I like cleaning the refrigerator about as often as I have a root canal.
· Some “Use By” dates are from 2007
· You need to use a sharp knife to dislodge some jars
· You could supply your local high school’s science labs with cultures.
A PJ mishap forced the issue. While re-filling her water glass in the middle of the night she spilled most of the chilled container, half of it onto the floor, and the other half throughout the bottom half of the fridge. Of course, she only wiped up the floor, leaving the fridge clean-up to me. Her rationale was that since I was the cook, she should leave such food-related issues to me.
As is my wont now and then — don’t put off today what you can put off longer— I put off the clean-up. Two days later I noticed that the lettuce bag was compromised. Wet lettuce in the fridge is not an optimum sanitary food condition.
Actually a few weeks ago I had purged the fridge of out-dated containers. Fortunately I hadn’t been using those anyway. A good cook’s rule would be to occasionally forage around in recesses of the fridge. Not sure why I thought I needed three large bottles of store-bought barbecue sauce, since I began making sauces and rubs from scratch a couple of years ago.
A good indicator of when to probe the recesses is that when you open the door, the stuff closest to the door falls out. That can get pretty messy if they are glass containers and you have kitchen tiling.
Something akin to finding a dead rat (or several) when you clean the garage, a package of dill had climbed out of the veggie/lettuce drawers and lay hidden in the back. It’s “Use By” date was 12/30/2008. Since that is a bit old for fresh dill, I tossed it.
I think that when it is time to clean the fridge again, I’ll buy a new one.
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