A few weeks ago, when I visited my sister and her family in Drayton Valley, she was so kind as to send me home with a few odds and ends of food from her storage room. One of the items was a can of beef broth with an expiration date of October 2006.
The other day I made Chicken Stir Fry with my friend Heather and she suggested that I use chicken broth instead of water to cook the vegetables. It was a great idea.
So the next time I cooked Stir Fry, this time just for myself, since I didn’t have any more chicken broth, I decided to use the can of beef broth that Jackie gave to me—even though it said October 2006 on the top of the can, I thought, well, technically it’s only the beginning of October, so it’s probably still good.1
BIG MISTAKE.2
The first time I ate it, it was not bad. I had a bit of an upset stomach but I thought it must just be heart burn. As I packed up the leftovers into plastic containers, I poured the broth from the bottom of the pan right over the rice. MMMM, extra flavour I thought to myself—extra food poisoning is what I SHOULD have been thinking.
The next night as I regurgitated the leftovers, I thought to myself—even though I know I’m not going to die, food poisoning does feel mighty close. Since I had thrown up about as much as I could and still felt sick, I decided that it might be a good idea to eat a heaping bowl or two of Raisin Brain, you know to “push the poison through”.
Moments later I was revisiting the entire contents of my two bowls of cereal in several terrific “oooaghhhs”. I quickly came to realize that I should take deep breaths between bouts of vomiting because you can’t breath while your digestive track switches direction.
The next few hours were long and painful. I decided that unless I felt totally better, I would not be going into work this morning. This was not a bad prospect considering how much work “work” actually is and it would be a good chance to let the 7 blisters on my feet heal. However, number one, I didn’t want to call in sick on only my third day of work and on the Friday leading up to a long weekend (how suspicious) and besides, at 6:00am I was miraculously and disappointingly healed (disappointingly because hey, four day weekend) so it was off to work I went; other than another slightly upset stomach at lunch it now appears as though the food poisoning has completely cleared up.
The story of my blisters is another matter. Suffice it to say that the first three days of work have been an adventure. I need to get some new work boots ASAP and hopefully I’ll beef up in the muscles department so that lugging those heavy blocks around won’t be so hard. Here’s to the working life.
And for supper tonight, I went back to my trusty staple… frozen pizza cooked in the oven.
1. This is where one comes to realize how important it is to have a girlfriend/boyfriend to bounce ideas off each other, like hey do you think this mould can just be cut off or is this dark grey block of cheese a write off?
2. For those of you that skipped over this post because it seemed too long, the moral of the story is don’t play Russian Roulette with expiration dates, it will catch up with you.
