Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Taming the Science Projects in Your Fridge


It's the "Greatest Hits Edition" of WFMW, where everyone re-runs a helpful tip they posted in the past. Seeing as how I've only run one WFMW tip prior to today, I thought I'd offer up the following instead:

Cleaning out the refrigerator. Not a task that I enjoy, per se, but one that needs to be done on a somewhat regular basis. In the past, my "clean out" approach was to put all items to the "Look and Smell Test," -- was the item growing mold or did it smell bad? If either answer was yes, into the trash it went. But, I soon discovered there were many partially-used items that had been in my refrigerator for a while, but didn't show the slightest fuzzy growth or emit the faintest foul aroma.

Salsa, comes to mind.

As does spaghetti sauce.

Capers.

Baby food.

Chicken broth.

How long had those things been in there? Were they safe to eat?

To help me decide, I started using a permanent marker and writing the month and date I opened the item on the lid. Having some idea of when the item was initially opened makes it easier to decide if a) it's still edible or b) I'm just entertaining a case of food poisioning.

For more great tips, head on over to Shannon's place!

5 comments:

Mom2fur said...

I love this idea! I'm definitely going to do it next time I clean out my fridge. It gets cleaned on a pretty regular basis, but there's always that poor jar of spaghetti sauce that gets pushed towards the back, LOL!

Anonymous said...

What a great idea! I'm going to do that this weekend! :)

Check out my tip below :)

Sandy said...

Good ideas!

Anonymous said...

Hello, I popped over to answer your question about my WFMW tip. Two of my girls have fine hair and the spray does not make it greasy or heavy. I do use fewer sprays on them than I do on my other girls.

Great WFMW tip yourself!

Kristen said...

Awesome! I just reached for some Italian dressing and found it was "best before" September 2007. Then I checked all my dressings and found only 1 that was actually still within its prime. Yikes. I will definitely be using your trick on the jar of salsa I opened today. (Paul Newman's pineapple flavor. Yum.)