Stinky Cheese Man

There has been something stinking up the refrigerator for the last week or so. Not overpowering, you just catch a whiff of it ever now and then whenever you open the fridge. Smelled like rotten meat. Really bad. So last weekend we cleaned out the fridge, threw out some suspicious looking stuff. Did not identify the culprit, but we figured maybe by chance we got it. No such luck. Still getting that smell this week. So today we emptied the fridge, took out all the shelves and drawers and washed everything. Did the freezer too. Even pulled out the fridge out from the wall and cleaned underneath, just cause we were on a mad tear. Did not find anything, except the stinky goat cheese darling daughter bought when she was home for Christmas.

Smell the cheese and it has a fairly strong odor, but it doesn't smell that bad, but I am at a loss as to what else it could be. So we tossed it. Hopefully it was the source of the offensive odor. If not, shoot, I don't what we are going to do next. We'll wait and see if the smell is gone or not.

All this brought to mind the villain in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy. You know he's the villain because he eats rotten fish. I mean who in their right mind would eat rotten fish? I can't think of anything worse. At first I thought this was just a device Neal used to identify the villain: oh, yeah, old what's his name is back in the story again, the dirty scoundrel who eats rotten fish. I mean you don't really need to know anything else about him.

And then I stumbled over this article about Garum in Wikipedia. Evidently fermented fish is something of a delicacy that's been around for thousands of years. Some people still eat it. Weird.