i have some really old skim milk. it's separated, but actually doesn't smell terrible. it smells like cottage cheese. i had some luck with making pancakes and french toast. any other ideas? many recipes call for using lemon juice or vinegar, i don't have either. i guess orange juice would work as well as lemon?

Honestly, I personally would never use old milk for anything other than discarding- I have a thing about old milk or even milk that is a day before it's use by date. I didn't even know you could use old milk for anything, but sure enough......

http://thegreenists.com/food/tip-of-...ired-milk/1055

I guess you could bake this for a treat!

http://bakin-n-bacon.typepad.com/bak...iled-milk.html

i was actually very surprised that this time, the milk didn't smell bad. all the other rare times it went bad, it was unusable.

i guess i'm on a baking kick. made bread pudding with some of the old milk the other day. was a bit like french toast with raisins. kids and i loved it.

that choc. cake looks very delicious. i could make some brownies for their lunch boxes. and freeze a bunch of them so i don't eat them while they are in school.

the ideas of making your own yogurt or cheese are so interesting! we always run out of all dairy before anything else, especially cottage cheese or yogurt.

In our modern culture, we've learned to be so squeamish about "spoiled" foods, to the point that even safe fermented and aged foods turn us off.

The biggest problem is that we don't know what is safe and what isn't, because we've lost the culture of fermentation. We don't have enough experience and don't know enough of the science or history of what's safe, so we've developed a "when in doubt, throw it out," mentality - and we throw out a lot more than we have to - and we also end up having to take probiotic supplements because we're not getting enough "good bacteria" from our diet.

We actually lower our resistance to bacterial infections, because of it.


It's kind of funny when you think about it, how many of us will throw away "spoiled milk" and then take probiotic supplements that we could have gotten from that milk.

Still, when you don't know what the aging process does to a specific food (is this food "fermented" or just rotten?), it's a bit like playing russian roulette.

I'd really love to learn more about fermentation to make pickles, sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir, cheeses...

that's so true. and even on our hands. we kill all the good and bad bacteria, then our hands are so dry and cracked, becoming more susceptable to infections.

My DH is a complete nutcase about this. If it is past the "sell by" date, he wants to throw it out. I try to tell him this is just the day the stores need to get rid of it, and usually it is still good for a week after, but NO!!! He does this with salad dressing, too. I thought maybe he got food poisoning when he was a kid, but he never has. Usually he'll look at the date, and even if the stuff is super fresh, he'll smell the container anyways.

Now something else popped into my head...how long are eggs good if they are in the refrigerator? Any idea? I know that if they are stinky, they went bad, but I had some eggs that were in the fridge for over a month and they still seemed good, but "somebody" made me throw them out...

If I'm going to cook them thoroughly, I've always relied on the "smell test" for eggs. I've used eggs at least a month beyond their sell by date and had no problems. In fact, if I'm making hard-boiled eggs the eggs almost need to be pushing their sell-by-date or they don't peel very well.

If I wanted a soft-cooked egg I'd want a fresher egg. And if I were going to eat the egg raw (like in eggnog), I'd want the freshest egg I could get (which is why I don't make eggnog).

Thanks, Kaplods!