Disaster Strikes!

The trouble started last Monday night. Joe and I attempted a Thai Curry with Tofu, and ended up with food poisoning. We chalked it up to bad tofu, and spend the day on Tuesday in bed recovering. Not a fun experience, and we were surprised when we both still had unsettled stomachs for the rest of the week. But we carried on working and doing our usual routine, with some basic pasta and standard leftovers feeding us through the week.

Then, Saturday morning, my weekend coffee routine was disrupted by chunky milk. Yes, it's disgusting, I agree! I checked the date, saw that it wasn't expired, thought "how weird", and moved on to plan B. I grabbed a container of whole milk from the fridge (leftover from a recipe), and tried that in a fresh cup of coffee. It was bad too! Now I was wasting precious coffee, and was getting quite frustrated. The whole milk was a day or two past it's sell by date, so I decided it served me right for trying to drink old milk. Next attempt: fat free half and half. Apparently, there are enough artificial chemicals in this dairy product to keep it fresh for extended periods of time, so I was able to drink my coffee and get on with my day. We had leftovers for lunch and went out for dinner, and there were no more food-related issues that day.

Sunday started with coffee, no milk/cream. We noticed the fridge smelled kind of funky, so we threw out some potentially deadly old veggies and headed out to church. We got home a bit later and I started planning my weekly grocery shopping. It was when I took a swig of Joe's warn fresh from the fridge Gatorade that it dawned on me... something is wrong with our fridge! The freezer is working perfectly, but after a little testing we found out that the fridge was at about 50 degrees, which is at least 10 degrees higher than it should be. It was just cold enough that it took us a week to notice, but it was warm enough that it was slowly spoiling all the food!

We spent this afternoon shopping around for a new fridge, and decided we should attempt to have it repaired before we replace it. It's only about 4 and a half years old, so we figure we should try to save it. Tomorrow Joe will be calling a handy man, and we'll be eating out for all three meals. I spent some time this afternoon disposing of everything that could possibly have gone bad, and cleaning out anything we could recycle. So, needless to say, there will not be much cooking going on around here this week! And I think I can officially say this was the first time we missed our crappy old apartment, where we could just call the maintenance guy to come whenever anything went wrong. I hope things are going better in your kitchen, and wish us luck!