Freezer burned meat is perfectly edible and works fine in stews and soups. Plenty of liquids spices and strong flavors will make sure it is still tasty too.

Signed

Cheapass.

Oh and and homobigotry is idiot. Sorry, the freezer burn comment is as smart as my comments are going to get today, thanks to various minor medical problems.

The worst spoiled food for us are mushrooms, which end up bleeding a wonderfully musty liquid that leaks everywhere.

We have two month old apples that seem fine as well.  Dunno why.

When I (het male) moved into my friend’s townhouse shortly after my separation from my wife, I got the pleasure of cleaning out his kitchen so I could move my stuff into half of the space.  Let me say that the stereotype of gay men as domestic neat freaks needs to die in an arson fire.

Nothing unusual about apples that keep well.  Our usual way of dealing with apples is to go to the orchard, buy as many apples as can be forced into the fridge somewhere, eat apples until all that remains is an assortment of various apples in the crisper drawer, make applesauce, hit the orchard again.  You can go a couple months between visits and the apples are still reasonably crisp.  Some of the old varieties were supposed to keep right through the winter, if kept cold.  In general, the harder apples, like Spencers, keep better.  Early-summer ripeners are said to not keep as well (of course, trying to keep an early-summer apple through winter would be kind of silly).
Of course, we don’t go a couple months between visits because the orchard is our source for unpasteurized cider and excellent cider doughnuts, but we could.

Stuff remains edible waaaaaay longer than most of us are taught.  The apples and applesauce don’t surprise me at all.  I don’t look at dates anymore—if it passes the smell test, it stays.

I have a weakness for old Heloise advice books and she recommended once to save pickle water and slice onions into it. I may try that sometime, although usually since I don’t buy pickles it’s just as easy to mix a little vinegar and sugar if I want quick-pickled onions.

My fridge is a friggin’ nightmare. It’s needed cleaning for at least a month and a half. Mr Kristin has volunteered to get his pith helmet and machete and venture in there this weekend.

Apples keep for a long time and unless they’re bruised, usually instead of spoiling they slowly go dry and corky/mealy.

Last Christmas my parents finally used the last of the nutmeg.  We wondered how long we’d had the nutmeg container, so we looked at the label on the bottom.

Its sell-by date was 1989 (!!!!!)

When my grandmother died, we cleaned out the pantry and my mother brought some home, which is how I ended up eating a slice of 5-year-old Velveeta.  She made me throw it out but you wouldn’t have known it was that expired from the taste.

I’ve been having a problem keeping strawberries mold-free in my fridge, and jars of pizza or spaghetti sauce are a perpetual problem.  Once opened, they’ll mold over real fast and a single person simply can’t plow through them fast enough.  Just one of many reasons tomato based sauces should be made from scratch.

In my experience, applesauce at the back of the refrigerator starts to smell fermented long before it looks any different at all.

I don’t know if it is edible or not, I played it safe.  (Although my boyfriend forgot to throw it away and it sat in a corner of the counter for about another week.  It still looked the same, but I wasn’t about to smell it.)

jars of pizza or spaghetti sauce are a perpetual problem.  Once opened, they’ll mold over real fast and a single person simply can’t plow through them fast enough.  Just one of many reasons tomato based sauces should be made from scratch.

Warm up what you need for a meal. Freeze the rest in ice cube trays or small containers. Solved.

liquified potatoes. Not good. Not good at all.

Ah, Kristin, that makes sense but unfortunately I don’t - for some reason the freezer is like a black hole for food for me.  I put stuff in there and then completely forget about it.  I know it’s a bad habit but with no kids I lack the motivation to change my freezer-shunning ways.

It was a sinful fridge and an evil pantry.

Kyso, I even have kids and I have the same spaghetti-sauce problem, just so you know you’re not alone. The Costco jar of sauce is twice as much as our family of 4 needs, so we forget and have half the jar spoil in our fridge occasionally. Mostly I have it licked, but the worst thing is when Mr Kristin chucks the remaining half a jar of sauce in the freezer still in the jar and then it takes days to thaw out, when inevitably we want pasta that evening.

Since my family remodeled we have two refrigerators, one in the basement, used for sodas and beer. Once I put a romaine lettuce in the vegetable drawer and forgot about it. Some weeks later it had altogether deliquesced; there was nothing solid left, just black ichor, like you’d expect to find in a lead-sealed coffin after a hundred years. A few threads of mold floated on it.

I concluded that lettuce, like jellyfish, consists mostly of water. I don’t like lettuce. I like vegetables with more substance.

@MAJeff - I had a friend who showed up to work one day covered in little red welts.  Turned out she’d left potatoes in the cupboard too long until she noticed a smell and found them.  She opened the door and was attacked by a swarm of tiny black bugs, like something you’d see expelled by a cursed mummy in a movie.

@ Kyso K, Yikes! I got to it before there were bugs at least.

Wait, what?

You had EXPIRED cans of soup? As a college student who lives on these the way others live on ramen, that seems… very hard to believe. Soup cans tend to expire very, very far in the future. Like, 2060-75 in the future. How the hell did you get a soup can that expired?

Oh God, rotten potatoes - I once had the FOULEST smell in my kitchen, around my fridge, but not in it. I thought maybe a mouse had died behind the appliance - the smell was that bad. Then I noticed a brown liquid running down the side of the fridge, from the wicker basket containing potatoes on top. Ugh - most disgusting smell ever. I’ve never put potatoes in wicker again (the spuds weren’t that old).

Rotten onions are no fun either. Ugh.

I once thought it was a good idea to store potatoes under the sink.  They went rotten in about three days.

Blerg.  I had some roommates who were fond of buying fresh fruits and veggies but then not eating them.  They went on vacation for two weeks once, and I decided to clean out the fridge in an attempt to actually have enough space to, you know, use it for stuff.  I filled up an entire tall trash can with completely liquefied portions of unidentifiable former food.  It was so unbelievably foul.  I try to go through the cupboards and fridge every week or so and toss anything that’s past the point it’ll be eaten before it gets really gross or shift stuff to the forefront if it’s coming up on that event horizon.

We just tossed a bin of yeast that had a pull date of February 2006.

We gutted the kitchen in December 2007.  Go figure.

About those expired cans of soup ...

If your soup is getting toward pull date and you don’t want to waste it, there is always the food pantry.

La Chica - it might have been your fridge’s fault.  My ex was in the habit of storing bread on top of the fridge until we moved to a place where for some reason bread stored there would turn into a soggy, moldy mess within two days.  We never did figure out why.  It was otherwise a very ordinary refrigerator.  I (heart) breadboxes myself, but nice ones are pricey and I don’t have the space here.

When cleaning out my mother’s cabinets after she died, I found amazing things.  Sometimes it was a bit of a guessing game, as the items predated the posting of “expiration dates”.  But there were clues, such as the state name in the address had 3 or more letters instead of 2.  “Phila, Penna”.  I didn’t look up how long ago that was, but at a guess 30 years ago.  Now these were “recent”, being as they had zip codes.  Some items did not even have zip codes in their address.  No nutritional labeling?  Well that is more recent than the 3 letter states.  Some had nutritional labeling, but it was clearly still in the prototype stage.  One of the saddest things was a large package of saffron, saved for special, but nothing was ever special enough.  It was black.  She had lived overseas and apparently shipped many of these things over there and then shipped them home, to remain uneaten.

My personal favorite was a box of Ayds dietary candy.  My son was horrified.  “There was a kind of candy called Ayds in the old days?”  I said it wasn’t really candy, it was meant to make you feel full before you ate so you would not eat as much.  I think they went out of business when AIDS came along.  The irony of it being a weight-loss program caused us to shudder.  I don’t know what was in those things, but they still looked fine, altho rather hard.  (We did not eat any).  I sold the nearly full box as an irony ridden antique.  We didn’t eat anything whose date was in question.  We were really afraid to eat anything there.  I also had to throw away everything in the chest freezer because she would put things in there after they had already gone bad, so you couldn’t trust it.

In case anyone wonders, I took my mother shopping all the time and she ate well.  She was very well taken care of, but very stubborn about “waste”.  Perhaps that was the biggest irony of all.  The waste was that it all went uneaten.

Wasted saffron?  That is so sad.  I just got over my habit of saving things for “special” occasions that never happen.

...I noticed a brown liquid running down the side of the fridge, from the wicker basket containing potatoes on top.

...My ex was in the habit of storing bread on top of the fridge until we moved to a place where for some reason bread stored there would turn into a soggy, moldy mess within two days.

Very often the top of the fridge is very warm - hot air tends to be dispensed out of the back of the fridge (especially older models) and that heat can collect on the top of the refrigerator.

or tell us about your progressive Friday perversions that should scare the fundies.

I actually just got home from an atheists’ banquet.
I’m probably not helping here, am I?

Oh, and you folks have no idea what refrigerator horror really is. 
I have two words for you: Katrina Fridge
mmm, maggots.  We bought toxic-gas respirator masks before going in.

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Christmas before last my roommate and I fell sick. We mustered enough energy to go to school and work but would crash as soon as we got home. It was three weeks before I was well enough to actually do something in the kitchen. We didn’t have a single clean dish, garbage hadn’t gone out in days, and the fridge was a bio-hazard. I tossed everything but the condiments and even a few of those. Some standouts were: Homemade Chinese food where even the meat had turned to liquid. Carrots that were sprouting new little carrots. A pot of broth that never got put up (I dumped it in the yard and there was a little dead patch in the grass for weeks) And my personal nightmare, the pot of soup that my roomie made when I first fell ill and had been sitting on the stove ever since. Between the maggots and the smell it’s the closest I’ve ever come to just tossing good ceramic coated cast iron cookware.

My brother and I cleaned out our 83-year-old Mom’s pantry for her recently…and we found a can of green beans with an expiration date of 1983. We didn’t open it.

“Only waste collectors trained in the handling of hazardous materials and armed with special equipment and hazmat suits were assigned the task of collecting refrigerators.”

Dirk Gently!

I am sure that if I’d been on good enough terms to help my family clean my grandmother’s house, I would have found a lot of what muddy @27 describes. Grandma lived through WWII in Germany with small children and never got over the food scarcity. She had tins of cookies and boxes of chocolate in the coat closet and under the spare room beds. She never ate any food gifts that were given to her but saved them to pass on to other family members—sometimes they would be old and dried-out by the time the “special enough” time came to get them out of their storage place.

She also had drawers full of pretty dish towels she never used because they were “too nice to use”. It sounds morbid and believe me, I am not unfeeling about my grandmother’s death, but I’m pretty sure the contents of her house must have been fascinating.

Heh, the epic stuff I’ve had to deal with.

I thought that I had cleaned the chicken soup pot, but when I was wondering what that foul smell was, apparently I hadn’t.  Just a whiff made me and my boyfriend at the time gag uncontrollably for several minutes.  Yum!

Wet and leaky potatoes, sprouted onions, things that I had no clue what they started out as, moldy tomato sauce, four week old potato salad, the brie that my dad had bought for me that I had no idea was bad or that it was the smell coming from the fridge, moldy fruit, moldy tomatoes, a can that wasn’t all that old that had exploded and leaked black goo all over the pantry wall…I could go on and on.

I have learned, however, if there’s something rather vile that I have to clean up, Vick’s VapoRub works to stop you from smelling it.  Once I learned to slather some on, I could actually clean the really vile stuff and gag only a few times.  That, and it’s just easier to barf into the garbage bag than make a mad dash for the toilet.  I try not to let food go too long, but sometimes it happens.  And sometimes it’s spectacularly bad.

As you may or may not know, I was laid up really really ill in November.  I had various mishaps and purges of the fridge, to do with my inability to cook anything.

It was only a month ago that I remembered the onions I had left in one of the drawers of my kitchen.  It’s interesting to see a sort of black sludge instead of a vegetable…

Sara @16, thank you for using the word “deliquesced”.  It’s one of my favorite words, without which I would find it impossible to discuss either refrigerator cleaning or Doctor Who stories.

Rotten potatoes have a stench like nothing else, but the weirdest kitchen cleaning smell I know of is the one that the bread/pasta drawer reveals when we finally pull it all the way out, turn it upside down and wipe away the dust of ages.

Mrs DBK is out of town on business.  I decided to surprise her by cleaning the whole house, top to bottom.  Vacuuming cat litter from various nooks and crannies in the basement and mopping floors is always a charming way to spend one’s decadent evenings.  Of course, we’re not gay, so I can’t lay claim to forgotten treasures of the refrigerator.  Is that, like, a “gay thing”?  Because I know plenty of gay people “why, some of my bes…never mind), but I didn’t know they were hoarding elderly canned goods.  Bless their hearts.  Those gay people sure know how to accessorize a kitchen.

My favorite thing found in my parents’ pantry was a can of cream of celery (?) soup. It had a pre-Nutrition Facts label.

First of all, who eats cream of celery soup? (Evidently not my parents.) I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of cream of celery, anywhere except that can. Second, the label makes it pre-1994 at the latest. I suspect it was from the 80s. It did not have an expiration date that I could find.

I’ve got to clean out our fridge. I’m not looking forward to it. First, though, we have to actually remember to put the trash out for pickup, so that we have someplace to put the discarded refrigerator food when we throw it out…

Rotted green peppers: even fouler than rotted onions.
When it became apparent that the apartment needed slightly more regular cleaning than we were managing, we instituted a lottery system for cleaning.  I got “fridge” in the first drawing.  If the fridge hasn’t been cleaned for weeks, it’s much better if somebody else draws “fridge” the first week.  There was a pot of something that had gone entirely to mold.  I soaked and scrubbed the pan three times before I even began to trust it.

When I was in college, my roommates and I were charged with bringing over chicken to our friend’s place, since they had a grill.  I thought I’d defrosted five frozen chicken breasts, but when we got to the grill-out, we only had four.  I just figured I miscounted.

Then the kitchen began to smell.  We were renting a hellhole, so we thought a squirrel had died in the walls.  Unfortunately, not so.  Apparently, I’d forgotten the last chicken breast in the microwave, which no one else had used for a week.  My poor roommates discovered it while I was at class. 

Worst thing I personally ever found were some potatoes hidden in the back of the cupboard after we’d gotten back from Christmas break.  They were well on their way to vodka.  I’m very, very glad that the plastic bag didn’t leak that liquid all over the place.

I think gay people should be legally prevented from reciting the rotting contents of their refrigerators.

Dear God, won’t someone think of the children?

In my Very First Kitchen, I hydrated some garbanzo beans.  I hadn’t realized how much bigger they would get when hydrated, so I used about half of them for the immediate meal, then put the rest in a plastic container and stored it in the fridge.

Then I forgot about them.

Weeks later, the odd smell in the fridge had been getting stronger for some time, and when I pulled the container out, I could see something PURPLE through the side.  I was afraid to open it.  I had not known that any treatment would make garbanzo beans PURPLE.

Top of fridge is warm from the could and gets a constant flow of air ditto. Good for rising bread, not for storing stuff.

When my mother died, ditto. (Of course, that was the least of it—she still had my dad’s check stubs from 1938 or so)

All I have to say is that things got somewhat better when we instituted the “transparent containers only” rule for the fridge.

LedasMom and hp are absolutely right.  Those apples in the store in March and April (and on to September for the late varieties)?  If they aren’t from New Zealand, they have been in a “cellar” (often not an actual cellar, but a climate controlled room) since the previous fall.  I love yellow transparents that typically ripen about now, but they don’t keep more than a few months past picking.  They make wonderfully sweet sauce with little added sugar though.  The nearby orchard has something called Gala Golds that seem almost as good and a tiny bit more long lasting.

Oh, dog yes; potatoes and onions becomes horrific blackish sludge could be a bio weapon. Uhg.

Worst smelled, would be an onion and 2 or 3 small potatoes forgotten in the back of a bottom cupboard.  Worst seen, a tuperware container with a little cooked spinach that had fallen behind something - was full of wriggling rice-sized white maggots.

I just recently threw away a rubbermaid pitcher of iced tea that had been in my refrigerator for at least two years.  Ick. 

Other than that I keep up with it reasonably well, usually throwing things out no more than a couple of weeks after they have become inedible. 

In other news, on Friday night I was pet-sitting for two clients that happened to be military families, so I had the opportunity to spread my gay cooties all over the homes of our service members, and possibly even to convert their pets to an unnatural lifestyle.  (Although one household already had dogs and cats living together, so perhaps there wasn’t much for me to do there.)

I really, really must go and use up that chicken stock and some saffron this afternoon….

When a good friend cleaned out his parents’ place a couple of years ago, the pantry was fine, but the freezer yielded such treasures as 26 year old turkey and a 30 year old packet of sausages.  Apparently, they had basically freeze-dried, like Andean mummies.

Just last week I had been bragging to a friend that I didn’t have any fruit flies. Fast forward a couple of days and darned if there weren’t a few of them floating around my kitchen.

There was a faintly funky smell too - every time I approached a certain part of the counter - I was beginning to suspect a dead mouse under the cabinets or something of that nature.

It’s been very hot here and so I haven’t been cooking regularly. It cooled down over the weekend and consequently decided to actually use the kitchen for something other than a depository of junk. I opened a drawer to grab a couple of onions.

Aha! - out came a cloud of fruit flies and sitting in the basket that holds my onions were several that were more the consistency of an overripe tomato rather than a hard onion. They smelled bad, too.

Kyso wrote:

jars of pizza or spaghetti sauce are a perpetual problem.  Once opened, they’ll mold over real fast and a single person simply can’t plow through them fast enough.

I use it as dip, on chips or with saltines.

Apparently, they had basically freeze-dried, like Andean mummies.

My kids get hot dogs out of the freezer to heat up by themselves and apparently they’re not so great about closing the wrapper back up, so I often find one of the little mummified buggers floating around in there. My dog LOVES them.

I’ve learned to put spaghetti sauce in the freezer whenever reasonable to do so.

That said, you do NOT want to see the contents of our produce drawers right now.

Oh man, this thread is making me feel so much better about my (lousy) housekeeping* skills. I haven’t been living on my own long enough to accumulate anything really impressive like some of the above, but my bad habit is bringing lunch to work in a tupperware, failing to rinse out the tupperware, tying off the plastic bag the tupperware is in, and then stashing it somewhere in my room where it is promptly forgotten. By the time I find those little buggers again I usually just toss them out, bag and all, trying to ignore the various fungi pressing their little faces against the plastic to look at me…

As for gay stuff, I spent most of Friday in the lab (not very gay) and then I watched anime—one of the female characters was pretty cute, and I noticed that, so that’s kind of gay. I do my best. :p

*Read: “basement-I’m-renting-from-a-family”-keeping skills.

@Bagelsan

I do the same thing with my travel coffee mugs.  (Except the throwing away bit; those mugs are really expensive and, while coffee mold is gross, it isn’t as bad as food residue.)