Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm self-administering (unwittingly) mild food poisoning pretty regularly because I can't throw away food, particularly food that I spent precious time on cooking it myself.

Like a big pot of soup, some fried meat and whatever side dish like cooked cabbage. The idea is to spend the unpleasant cooking time once, put it all in the fridge then for a few days at least the whole effort is just to retrieve servings and heat them before eating.

Most of the times I finish what I cooked before starting to spoil but even spoiling isn't very sudden. Like I ate 5 days old soup yesterday and tasted a little funny but it was all good, no side effects. There's still a bowl left at the bottom of the pot today and by the time I'm hungry it's too late to start thinking and waiting for alternatives so what the heck. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I guess. Therefore it happens sometimes that I wakeup at 2 AM with an acute feeling that a bowel evacuation is imminent if you know what I mean :)

The trick is to once every couple of days when it's starting to get to that point where it'll go bad soon, take it out, and re-cook it somehow to kill any bacteria. This could be tossing soup back on the stove, or microwaving veggies steaming hot.

Also, it helps a lot to have strict sanitary standards for yourself, like always using a clean, fresh utensil to scoop out your servings. Or if you use the same one, start from the most-recently cooked food and end at the oldest, so you're not potentially introducing bacteria or mold from older stuff into newer stuff.

I eat leftovers sometimes up to maybe 10 days at max, but I am pretty good at avoiding any issues from it.

For soups and stews, a useful approach is transfer into smaller single-serving containers to freeze. Then you can take out one serving at a time to thaw and reheat while the rest can stay frozen for many weeks.

You just have to cool it first so you don't overload the freezer with too much energy at once. We cool the pot, then divide and refrigerate the smaller containers overnight before transferring to the freezer the next morning.

We put our whole soup pot into a cold water bath to rapidly cool it. When the water warms appreciably, drain and replace with cold water again. Sometimes we put ice or those sealed gel ice packs into the bath to really accelerate the process.

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