Can I Get That Recipe?

Something was rotten in the state of Minnesota. A couple days ago, my roommate Sanna and I noticed a gnarly smell coming from the kitchen. As we were poking around the bags of bread and chips trying to locate the cause the cause of the funk, I said “Ew. The last time I smelled something this bad, Perek had a bag of potatoes that had rotted and liquefied in back of the cupboard.” Lo and behold, we discovered a bag of rotten potatoes. Liquefied.

How can this happen not once but twice, you ask? It’s not like our kitchen is dirty. We wash the counters, throw away garbage, wash the dishes. But we have very limited counter space, and only three shelves available for food storage. So food gets lost sometimes.

So the first time I found funky potatoes, we had all been smelling something gross for a few days. Upon a deeper search, I found them way in the back of Perek’s shelf, behind boxes of pasta, cans of beans, and a jar of peanut butter. The bag of what had previously been potatoes was now a thick, gooey, sludge that ran down the back of the cupboard. I tied a tshirt around my face, covered my hands in Ziploc bags, and spent 20 minutes scrubbing the “potatoes” off the shelf. Gagging the whole time. This was back when I lived with the three boys, and they all sat in the living room playing Halo while I cleaned. Turns out, they decided they could stand the smell. Since I couldn't, I was the one who had to tie on the t-shirt.

But now it’s officially happened twice. The fact that the same problems happen whether I live with 3 boys or 1, leads me to believe the problem is not just Testosterone’s clever habit of neglecting cleaning. Clearly, the problem is that food just expires too quickly and in entirely too disgusting of a way. We need to do something about this, people!