Beware the cantaloupe!
My boss drives about 200 miles of middle-of-nowhere highway on the weekends and has been bringing back great roadside produce for a couple of weeks now. He gave me this HUGE cantaloupe this week, since Nico likes them. We hadn't finished the last huge roadside cantaloupe he brought, so the new one was sitting on the shelf unit by the fridge, uncut. It was fine when we put it over there on Tuesday. To my knowledge it was fine Wednesday. It seems either Wednesday night or while we were at work Thursday morning it went horribly, aggressively bad and leaked awful rotten cantaloupe juice all over the shelf and the floor. I was unaware that cantaloupes are actually evil, but it seems that they are.
There's no polite way to put this: when Nico and I got home from nursing group at 3:00, our entire kitchen smelled of unwashed crotch. After eyeballing the dog with great suspicion, I realized it was the cantaloupe. And Nico had passed out asleep in the car and he only stays asleep on someone's lap in that situation, so I ended up sitting on the couch with him for like 2 hours, smelling this horrid crotch melon smell. MB wanted to go out to dinner, and once he was home and Nico was up I only had time to throw the melon out and wipe up the juice, but not to clean under the shelf thingie or mop the floor. So when we got back, the house still smelled like crotch. After Nico was in bed I spent 45 minutes moving everything off the shelves, wiping them down, cleaning stuff from the shelves that got splattered, and sweeping / swiffering / steam mopping the floor. Then I burned incense and a candle with the kitchen window open.
Okay, you're thinking, no biggie...everyone encounters a rotten melon every now and then. But oh, my friends, it gets worse. Friday at work, I went to get my lunch out of the fridge. I moved a cantaloupe on the top shelf while looking for my apple, and discovered that it and its identical buddy had both turned semi-liquefied overnight. Apparently it was a suicide pact of some kind. And thus, for the second time in 24 hours, I got to mop up nasty crotch-y rotten melon juice. It seems I have done something to anger the cantaloupe gods. I'm not sure what I did but I assure you, I wholly regret it. Beware the cantaloupes, y'all. BEWARE.
I'm looking back through the years and trying to remember anyone whose crotch smelled like rotting cantaloupe. Perhaps it's an experience I've missed.
ReplyDeleteThat's the disturbing part - it didn't smell remotely like cantaloupe.
ReplyDeletegross! i will definitely eat up any and all cantaloupe before i have to experience that!
ReplyDeletewe kept a home-grown pumpkin for almost a year--MEANING to carve it--but the worst it got was a little moldy on the bottom and soft. we tossed it before it could liquefy.
I came back from vacation to find that though I emptied the fridge before I turned it off, I had neglected to leave the door cracked open. Mold smells horrible too. Though not remotely crotch-like.
ReplyDeletein my vast experience in liquefied pumpkin (what can i say, we're not so good about removing the fall porch decor) they don't smell so bad. not to say it smells good, but it's abut what you would expect: pumpkin + fermentation.
ReplyDeleteDead melon smell sucks. I am pretty sure there was a dead melon in my mom's fridge, 20, 30 years ago, and to this day I am just not so fond of melon.
ReplyDeleteExcept watermelon, which is fantastic.