PANTRY DISASTER

On Christmas weekend, I went to set up for cooking....and opened my pantry and some of items were kinda sticking to the shelf...I thought - what on earth is in there that is leaking and sticky??  I had to lean over and look up at the underside of a shelf.  This is what I saw:

Great.  A can of crushed pineapple had exploded.  Lovely.  I couldn't deal with it at that exact moment (but I did deal with it).  It looked like the can had swollen at the top and the bottom before it finally gave way somewhere in the 'belly' of the can.  So, learn your lesson from me, folks.  Inspect your canned goods once in a while and get rid of anything suspicious.

Not sure what happened here...maybe the can had a ding and bacteria got a foothold?  Who knows?  I will write to the company and see what they say.

I got out a box of gloves (and changed them several times in the cleaning process).  I threw away anything that could not be washed thoroughly - like boxes of pasta.  I washed all of the cans carefully.  Then I scrubbed the whole affected area, and everything south of it (the shelf below and the floor) with warm Pine-Sol water.  Then I got fresh gloves and a clean rag and cleaned out my bucket and put in warm water with bleach.  I rinsed the whole area with this and then just let it be until it was thoroughly dry.

When the pantry and all the salvageable food items were clean and dry, I put it all back together.  I tried to bring some law and order back to the situation.

Embarrassingly, I found that I had more than one of a few things - I purchased without knowing I had one in the cupboard.  Oh, well.  None of those things has a short shelf life, so it'll be ok.  I even had bought a couple of shelf thingys (see in the pic?) a long time ago for this exact purpose.

So, in the end it worked out - the pantry really needed cleaning and sorting and I feel better having done it.  Now I want to get after my refrigerator!



~ks