Yuk and Double Yuk I was doing my weekly fridge cleaning when I came across a plastic container full of two-week-old vegetables that I had forgotten to throw out the week before. I put the whole container in a box of garbage by the front door and went about my business. About a half an hour later, my fiance and I were sitting watching TV when we heard this loud KABOOM! It sounded like an enormous exploding firecracker. We both looked at each other and said, "What was that?" I got up thinking that something must have fallen from the pantry. On my way into the kitchen I saw that the lid from the vegetables had blown off! I told my fiance what it was and sat back down in the living room. Not even 30 seconds later we both got a whiff of the most foul-smelling odor you could possibly imagine. Realizing that it was the vegetables, we both ran to the kitchen and tried to put the box of garbage into a larger bag. The smell was so strong it was almost blinding. We both gagged more than once trying to contain the smell in a garbage bag. It smelled like gasoline! My fiance managed to get to the dumpster without fainting, and when he returned he said that the smell had wafted through our entire apartment building. We both prayed that no one came out into the hallway. Needless to say, we had to evacuate the apartment for the rest of the day. At least we didn't eat the vegetables! Many years ago, when I was a child, my parents purchased a bottle of oyster sauce during a visit to a Chinese supermarket. Back at home the meal was served, and my sister and I tucked in eagerly, anticipating the culinary delights of Hong Kong. There was barely time to say "Yuk!" Used to mainstream "pour-in" sauces and without instructions in English, my parents had emptied the entire bottle in. When I was in grade school many years ago, I came home each day for lunch. One day my mother had made spinach or brussels sprouts or some other awful thing. Instead of eating it, I carefully spooned the offending vegetable into my lap and disposed of it in one of our home's basement window wells on my way back to school. When I returned home that afternoon from school, there were the brussels sprouts on a plate--complete with bits of sticks and leaves!--and I was made to sit at the dining room table until I ate every single thing on the plate! This was in the days of "Think of all the starving children in Europe," so it was a major crime not to eat food set before you. When making a lot of cheesecakes in a short period of time, I often make my crust in three or four batches at a time, and can keep the stuff in the fridge for about a week. I do the crust not by rolling it out, but by just pressing bits of it with my fingers against the side of the pan, much like Silly Putty. One night for dinner, there were some leftover mashed potatoes, which I put in a small jar and stowed in the icebox. The next time I made a cheesecake, I found the potatoes, and made the crust from that (always rushing) and wondered as we ate the cake, why the crust was so different! When I was pregnant with our son, dinners were a little scary to say the least! One particularly bad day, I made sandwiches for me and my husband. As we were eating, Stu stopped and took his bite out of his mouth and said, "What the #@%& is this?" I looked down at what was in between the bread and couldn't stop laughing. Due to lost brain cells and total lack of interest in food, I had apparently discarded the meat and instead used the paper from the deli that they use to wrap the meat in! We were hysterical because it was the icing on the cake at that point! When I was about thirteen, our family of five had a memorable dinner. My grandmother had given us some soup she made, and we were all about to dig in. I was not as fond of soup as others were so I was taking my time and scrutinizing each bite. Suddenly I gasped and put my spoon down. My mother asked what my problem was. I told her that there were worms in my soup. Four other spoons which had slowed when I gasped suddenly stopped altogether. She took a spoonful and as she was lifting it, she remarked confidently that of course there weren't worms. "Those are just barley," she said. Everyone peered into their soup bowls. After an uncomfortable and silent few seconds, my parents conferred and agreed that they were indeed worms after all -- or grubs or larvae or something. We all hastily pushed our bowls away. Mom somehow got the unhappy task of having to call Grandma with the news, although Daddy should have called since it was his mother (he'd decided she should be notified, since she might've made a double batch and could have been eating worms herself at that very moment!). Grandma, who was frosty to Mom on a regular basis anyway, was not amused or even polite. She became offended and promptly declared that was nonsense. Then she hung up, and we never heard another word about it. To this day I peer into soup bowls before eating heartily, and I still don't really like barley. Entertaining others is not high on my list of things to do for fun, in part because of mishaps like inviting a nice couple to dinner of cashew chicken and then finding the cashews in a pretty bowl in the kitchen just after we said goodnight to them. There is another time when we invited my brother to dinner. I still claim it was a perfectly tasty dinner, but my brother would without hesitation nominate the lentil spaghetti sauce I served as one of the more disgusting meals he's ever eaten. It tasted wonderful to me, but he still mentions it every now and then. This from a guy who does not appear to do any cooking at all, and who thinks that pizza is incomplete without pieces of pineapple on it. In deference to my family, the lentil spaghetti is a thing of the past. People wonder why I am so hysterical about sanitary food preparation. I simply hate to be nauseous. I really can't stand it. In the mid 1970's, my then-boyfriend and I went to a crummy little lower East Side of Manhattan restaurant for omelets. It was one of those places with uneven floors and "festival seating." It may have been run by Zen Buddhists. Of course, I was making around $47 a week, and I thought the place was grand. We ordered cheddar cheese omelets. Mine arrived running all over the plate. "Hmmm," I thought. "Once it's subjected to heat, is not the protein in the egg supposed to turn solid, or at least thick?" So I sent mine back to be cooked a little bit more. They brought it back cooked a little bit more thoroughly. In my haste, however, I forgot to insist on a brand-new clean plate -- and anyway, they had hardly recooked the egg at all. Then-boyfriend ate both his and mine, and I ate some of mine! Suffice it to say that by Sunday morning I woke up feeling nauseated. By around 1:00, I was hobbling through Grand Central station, searching for the lavatory so that I could puke into it with loud, screaming, relentless heaves. This continued for hours. The worst part of it was that I was all dressed up in my best pseudo-military apparel for an Elvis Costello concert. Of course I was way too sick to go to the concert, which I'm convinced, had I attended it, would have changed the course of my life for the better, but no, too bad, I was puking. Then-boyfriend arrived home from a weekend in Boston, also clutching his thorax and making the same, eerily similar screaming heaves sounds. My guess? We both got horrible salmonella from the raw, been-around-the-block-a-few-times, uncooked East Village eggs. Hey, the women are loose, why shouldn't the eggs be? BACK TO MAIN DISASTER STORIES PAGE Catherine S. 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