Kitchen confession: If something isn’t demanding attention from the back of the refrigerator, I pay it no mind. Vac-packed smoked salmon can stay for years, if it wants. Ditto for the pricey, unopened logs of smoked goat cheese and little rounds of MouCo ColoRouge that is long past its “best vultured up by” date.
A friend perceives this as icebox Darwinism at work: the foods smart enough to keep quiet live to see the door open again.
I wish I shared his theory, but I know better. My “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the fridge is the direct result of my being blessed with a cast- iron gut. Drinking the water in Haiti? No prob. Buying food from some guy barbecuing on the beach in Jamaica? Not an issue. The idea of my fridge being a major public-health concern? Never even crossed my mind.
But the unpleasant reality of a slick of blood leaking from a defrosting pheasant combined with a co-worker thinking he’d been flattened by a bowl of bad steel-cut oatmeal — but maybe it was the peanut-butter-flavored Clif bars we got at the office — forced a confrontation with refrigerator secrets so dark that even I was shocked.
Lurking behind the strong but silent Greek yogurt and just behind a wall of made-by- me jars of jelly, I found the history of my food universe spelled out in half-empty and unopened jars of condiments.
A little pot of Asian hot sauce from the Boulder County Farmers Market circa somewhere around 1999 was there, along with a half-used jar of cocktail sauce bought at Pike Market in Seattle the first time I visited that city, in 2001. Count among the dead soldiers two unopened bottles of Whole Foods-brand cocktail sauce, expired for three years, a quart of French’s yellow mustard, three expired jars of organic mayo (right alongside two other jars of still-OK mayonnaise), a couple of bottles of organic ketchup and a bottle of “catsup” I think was part of a swag bag at a summer party four years ago.
I found a gone-brown vat of sauerkraut I swear was only opened on Sundays during football season. Out went some seriously scary salad dressings, barbecue sauce and Chicago-dog green relish that I cannot say for sure was put there by me. There were stray olives — black and green — and the odd jars of stuff that came to me in the mail at work that I opened to taste and never thought of again.
It broke my eco-friendly heart to do it, but I gave myself permission to shove all this plus two half-consumed bottles of Elvis hot sauce into a Hefty bag and head to the trash — without recycling.
It had to be done — confession is good for the soul and for the health of the icebox.
Dana Coffield: dcoffield@denverpost.com or 303-954-1954
