Continuing Tales Of Adventure

[brigid]

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.)

Comments

[serendipity8791]

My mother recalls such other strange things, like my being given too much ketchup and having to finish it on its own, with nothing to dip in it. Being yelled at for gagging on foods I didn't like, like liver or cooked carrots.

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.

[brigid]

Liver was one of the foods that babysitter force fed us. It's also a food my mother NEVER served because it's a filtration organ and full of poison/toxins (and is gross, too).

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.

[serendipity8791]

French Canadians of the generation before mine are still fairly culturally attched to the idea of liver being full of iron (I read somewhere it isn't necessarily significantly higher in iron than regular red meat), due to it being so dark, and, therefore, healthy. My generation is more "EW ICK FILTRATION ORGAN!" and we tend to shy away from it.

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.