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Continuing Tales Of Adventure
Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.
I do this thing with food that’s kind of weird, where I scrutinize it for mold. Especially bread. Since some bread mold looks like flour (white and powdery), and a lot of the bread I eat is dusted with flour, this means a lot of scrutiny. But I maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE in the face of blue and green mold as well. And red mold. All mold, really. And lest you think I’m just unreasonably paranoid, this constant scrutiny often reveals actual mold. Either I’m just unlucky when it comes to getting moldy food, or else a lot of people are gulping mold and spoiled food down left, right, and center because they aren’t checking.
I wanted a piece of carrot cake last night. If you go to a restaurant and buy a piece of carrot cake, it costs about $3.99-4.99, on average. We were at the grocery store and I picked up a single layer carrot cake for $4.99. I got home, all pleased with myself, with big plans for eating that cake (on the couch while watching Iron Man II). So I get settled in, cake on my plate, fork and everything, and I take a bite. And it tastes good! No raisins, no pineapple, just a carroty taste and walnuts and the cream cheese frosting tastes like cream cheese and not grease. I fork off another bite and I notice a dark spot on the bottom of the cake.
Possibly it is a raisin, even though the cake doesn’t taste raisiny. Possibly it is mold.
I dissected the dark spot and sure enough, mold. Mold on a cake I had purchased THAT DAY. Mold on the bottom of the cake, which a less neurotic person would not have noticed. Mold in my food that I paid good money for.
Nesko confirmed the mold diagnosis, took the plate away, and came back to inform me that the cake’s sell-by date was October 30th. In other words, it was an expired (and moldy) cake that the grocery store was selling for full price.
My CONSTANT VIGILANCE saved us all from a belly full of mold, though. Now to try and convince the store to take the cake back. Luckily, I have nothing but free time so this should be totally easy to do.
(I made a commitment to myself to stop BUYING cookies and just MAKE them instead. Perhaps I should extend that to cakes etc. as well.)
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When I was a kid my babysitter's husband was psychologically abusive towards me, and I was once forced to eat a whole piece of cake (okay, so that could be constructed as physical abuse as well), which was about one quarter covered with blue-green mold on the bottom. I was forced to finish it. I didn't get sick from it, but it was the most absolutely disgusting thing I have ever eaten. And all the while, he was insisting I was imagining things and that the blue-green stuff was icing, which made no sense as that chocolate cake was covered in a brown, chocolate-y icing. I was also the only person who had been served a piece of chocolate cake.
Ever since then, I have had a fear of eating mold.
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I had a baby sitter who would shove food into our mouths and cover our mouths with one hand, pinching our noses shut with the other, so we'd HAVE to chew and swallow. She mostly did this to my youngest brother, when we weren't around, but she did it to me as well.
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I once told my mother that they had threatened to audio tape a fit I threw on a Snow Day, because they refused to let me go outside to play with the other children, because, despite it happening right after lunch, my mother was supposedly about to arrive to pick me up. Which, in winter, she didn't arrive until it was dark out. They wanted to use the tape to show my mother what a bad little girl I was, so that she would punish me. They did tape it, but the way the conversation was going, it would have been obvious they were just trying to screw with my mind, so they never made my mother listen to it.
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That babysitter also got central air installed and then wouldn't let us into the house all summer. We live in the midwestern USA where summer temperatures can reach the upper 90s/lower 100s (farenheit) and very very humid. It was the oddest thing, especially as we'd been allowed in the house prior to the AC being installed.
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That is, indeed, odd. Montreal gets really muggy and hot in summer and I would NEVER let little kids out in that heat if I could provide them with decent shelter from it. That is just crazy.
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I'm paranoid about my bread. I always do a check of the bread, pre-expiration date, or no. And strawberries. I have zero luck with strawberries.
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I SCRUTINIZE strawberries (all berries) (all fruit, actually) while in the store, and sometimes will pass over 20 cartons of strawberries before finding one that suits me. Sometimes I do not buy them at all. And even with the time and care I take, we still usually end up throwing out some -berries because they've gone bad, which feels like we're setting money on fire.
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I do not, however, recommend getting a pet just to have a garbage disposal. Composting, worm bins, dropping berries for birds and squirrels, or making squishy paint are much better things to do with mushy berries.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if squishy strawberries can be frozen to use for baked goods later...? I know bananas can be chucked into the freezer to be baked, and blueberries will fare well. If you pulled out the ones that looked like they were about to go, froze them, then diced and baked them, I wonder if that would solve the original problem of having dead berries on your hands 3 days into a new carton.
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Some friends are down for Aliyah's baptism tomorrow, and we bought a pecan danish for a celebration breakfast. Except the thing was only moldy under the sticker (which means we didn't see it in the store) and had no sell-by date. Back to the store I go!