It started about two weeks ago. I came home, entered the kitchen, and noted that the room smelled a little weird. I figured it had to be food that had been left out and was now decaying in the trash can or the sink. We have window units as opposed to central air, and, once the mercury rises in the kitchen, I figured there were bound to be some casualties.
As I am the only one in the house with a sense of smell (that is capable of human conversation, at least, and not just a series of "FEED ME" howls), the task of "Ooh, that smell - Can you smell that smell?" fell to my shoulders. I made sure the sink was cleaned out, and there were no food remnants left in the strainer. I even did a "spot check" of the room with my nose to try and determine the origin. No matter what I did, I could not place it. I gave up, since my nose had already become accustomed to the smell for the day.
This kept occurring over the next week and a half. Every day I would come home, the kitchen would reek, and I could not figure out what the source was. I checked the trash can, the sink, the fridge, the freezer, the cat's food area, the litterbox, and the food cabinets. I even checked the less-used cabinets to make sure nothing had crawled into them and died. Nothing had.
Finally, on Friday, I had the stroke of genius. I remembered there was one place in the kitchen I hadn't checked thoroughly, because I assumed the tenants of this spot were impervious to this kind of damage. I thought wrong.
To be honest, I can't take all of the credit for my "Eureka!" moment. A few weeks ago, a host on my favorite morning radio show was telling how she too had a mystery smell in her garage that she could not place. It turns out, the thing puking up her garage was a bag of potatoes that had been left out there since Thanksgiving, and had turned extremely south.
I keep my potatoes (and onions, and other non-refrigerated vegetables, still bagged) in a large bowl on my counter. At first glance, everything seemed all right on the surface, so my eyes always swept over it during my inspections.
On this fateful Friday afternoon, I decided it was now or never. I pulled the bowl closer to me, and removed the bags of vegetables, only to find half an inch of standing, opaque, brown liquid in the bowl. It smelled like death, and it was all I could do not to throw up as I threw the vegetables away, and dumped the liquid down the sink. I did not think to take a photo, but here is an artist's conception of the horror:
The lesson here, obviously, is not to waste food. Try to always use your food in a timely and efficient manner, so as not to let it become a festering, possibly free-thinking science experiment plotting your untimely demise. I urge you to check your vegetables now, for every second you don't is one more second they leak death juice into your best serving bowl! Next step: world domination.
3 comments:
If you had thought to call your "vegetable" expert father and told him that the mysterious odor "smelled like death", then his response would have been to "check your potatoes".
Also check under the plastic ledges because if stuff spilled it can linger there for months/years and grow mold. I am a bit of a need freak, and the chef of the family, but sometimes I go to friends homes and wont eat anything because it smells like there is a dismembered corpse in their fridge. This phenomenon mostly happens when two or more unmarried men are in the same dwelling because the old food often spills when they attempt to jam their multiple cases of beer into the front, while pushing stuff a buzzard wouldn't eat to the back. To me left-overs have a 24 hour statute of limitations. Clean that sucker out with a diluted bleach solution, and keep boxes of opened baking soda in the freezer and fridge.
Did you see the vid that I put on fb yesterday. Was that a Liberal Elite look-a-like or what?
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