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We usually take what we can to eat in the car..ie lunch meat and make sandwiches...then if I have vegetables or something I just bought stupidly, I give it to the dogsitter on the way out of town....pretty much plan on no big shopping trips for groceries before a big trip..that way I don't waste alot...
That is pretty much what we do, limit the shopping for about 2 weeks prior to leaving and try to empty the fridge so we don't have to throw. Spoiled brats clients leave "care" packages for us as well. Also a few of his clients tell us to make sure we pick any ripe produce if they have a garden.
Double GROSS. Yeah, it's a different diary product alright - it's a rotten dairy product. Not yogurt, not cheese. Rotted milk.
I'm not so desperate to eat rotten food.
I don't understand why everybody has this huge hangup over milk. Maybe there is something special about the bargain brand of milk I get at WalMart, but I doubt it. If you are careful not to contaminate the milk in the jug (like by drinking from the jug) and keep the lid on tight, there will be no extraneous organisms in there to spoil it. After a month or so, even pasteurized milk willl clabber. It gets lumpy and acquires a sour, but not necessarily unpleasant taste which can be overcome by adding a sweetener if you wish. Nearly all packaged breakfast cereals contain so much sugar, clabbered milk will be perfectly fine, if tangy, on your cereal. Drinking a nice cold glass full of it might need a spoon of suger, a dash of molasses, or something to make more in tune with your tastes. If you bake with it, you don't even need to use baking powder, the clabbered milk will lift your dough. Perfect for French toast, too, mixed with the egg. A few things it's not so good for, like mashed potatoes.
Clabbered milk is an important component in most traditional cultures -- before there was refrigeration, milk was consumed fresh only a few hours after milking, and then a starter was added to it to clabber it quickly.. I first encountered it in Romania, where at about 9 am, the milk merchants would clabber the unsold milk, and sell it with a wonderful deep fried sugared scone, and everyone took a break from work at about ten, when the lapte bahut was ready from street vendors.
I now actually look forward to the last of a jug of milk clabbering, it makes a nice diversion in my everyday breakfast routine.
I don't think I'll be drinking any milk with my breakfast today. ughhhh!
We typically leave for 7-10 days. Like most others we try to use what we have in the fridge except for things like eggs and condiments. We also stop purchasing perishables and will do without for a couple of days.
If i were off for a week i'd probably not throw anything out but 6 weeks? thats a different story,
All your fruit and vegetables will be inedible on your return,milk and cheeses will be starting to mold any opened leftovers will not be fit for human consumption,
I'd throw stuff out before hand so as not to deal with mouldy or spoiled products.
But jt if you like eating 6 week old products then throw nothing out and have a feast when you get home.
Quote:
Clabber is a food produced by allowing unpasteurized milk to turn sour at a specific humidity and temperature. Over time, the milk thickens or curdles into a yogurt-like substance with a strong, sour flavor.
I guess its an acquired taste ,fortunately in my 67 years a taste i've never needed to acquire..
I make a point of using up everything I possibly can before a trip, and giving anything that happens to be left over to my in-laws or the pet sitter. We're rarely gone longer than one week, so I don't worry about things like eggs, carrots, and hard cheeses. They'll be fine for a week.
As for the sour milk, I only buy milk in half-gallons and use it up before it gets sour. The very few times it has become sour, I used it in pancakes or the like. I didn't throw it away. Soured milk is a traditional food. I suspect it is the media and an obsessive, misguided concern about food safety that is making people think they have to throw everything out the second it reaches the "expiration date." Sour milk (not rotten milk, sour milk) certainly will not hurt you and is even wholesome. What do you think sour cream is? Ever think about that?
Beforehand, as long as the trash pickup is right before our trip. If food is going to spoil, I'd rather it be done slowly in a cold fridge than sit in a hot garbage can all week.
SPOILED milk is NOT the same as SOURED milk or CLABBERED milk.
Quality SOURED milk is when the good bacteria in unpasteurized milk do their thing.
CLABBERED milk is similar - unpasteurized milk is naturally thickened by the good bacteria.
YOGURT is when good bacteria do their thing and thicken milk (you know, live cultures, like Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus).
CHEESE is also made using specific good bacterial cultures.
When you go to your local Walmart and buy your gallon of pasteurized milk, the good bacteria are no longer in the product. That is what pasteurizing does - kills the bacteria.
RE: sauerkraut - this is a fermented food. Our good friends Lactobacillus are present. Cheese and yogurt also have those good bacteria.
The spoiled foods may have pathogens, such as overgrown yeast or mold or Paenibacillus, etc.
Somebody asked about sour cream....again, made with unpasteurized cream with lactic acid bacteria, you will get good sour cream. You will NOT get good sour cream by just allowing regular pasteurized milk to sit in your fridge for 6 weeks.
OP, if it takes you so dang long to consume a gallon of milk, why, oh why, don't you simply buy a smaller container?
Heck, I don't even eat leftovers, so there is no way I'd touch spoiled food.
Bacteria causes milk to sour. Pasteurization kills the bacteria. But pasteurization does not make the milk immune to souring, ever--it just makes it slower to sour. Therefore, over time, bacteria are reintroduced to the milk. This happens every time you open it. If your milk is sour, it has bacteria in it. You can't therefore conclude that the bacteria must be "bad" bacteria and not "good" bacteria.
Good sour milk has a distinctive smell, taste, and appearance. Spoiled milk and moldy milk do not have these qualities. Spoiled milk, for instance, may be green and smell foul (I've seen it).
The real problem is that others assume that people are unable to distinguish between naturally soured milk and spoiled food.
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