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I’m not one to slavishly follow sell-by dates on food packaging – provided that the contents are not too elderly, of course and have been kept properly. Stuff doesn’t just go off immediately the sell-by date has passed.
I won’t buy anything past its best before date of course, but if it’s been sitting in my fridge since before that date and it looks okay, well, I’ll give it a punt. These things have a fair old safe period built in and a bit of case-by-case judgement covers pretty much all angles, so there isn’t much to worry about as long as you use a bit of the old common sense.
Last week I bought some cottage cheese with chives for lunch, but then didn’t eat it. I took it home and put it in the fridge where it sat unremarked and unregarded until this morning, when I fished it out and looked at it again. In the meantime it had passed its expiry date some five days ago. I pondered for a while. The carton looked a little fuller than these things usually do, but five days in a rather cold fridge? Surely it would be okay? So I brought it back to the office with a view to eating it at lunchtime.
Well, all I can say is that a lot can happen between putting it in your bag in a morning and getting it out again several hours later. The carton looked rather more rotund at 1pm than it had at 8am. It was still sealed, but was rather more rounded where it ought to be flat.
When I opened the cottage cheese, there was a rather more energetic sigh of relief from the carton than I would normally like and though it didn’t smell off per se, the chives had clearly had time to infuse the curds rather more powerfully than is normally the case.
In the end, I decided against eating it. So, what to do with a ful carton of opened and rather ripe cottage cheese and chives in an office environment? We have a number of bins for different types of recycling and/or landfill, but none of them suggest that I should use them for cottage cheese. Particularly very oniony cottage cheese.
So I swilled it down the sink and chased it down the plug hole. No-one will notice; I have merely replaced the unsettling smell of death that often emanates from the sink with a rather better smell of chives. At least I recycled the carton.
Completely unrelated to the above, I discovered what looks like half a tooth in the plug hole. I wonder if this is in any way related to the habitual pong that issues from that area? Is someone disposing of bodies down that plug hole? Have I just marinated the remains with cottage cheese and chives?
It’s worrying.
I won’t buy anything past its best before date of course, but if it’s been sitting in my fridge since before that date and it looks okay, well, I’ll give it a punt. These things have a fair old safe period built in and a bit of case-by-case judgement covers pretty much all angles, so there isn’t much to worry about as long as you use a bit of the old common sense.
Last week I bought some cottage cheese with chives for lunch, but then didn’t eat it. I took it home and put it in the fridge where it sat unremarked and unregarded until this morning, when I fished it out and looked at it again. In the meantime it had passed its expiry date some five days ago. I pondered for a while. The carton looked a little fuller than these things usually do, but five days in a rather cold fridge? Surely it would be okay? So I brought it back to the office with a view to eating it at lunchtime.
Well, all I can say is that a lot can happen between putting it in your bag in a morning and getting it out again several hours later. The carton looked rather more rotund at 1pm than it had at 8am. It was still sealed, but was rather more rounded where it ought to be flat.
When I opened the cottage cheese, there was a rather more energetic sigh of relief from the carton than I would normally like and though it didn’t smell off per se, the chives had clearly had time to infuse the curds rather more powerfully than is normally the case.
In the end, I decided against eating it. So, what to do with a ful carton of opened and rather ripe cottage cheese and chives in an office environment? We have a number of bins for different types of recycling and/or landfill, but none of them suggest that I should use them for cottage cheese. Particularly very oniony cottage cheese.
So I swilled it down the sink and chased it down the plug hole. No-one will notice; I have merely replaced the unsettling smell of death that often emanates from the sink with a rather better smell of chives. At least I recycled the carton.
Completely unrelated to the above, I discovered what looks like half a tooth in the plug hole. I wonder if this is in any way related to the habitual pong that issues from that area? Is someone disposing of bodies down that plug hole? Have I just marinated the remains with cottage cheese and chives?
It’s worrying.