Tuesday, April 12, 2016

In which I try to poison myself. Three times.

After I share this, I may find it very difficult to find anyone willing to risk dinner at my place.

On Sunday, I made a small lasagna. Well, as small as any lasagna can reasonably be, in a deep, seven by eleven inch pan. Only two layers of no-boil noodles, one on the bottom, one on the top. Ground turkey, a little bit of onion and green pepper mixed with spaghetti sauce for one layer, sliced fresh mozzarella for another. A mix of freshly ground, imported Parmesan cheese mixed with ricotta cheese and an egg for another layer.

That ricotta...

It had been in the refrigerator since I first decided to make lasagna, a while ago. Long enough ago that the carton was a bit past the "sell by" date. The container had not yet been opened. I've never had an issue with using dairy a bit past the sell by date, provided it hadn't been opened yet.

Until now.

The lasagna tasted great. I had a bit for dinner, then refrigerated the rest. Once it firmed up, I'd layer the slices in a freezer container, and voila! lasagna available to thaw for future meals.

It started just before bedtime. That rumbly tummy, uncomfortable bloated feeling. That "I need to do this right.now." feeling, coupled with an inability to do just that.

No fun.

No fun, especially the three times I was up in the night, not counting finally giving up and getting out of bed for good at 3:30 a.m.

Monday was an extra coffee kind of day.

Monday night I went to pack up a portion of salad dressing for Tuesday's lunch. I'd used the last of the yummy Marie Calander poppyseed ranch for Monday's salad. There was a new jar of it in a grocery bag in the pantry.

That dressing...I'd added it to the grocery order a week ago, knowing I was running out. The grocery bags up the order with the nonperishable separate from the perishable goods. I have a bad habit of letting the nonperishable stuff stay in the bag on the pantry floor, especially if I intend to use the stuff soon. I'd not gotten to this new jar as quickly as expected, because I miscalculated and ran out of viable spinach for salads earlier than I thought I would. A quick stop at the store Monday night fixed that.

I unscrewed the lid on the new jar, transferred a couple of teaspoons of the dressing into my little container for lunch, licked the spoon, went to put the lid back on the jar...

The texture of the dressing looked a bit, um, off. Kind of lumpy.

Hmm. This time with my reading glasses on, I searched every inch of the jar until I found the tiny words: "keep refrigerated". Yep, I'd totally forgotten that this dressing is sold from a refrigerated section in the produce area. The person who pulled my order apparently forgot that little fact, too, and packed the jar with the nonperishables.

Sigh. No poppyseed dressing for me. Hopefully, the licked teaspoon wouldn't cause me as much trouble as the expired cheese. Then again, I'd had much, much less of the dressing.

There's a bottle of regular ranch dressing in the fridge, so I put some of that in another container for lunch, carefully looking at it, smelling it and tasting a bit, just in case. It was fine.

Until lunchtime today, however, when I opened that little container and discovered that the dressing had separated. Ew. The lunchbag is insulated, and everything went into it at 6 a.m., cold from the refrigerator. I had lunch around 12:15. The bag was closed the entire time. I'd never had this happen before.

Another bottle of dressing bit the dust.

At least this time, I caught it before I ingested any of it.

It seems to be time for a really, really thorough pantry/refrigerator/kitchen purge.

1 comment:

Andi said...

We had some guava mango juice that must have been a bit off this week...or so I thought. It was well within the use by but had been open a while. It smelled and tasted as fine as guava juice ever is. Then myself and son felt sick...son to the point of almost throwing up over and over. I thought I had made a wrong food choice and was paying for it until I told Husband. He informed me that the Kiwi Strawberry in the same brand from the same store had also made him sick like that. Ah...food adventures sometimes seem like a science experiment.