What A Waste

I hate waste. I really do. I work too dang hard for my money to waste what I have.

Let's back up just a bit.

I forgot to take something out of the freezer for dinner tonight, Ron was on a service call, so I called Phil at home. I asked him to go to the freezer in the basement and take out three chicken breasts to thaw. Easy right?

A few minutes later, Phil calls me and asks if I would consider a plan B for dinner! What the heck! I know there is another bag of chicken breasts down there, how could he not find them?

I wish it was that easy. Phil let me know that whichever of us was last in that freezer, never shut the damn door. Phil said that most everything inside was encased in about 4" of ice! You gotta be kidding me! He did take the bag of chicken upstairs and was able to bang it on the sink to get three pieces out of the frozen stack.

Ron came home and unplugged the defrosted the freezer. All of the food that was in the freezer was put in a cooler, in our upstairs freezer and in our neighbor's freezer! Once all of the ice was out of the freezer, we tried to assess the damage.

By now, I am home from work. The chicken that Phil took out is defrosted in a zip loc bag in the sink. I opened it and while the smell didn't knock me over, it was a little funky. To top that off, the chicken looked weird. It turned colors I never saw in raw chicken before! Crap, a whole bag of raw chicken breasts went into the garbage bag.

After that, we checked out the sausage. You can get three pounds of Bob Evans bulk sausage at Sam's Club for the price of one pound at Giant Eagle. I had the box of sausage in the door of the freezer, and that was no longer frozen. Yeah, three pounds of sausage on top of the chicken in the garbage.

I HATE throwing away food, but I hate even more making people more sick than usual with my cooking. I had a lot of frozen veggies in the freezer that I have to imagine are just fine. But I'm still worried about a frozen turkey that I had in the freezer. I don't know if that's going to be ok until I thaw it out to cook it. Maybe I should do that this weekend.

Everything else will be on a wait and see. Wait until I try to cook it and see if it's still good!

This makes me absolutely sick thinking of what I threw away. I truly hate to waste and this is waste for NO good reason. We were just careless. This kills me.

In case you didn't guess it, we did do Plan B for dinner. Mutt and Jeff's had a table just for the three of us.

So, Thursday after work, if you need me, I'll be at Sam's Club. I need to restock my freakin' freezer.