Hardboiled
Jul 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pm by Susie
I’m cleaning out the fridge so I’ll have room for the Big Bridal Shower Extravaganza in two weeks. I haven’t had eggs in a long time (mostly since I discovered the Southwestern-flavored Egg Beaters are pretty damned yummy!) so I’m boiling up a dozen eggs that are six weeks past their “sell by” date. Oh, what the hell.
Am I the only person who has ancient food in the fridge? My freezer’s even worse. How long does meat keep, anyway? These steaks aren’t that old but they look really dark.
I plan to use all these eggs to make tuna and egg salad sandwiches but I don’t have any bread in the house. I guess I’ll get by with some potato-bread hot dog buns.
Um, you really sure you want to eat eggs that old? Maybe you should crack one down the drain just to get a whiff.
I have old food, but I don’t generally eat it. I do love how most of my dairy products have two different sell-by dates, one for general use, and another for NYC. It always makes me wonder what the reason is for that. Though in some markets, I regularly find expired food on the shelves, so it could be extra lead time built in.
I’ve often thought that if the US could just harness the energy in the methane that’s being produced in the backs of our refrigerators we could easily end our dependence of foreign oil.
“methane produced in the backs of our refrigerators” heh, exactly.
I just had one for lunch, it was fine.
I often end up cleaning out my dad’s refrigerator, but in his case, it’s the fact that he has almost no sense of smell which is responsible for his old-food-in-fridge syndrome. Scary.
Well yes, that would be me as well. I can sort of smell things, but I can’t tell where they’re coming from. I’m always embarrassed to find out later that my guests were wondering what they were smelling.
My fridge is pretty good — I clean it out every week . My freezer is a little . . . iffy in bits.
It’s my pantry that gets scary.
“Hey, Lis?”
“Yeah, Ian?”
“You don’t mind if the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese expired in ‘02, do you?”
“WHAT?”
“Well, remember when we were stocking up on dry goods for Y2K?”
By the way — it was fine. It was a weird color, but neither of us got sick or anything.
Mrs DBK is the only person I know who keeps soda past its expiration date. Soda has a very long expiration date. It’s bizarre.
I had a box of cinnamon for twenty years until Mrs DBK dropped it and spilled the whole thing the other day. It was a very large box of ground cinnamon and it always seemed to be adequately potent.
And even if you ate one and didn’t die, I don’t think I’d use those eggs. In fact, I am now quite certain that I don’t ever want to eat at your house.
Eggs keep a remarkably long time if they’re not cracked. “Fresh” on a carton of eggs means that they are no more than 30 days old. I am not making this up — check the American Egg Board at http://www.aeb.org/ If properly refrigerated, four to six weeks is no problem.
Really really fresh eggs are almost impossible to peel when hard-boiled.
Simple test for aged egg usability: fill a pan with water and put the eggs in. If they stay on the bottom, they’re fine. If they stand on the narrow end, or half-float, they’re iffy. If they float, they’re rotten.
There is a pocket of air inside the egg that grows as the egg ages (because eggshells are porous). You may find in a given dozen of the same apparent age that some eggs are rotten and some are fine. One good egg out of a dozen old ones does NOT guarantee that all the eggs are edible.
I once went to a potluck to which someone brought deviled eggs. They were delicious, until I looked a little closer at the paprika sprinkled on top, which seemed a little, um … chunkier than usual for paprika.
It was tiny little paprika-colored pieces of dried insects that had apparently been eating the spice. A long time ago.
Once I pointed this out, there was a general pandemic of people running for the bathroom to hurl. I’ve often wondered if maybe I should have not said anything.