, popcorn frozen to kill any surprise insects, muesli, and 12-grain cereal), and dairy products (butter and cream cheese gone- probably milk, too- I did not sniff it). Even some frozen beans were bad. I chucked an entire black lawn-sized garbage bag full of stuff, because I had just opened a new 5 pound bag of flour, and had a lot of cornmeal awaiting transfer to the freezer in the garage. It went to the garage, alright, different receptacle. Plastic containers were history, too, because once they absorb an odor like that, it can be impossible to get out.

Lessons learned:

1. Chalk board needed for fridge. Throw out leftovers after 5 days and everything else WHEN it expires, not 2 years later. Even if it is in a jar and looks fine. Buy what we can use up.

2. Check fridge regularly (like when putting away groceries weekly) for mystery bits at the back.

3. Really old refrigerators may need a Deep Cleaning (take everything out and scrub, maybe flush the drainage system somehow) once in a while.

15 Minutes Can Change Your Life

At about 4:30 Friday, I was cleaning up after finishing an assay when the sky blackened. Rain poured over the building in sheets. Leaves and trash swirled upward from the construction site below the window. I headed downstairs, despite the lack of any alarm. It was over in a few minutes. The tornado warning alarms sounded for the next half hour. They may have been going during the storm, but we could not hear them indoors.

On the way home, I saw the usual small branches and leaves littering the road. The electricity was out when I got home, but I called the utility company, and the automated service said it would be up in a few hours.

Hours passed. We went for a walk after dinner at the local cafe, which had power. A few blocks south of us, a huge, mature oak had split from the bottom (roots were shallow and black with rot, though the crown was lush and green) and fallen on a thick north-south power line, crushing a utility pole with the transformer and leaving lines in the road. We learned that this had happened all over the city, with winds up to 70 miles per hour, and a tornado suspected in Bartlett. It travelled up Bartlett Boulevard. It hit densely populated areas along the route. Nobody died, and only a few were injured. About 130,000 people were left without electricity. We bought some dry ice and prepared for the worst.

The trucks started coming and going the next day. The neighborhood echoed with chain saws and generators, but was otherwise strangely quiet. The holes for new poles were being drilled by Saturday afternoon. Police cars with spotlights patrolled the neighborhood all night. Wires were up Sunday, but there were other wires down that had to be fixed before they could safely restore our electricity.

The dry ice was gone by Sunday afternoon, and the refrigerator was getting too warm. We went hunting dry ice, but to no avail. We bought regular ice and hustled all remaining salvageable cold goods into the chest freezer in the garage, packing it full so that it would stay cold.

We grilled a dinner of fresh vegetables and thawing chicken in our smoker/grill. We'll eat a lot of chicken and pork chops in the next few days. Fortunately the meat did not thaw completely.

We learned that we are too dependent on the electric company for our basic needs. Freezing as a sole means of food preservation is not good. We lost a LOT of frozen vegetables. We need a battery or crank-operated radio. I'll be canning a lot of strawberry jam in the next few days, as the strawberries thawed, too (but stayed cold). We need to build our emergency supplies. We will.

Strawberry Season

Today I am slicing and freezing strawberries. It is really easy. You can wash, drain, and freeze the slices (whole small ones can be frozen, but large ones should really be sliced so the freezing is uniform, and you can get them into bags or boxes fast afterward). You can also sugar-pack them in 2/3 or 3/4 cup of sugar for every quart of strawberries. That creates a nice, self-generated sauce for ice cream or shortcake... YUM! The orchard people were selling 8 quarts in a flat for $20. Considering that the quarts are very full, which means roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 pounds of berries per quart, it was cheaper to buy a flat than to go to the U-pick-em site at $1.89/lb. 

No pictures today, but you can download a Powerpoint presentation from www.uga.edu/nchfp/multimedia/slide_shows/freezing_strawberries.ppt . Educational institutions and the USDA are the go-to points for learning how to preserve food safely. 

I hope to take out some of the sugar-packed ones later, for use in preserves when the appropriate eye of my stove is repaired. Woo hoo!