Today's lesson

Today's lesson:

Always, always, ALWAYS thaw meat in a container - plate, bowl, baking pan, whatever. Do not fool yourself into thinking that the repurposed Walmart shopping bag will keep a thawed roast from bleeding all over the refridgerator.

Ask me how I know this. Go on. Ask.

It's because we tossed a roast in the fridge to thaw a few days ago. DH popped it into a plastic shopping bag first, to contain the leaks. I watched him do it, and thought at the time that it might not be enough, but I planned to cook Mr. Roast the next day (before it was fully thawed) and got distracted before I put a plate under it.

Skip forward a couple of days. Early this morning, my tired self reached in to get Mr. Roast ready for the crock pot, and found a nice bloody mess. Joy. At least it was on the bottom shelf this time. I only had to clean up one glass shelf and the crisper drawer (which, in our house, is full of chocolate in various forms, and two boxes of butter/margarine). Last time, we put the ham on the top shelf. Ham juice all over the fridge, top to bottom. I spent all morning cleaning it up, and the whole place smelled like ham.

This time, the only casualties were some out-of-date cheese sticks that should have been tossed months ago. The margarine seems to have been sealed enough to keep the blood out. And luckily, the foil on a giant-size Caramello bar is sealed around the edges now. I spent an hour or so scrubbing bloody juice off the glass shelf, washing the apples (even though they were in a produce bag), and cleaning up the chocolate chip bags.

The fridge is cleaner now. That's progress.

And now I'm off to read the Shuttle launch blog, since I don't get NASA TV and the news channels don't think a launch is worthy of air time anymore. (I gotta find a full-size copy of that image with Endeavour in the moonlight from the first link. It's probably amazing in a bigger size.)