Tinfoil Chef

One of the jobs I’ve always hated is the task of once in a while going through the refrigerator not only to clean it (which isn’t a bad job in itself really), and find the occasional mystery item that got put away only to slip behind or under something else and get forgotten.

You know, the block of cheese that suddenly looks like blue-green home theater carpet, the plastic storage dish that you forgot was in there and when it’s opened you suddenly decide you don’t care why it’s in there or what it once was. That sucker’s going in the trash and if it won’t easily come out of the container then the whole thing gets pitched.

On the other hand, I learned something once about hard blocks of cheese. When they get that fuzzy blue-green growing on them, all you need to do is use either a sharp knife or a cheese slicer to cut off all of the outer surface layers. Those you pitch, the rest is perfectly good cheese.

It’s a good idea when doing this to make sure that none of the clean surfaces you expose touch the stuff you’re cutting off. The way I avoid that is to clean the knife I’m using every cut or two in order to prevent any of the blue-green from collecting on the knife and spreading onto the rest of the cheese.

I’d say that it almost goes without saying that once this is done it’s a good idea to be sure to use that cheese soon. And if you don’t use it right away, be sure to store it in a fresh, clean container that seals tight.