S-Bomb Explodes in Pantry

We had an explosion in our pantry today. I was typing away on my laptop in the family room, totally absorbed, when I heard an unbelievably loud noise coming from the direction of the breakfast room. We have a large window there by the table, and periodically mockingbirds nosedive into it, fall into the bushes, and stagger away. I remember thinking that that was certainly one big bird--and that it probably wasn't going to be getting back up.

My husband came home several hours later, and went outside to check on the crater in our back yard. We had a backhoe out there this week excavating for our 2008 home improvement project; hubby's a construction administrator by day, and puts it to good use around here, too. He stayed home the day the yard got dug up, I think just to make sure his beloved trees didn't get hurt in the process. But there really wasn't all that much to watch as it turned out; so to work off some restless anxiety about 10 years of landscape labor being torn up in 2 hours, he decided to clean out our kitchen pantry.

The pantry had not been officially cleaned out since we moved here 10 years ago. The stacks of mismatched tupperware had risen to ominous heights on overcrowded shelves mixed with soups, coffees, pastas, cereal boxes, paper plates, cups, and napkins from Christmases past, expired appliances, candles our grown children had made in elementary school, etc. My husband's wine collection had long outgrown its floor rack, and bottles hugged the walls leaving only a narrow path between. Whatever was in the farthest recesses of that pantry I couldn't tell you, except to say that it probably hadn't been touched for many, many moons. But my husband started excavating, and soon our kitchen table was piled high with old 'friends.' A lot of stuff went into the donation box--but I put my foot down about our kids' old sippy cups. I mean, we've saved them this long, we might as well store them for our future grandbaby's use. (Yes, I'm sentimental.)

Then my hubby laboriously matched up all the tupperware with lids, stacking them symmetrically on the shelves, and restocked the shelves with painstaking organization: all the coffees together, cereals lined up, paper plates and goods in another tall stack, soups and pasta sauces 3 or 4 deep, just like at Tom Thumb. He rounded up all the miscellaneous wine bottles and put them on the top shelf where all the sick and dying appliances had been. And then he showed off his handiwork to me.

I was dutifully impressed. My hubby is about as far from Felix Unger as you can get...highly creative, always busy, and always leaving a wake in his path. (He hasn't been able to sit on the couch or vacuum the floor of his home office since we moved here, for all the stacks.) So this was a pretty big deal. And then, since we now had so much pantry space, he decided to take a trip to Costco with his buddy down the hill. Two hours later he returned with a few hundred dollars worth of groceries, and restocked the shelves; now it didn't just look like the grocery store. It looked like Costco.

So...getting back to today...after my husband finished checking on the rebar-filled hole, he went to the pantry--whether to regain that superficial sense of order or to get a snack, I don't know. Next thing I hear is a groan (muffled sobs?), and, "Pat, did you hear a loud noise today?"

"Yes, I think we had another bird fly into our window. I was surprised the glass didn't break, it was so loud."

"It wasn't a bird."

I got up, went to the pantry, and looked in. There on the once-cleared floor was a large plastic container that had been filled to the top with 48 oz. of Mexican salsa. About 1 or 2 cups of salsa splayed out in all directions on the floor. I looked up to a shelf 5 feet above, and there was the lid, and another cup or so of salsa, splayed out in all directions, clinging to the sides of other salsa jars, pasta packages, bottles of oil...and as I looked around, everywhere I looked I saw chunky red salsa--clinging to the undersides of shelves, decorating each item of tupperware, puddling on the soup cans, vegetable cans, and napkin bags, clinging to the sides of shelves, the ceiling, the wine bottles, the handmade candles....two hundred cubic feet of chunky salsa decor.

Maybe it was the smell of salsa, but my husband and I decided at that point to go out to our favorite Mexican restaurant, where you can sit outside on a patio overlooking a fountain and sip the best margaritas in north Texas. We wondered if maybe we ought to notify the salsa company that its salsa was explosive (the lid had literally blown off). Then, as we ate quesadillas and black beans, my husband got this look of slow dawning on his face. He remembered that when he'd put the salsa in his cart at Costco, it was cold--from the refrigerated compartment. By the time he got it home, and divvied up bulk groceries with our neighbor, it was room temp, and not noticing the small print ("homemade; must be refrigerated"), he added it to his pantry collection. Apparently the bacteria had been busily multiplying ever since. We took advantage of the two-for-one Monday night drinks, and came home fortified for the task ahead of us.

We now have a very clean pantry as well as a very organized one. We even know what's in there now, having wiped salsa from virtually every item. Best of all, we now have a story that tops the first time my husband tried to cook an egg in the microwave (another kitchen explosion involving microscopic food particles clinging to eyebrows, curtains, and ceiling--but that's another story.)

OFG, what a story...Eeeww! Ugh! Yuck!



Tell me more, y'all.

Velma deSelby Bowen said:

Haven't done anything with fermenting explosions (though there's a Tupperware container in the back of the fridge that may be able to vote), but my mother taught me a recipe for exploding eggs when I was a child:

Three eggs
One pot of water
A good book

Put eggs in pot on stove, on medium-high heat.
Retire to other room with book; lose self in book.
When you hear the first explosion, yell your preferred exclamation of dismay.
Toss towel over head, dash into kitchen, turn stove off.
Pour water CAREFULLY over remaining eggs (if there are any).
Scrape burnt egg and shell off walls, stove, floor, furniture, cabinets.
Make cheese sandwich.

I don't think I lived in an apartment without egg-stippled walls in the kitchen until I was in my thirties.

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Yes...this brings back the memories. (It's especially fun when you have one of those kitchen ceilings from the 50's with stalactite-style plaster jobs.)

Jenan Mac said:

Oh, ick!
When my littles were...well, littler, the big kids used to feed them occasionally, but they'd leave the 3/4 empty bottles on the couch, the floor, the bed, wherever. Sometimes they'd go missing for a couple of days, until I'd realize I only had 16 bottles instead of 24. Then we'd find them. Of course it was always after the Isomil had curdled into some weird, gelatinous semi-tofuesque mass.

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Heh, our worst specimens were the ones we discovered in the 120-degree car underneath the seat.

Perks said:

Oh no, Pat. I guess you wouldn't have written it as such if you didn't want us to laugh, but I feel for you, lady. Ugh!

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Thanks, Perks. But all the sympathy goes to my hubby, who had all of that heroic organization despoiled in one explosive burst of salsa-lovin' bacteria.