Friday morning, my husband decided that he was going to smoke some chicken wings on Saturday, so he went out and bought all the stuff yesterday to brine the chicken wings. After work, he put the raw chicken in a big plastic container and made the brine with cold tap water, some red pepper flakes and some fresh garlic. He stuck it in the fridge so it would marinate overnight.
Now I should have paid more attention when he told me to be careful not to move the container because it was really full, but I didn’t even think about it. And I should have.
This morning, I opened the fridge to get my almond butter to put on my toasted wheat bread and I saw it — a pool of rust colored liquid on the glass shelf above the vegetable crisper. And I immediately knew what it was — a salmonella-infested chicken brine sitting in my refrigerator, touching all my fresh produce and the brand new carton of eggs. And it had probably been infecting everything in my fridge for the past 12 hours.
I wish I could tell you that I calmly cleaned up the mess and went about my day. But that’s not how the morning played out. There was yelling and swearing. Many paper towels were sacrificed. I pulled every single item out of the fridge to clean and disinfect it (and some items I just threw out) and somehow we even got the glass top shelf out — the salmonella poison had dripped down between the glass shelf and the plastic structure on top of the veggie crisper. It wasn’t easy to get it out, nor was it easy to get in there to clean up the mess. There were a lot of strong words said this morning.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t my best moment. And I am still annoyed that my husband didn’t even think that a filled-to-the-brim container of chicken could cause a major leak — the man is an engineer for goodness’ sake — put a damn cookie sheet under the container!
But my fridge probably hasn’t been this clean since we bought it 3 years ago. And the chicken wings tasted pretty good tonight. We sure did spend a lot of time preparing them…
Notes from a Self Quarantine 