One of the neat things about our kitchen renovation was that we were able to take our old fridge and stick it out in the garage. The 18 extra cubic feet provided some nice overflow space, since the fridge in our kitchen for various reasons isn't as wide as we'd have liked it to have been.
Neatness turned to tragedy when some recent movement in our garage left the fridge without power for some, oh I dunno, let's say a month. Remember those pictures of people in Louisiana after the floods, pulling things from their toxic refrigerators? Welcome to Hart Place.
Mostly the fridge was stocked with beer, glorious beers from all corners of the world (well, mostly from the local distributor) but there was also some (formerly) frozen chicken, veggie patties, a half of a Cold Stone cake and some other items I can no longer identify. All of which was sitting in various kinds of molds.
Now, having a father who was preparing for the end of the world can come in handy sometimes, and today was such a day, as I donned a 1980's Army-issue gas mask, and tackled the fridge. It's not an exaggeration to say (based on my brief olfactory investigation when I was complete) that I'd have died had I not been wearing that mask. Sure, one can look a bit odd going all Clockwork Orange in the garage but it's better than passing out and letting the mold slowly grow over me.
Some things I learned: bottles of sealed foodstuff are not quite as sealed as we all might think. Several containers of things like marinades had considerably more mold around the screw-thread area of the container. The beer was of course almost completely mold free, although I can't say the same for the paper six-pack packages.
Regardless of the degrees of mold, I cracked open and disposed of all the bottles of beer. Probably fifty bottles of beer went down the drain. Sure, I could possibly have saved them by soaking them in bleach-water, but really, do you want your last words to be "the beer, it has toxic...mold". I really really threw out a lot of beer today, and I just kept repeating lines from the Untouchables to myself. (One of them comes at you with mold, you come at them with flesh-eating bacteria...that's the Chicago way.)
So, if you're coming over any time soon, bring a cooler and some beer, because there's none left at my house.
Maybe when I'm not so sad about it, I'll talk about how my grill fell apart today.
I guess we'll be bringing beer to the bbq on sunday...and i guess we could also bring our grill?...
Posted by: DW | May 23, 2007 at 08:23 AM