Addendum To: Addendum To: Mystery Meat

Remember when I said that I can eat anything that's in the fridge no matter how long it's been in there?  Yeah, fuck that noise.

Last week, maybe a little longer ago, I thought I was going to warm up the third-to-the-last packet of ribs.  I opened it up and I saw some white stuff around one end.  But this was not fat soaking up to the surface, which I thought was the case with the mystery meat I ate and blogged about before, or what I thought was on the ribs I had eaten before that.  Upon closer inspection it had the texture of snow ... which I think is a telltale sign of freezer burn, or worse.

I freaked out again and started looking through the other ribs.  They too had those fuzzy white spots, but they also had rings of green spots around them too -- signs of mold.  OK, I'm not brave enough to eat that.

I then looked into the bag of chicken, of which I had, like, five pieces left.  Three of them seemed good enough, but the other two had spots which were covered in that white and green.  Honestly, if I saw only the pieces of chicken with those spots, I might have taken a shot at eating them, thinking they too were pieces of fat.  But given that it seemed obvious that the ribs were in the refrigerator too long, the chicken must have as well.  So I cut bait, threw all of those ribs and bad pieces of chicken together, took out the three "good" pieces of chicken, cooked them in the toaster oven, and then threw the rest into a garbage bag at one of the nearby gas stations.

The meat was horribly discolored in the pieces of chicken I decided to eat, but again, I'm here to blog about it, so I'm alive, which means they were probably good enough to eat, or not bad enough not to eat.  But it turns out that, indeed, there is a time in which leftovers go bad, and maybe I should heed that.

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Which brings me to the pasta I cooked at ate yesterday, the one which I made too much of.  I had put the pasta sauce into the saucepan when I noticed a black spot at the top of the pasta jar.  Is that mold?  And then, once I got done with cooking but before I ate a bite, I noticed that in the underside of the lid there are paste three black spots.  The sauce looked as red as it should, and it seemed to smell normal -- and, again, I'm alive to live to tell the tale of the meal.  But now I feel this pressing need to finish the rest of the sauce.  I grew up thinking that as long as we screwed the lid on tight, we could leave spaghetti sauce in there as long as we want.  Is that really true???