My mom -- the same person who sent me an annual article until I was in my thirties about how to safely prepare the Thanksgiving turkey (never on wood cutting boards, wash hands with strong antisceptic soap after every step of the process, don't stuff the bird, and cook for at least 7.5 hours per pound till charred black) -- should probably not read the rest of this posting.
I wake up today and realize the freezer has thawed overnight. Did it break? Did somebody leave it ajar all night? At first the answer is unclear, but what is clear -- or red, or purple, or cloudy, depending on the substance in the drawer -- is that everything is mush. All the ice creams get lumped together into one raspberry/coconut/vanilla "milk shake". Many things, such as old half-loaves of baguette meant for future bread puddings and French toast, are thrown away. But I cannot bring myself to jettison the expensive ingredients, bought in preparation for hosting our friends from San Francisco.
And so I change the dinner plan. What was going to be a simple cheese and pâté meal is now an all-protein all-the-time dinner. On the table are scallops, filets of poached salmon (since giving myself a a nasty oil burn last week by sauteeing salmon and, adding insult to injury, turning our apartment into a stinky fish fry for days), sole in lemon breading (thanks, Picard!), and chicken cutlets, all purposely a touch on the over-cooked side. There are eight of us, but four are children under the age of nine, so we are left with containers full of leftovers. We'll see tomorrow if we risk eating them.
In the end, the freezer does re-freeze, so we assume it was left ajar. The problem is that we don't know when the freezer really warmed up and for how long the meat has been thawed. But we all eat it anyway. After discussing the potential logistics of eight people hurling at the same time in a smallish apartment with only one toilet, we wonder how bad it would be if we posted ourselves at regular intervals and projectile vomited off the étage noble onto the buskers and bystanders below.
You know you've got a good friend when you've just potentially given her and her entire family salmonella, and her comment is, "Well, it would make a really funny story for you." I appreciate Sarah's comment more than she'll ever know. Nobody else has had that sort of purposeful, conscious dedication to contributing material for my blog since God lit me on fire.
[Update: 2 hours since dinner, and all's well.]
[Update: 4 hours since dinner, and all's well.]
[Update: 6 hours since dinner, and all's well. Hmmm....a little chicken/salmon midnight snack?]
[Update: next morning, and all systems normal.]
I wake up today and realize the freezer has thawed overnight. Did it break? Did somebody leave it ajar all night? At first the answer is unclear, but what is clear -- or red, or purple, or cloudy, depending on the substance in the drawer -- is that everything is mush. All the ice creams get lumped together into one raspberry/coconut/vanilla "milk shake". Many things, such as old half-loaves of baguette meant for future bread puddings and French toast, are thrown away. But I cannot bring myself to jettison the expensive ingredients, bought in preparation for hosting our friends from San Francisco.
And so I change the dinner plan. What was going to be a simple cheese and pâté meal is now an all-protein all-the-time dinner. On the table are scallops, filets of poached salmon (since giving myself a a nasty oil burn last week by sauteeing salmon and, adding insult to injury, turning our apartment into a stinky fish fry for days), sole in lemon breading (thanks, Picard!), and chicken cutlets, all purposely a touch on the over-cooked side. There are eight of us, but four are children under the age of nine, so we are left with containers full of leftovers. We'll see tomorrow if we risk eating them.
In the end, the freezer does re-freeze, so we assume it was left ajar. The problem is that we don't know when the freezer really warmed up and for how long the meat has been thawed. But we all eat it anyway. After discussing the potential logistics of eight people hurling at the same time in a smallish apartment with only one toilet, we wonder how bad it would be if we posted ourselves at regular intervals and projectile vomited off the étage noble onto the buskers and bystanders below.
You know you've got a good friend when you've just potentially given her and her entire family salmonella, and her comment is, "Well, it would make a really funny story for you." I appreciate Sarah's comment more than she'll ever know. Nobody else has had that sort of purposeful, conscious dedication to contributing material for my blog since God lit me on fire.
[Update: 2 hours since dinner, and all's well.]
[Update: 4 hours since dinner, and all's well.]
[Update: 6 hours since dinner, and all's well. Hmmm....a little chicken/salmon midnight snack?]
[Update: next morning, and all systems normal.]
No comments:
Post a Comment