Huge row with DH over food safety - who is BU?

[namechange294824]

NC'ed on the off chance this is outing!

DH and I are both 34. We've been in the process of moving house over the past 2 months, and are finally in a position to have guests in the house (i.e. we have a dining table and chairs). Moving hasn't been without its challenges and there have been some really stressful bits, but on the whole it's been fairly straightforward, and we don't have kids.

Invited DH's parents (mid/late 60s) to dinner on Tuesday night. I offered to cook. I prepared a starter, a main, and a dessert on Monday night, ready to go in the fridge for ease of serving quickly on Tuesday (I was going to be getting in from work only 20 mins or so before they arrived so it made sense to pre-prepare.) I spent 3.5 hours cooking/baking on Monday, which wiped out my entire post-work evening. No drama; I'd offered to do it, and I enjoy cooking.

But throughout this 3.5 hours DH could not help himself from repeatedly putting his head round the door and being critical - why hadn't I done X? Was I going to bother putting Y in the bin or is it going to be left on the side forever? So on, so forth. I asked him to stop, and he didn't. He probably whinged at me 5 times about separate trivial things whilst I was cooking.

The main dish needed a long while in the oven. It was 9.15pm at this point and he had totally exhausted me with his bitching and griping. I told him I just wanted to shower and go to bed and asked him to take the food out of the oven once the timer went off, which would have been at 10pm.

He did that. But he then failed to put it in the fridge, leaving it out overnight on the countertop. He was watching telly until about midnight, well after the point it would have cooled enough to go in the fridge.

I was so furious in the morning that after a night of whinging and sniping at me he'd not even had the thought to properly put away the food I'd spent so long cooking.

His position: the food's fine, it had foil on it anyway, just crack on and serve it tonight

My position: it's a meat dish (with pork in) and I don't feel comfortable serving it to his parents who are in their 60s after it's been left out overnight in the middle of August

He cancelled the dinner plans, and told his mum it was because we'd had an argument (which we had, I guess, but now I feel really humiliated and almost ashamed that their evening was spoiled because of us).

So... who is BU?

Has he always been such a man child? He sounds very immature and childish.

Because of the potential for food poisoning.

It's pork...

Which would probably ruin it?

Yes

I wouldn’t have had an issue with it and his parents are 60 not 160

Can I just say that the OPs ILs are not elderly. They are in their 60s. These days that could easily mean they are both still working full-time, in good health, with another 20 or 30 years of life still left ahead of them. They are no more at risk from food poisoning than anyone younger than them and older than a tiny baby.

The cooking process will have killed most of the bacteria present in the raw foods. The foil prevents new bacteria from landing on the food from elsewhere in the kitchen.

Taken together, this means there are very few bacteria available to grow / reproduce.

I would have eaten it. We eat very late and leftovers are often left on the side to cool overnight and put in the fridge the next morning. I’d rather that than put too-warm food in the fridge.

So I probably eat a meal that’s been left out overnight at least once a week (and have done for years) and I’ve never had any problems.

Wouldn't be an issue if you were serving it that same day surely. I would have ate it. But then again I just had a packet of quavers for breakfast so probably shouldn't be giving food advice.

Imo the only thing that springs to mind that I wouldn't eat if it had been left out overnight would be rice.

@Nanny0gg

Many posters disagree with you on the food poisoning potential risk. Read some of the comments saying it would've been fine, and couldn't have gone in the fridge the night before anyway.

Why not?

You learn something new everyday! Just googled this. Interesting!!

High risk food (cooked meat). 90 mins cooling time then into the fridge at less than 8 degrees C.

Putting a hot dish in the fridge before it has cooled to near room temperature is arguably more stupid than leaving it out, and covered, for 8 hours.

If it had been covered during cooking and since removal from the oven I would (if I ate pork, which I don’t) have absolutely no hesitation in eating it.

What could possibly happen to it in that time and under those conditions? It’s been hot for hours so any bacteria from the raw ingredients are well and truly dead. If it’s covered nothing is going to land in it.

I would most certainly have eaten it any way.
Aren't they food GUIDELINES.
He was being very unreasonable cancelling the plans

So do you think that in the 1950s and 60s (say) everyone kept a meat stew on the boil all day every day? Would you like to go and do some research on that?

I grew up in the 60s and we didn't have a fridge until 1969. We had a larder with a cold marble slab. My mum would do a roast on a Sunday, we'd have the meat cold with salad on Monday and on Tuesday what remained would be served with gravy or put into a pie. Wednesday would often be a stew and leftovers would be kept in the larder and heated up the next day or the day after. No one in the family ever had food poisoning. My mum would have been mortified.

Sorry, where is the food poisoning risk?

How do flies get into it? If it's covered?

I don't know which part of the UK (if any) the OP is in, but where I am at the moment it's more like autumn than summer. Temperature in an unheated kitchen overnight here would be quite low. I'd have had no qualms about eating anything left out overnight to cool that only finished cooking at 10pm.

Yes.

But people only ate pork and prawns when there was an 'r' in the month.

I certainly don’t think they’re old! It’s more that I realise they probably have more risk than we do in our mid 30s re: food poisoning, and it’s likely to be a less pleasant recovery for them. DH thought it was fine to eat, but I insisted it was binned.

I'd contact his mum and tell her the whole story.

What a silly baby he is. He should have been cooking for his parents. If you were, he should have been grateful, and he should have put the pork in the fridge.

And he needs to learn food safety rules. And not to run to Mummy and discuss your relationship.

I might leave it overnight in MY kitchen but it's the coldest room in the house so I would be fairly confident if I got up at my usual 6am

I don't know the temperature in the OP house though

Absolutely this ..

It also depends where you live . If your posting from Athens where the temp isn't going below 26 degrees at night then fair enough - but my kitchen doesn't get above 10 degrees at night (in fact 7 last night) - so would not of put in the fridge until fully cooled by the morning.

I am also an ex sanitation engineer and extremely well acquinted with E.Coli, Salmonella, Listeria and the common parasite of pork Trichinella spiralis.. all of which are negated from 3.5 hours in a hot oven.

What a waste of food.

I think you are both being unreasonable, tbh. Your DH disrespected your time and effort, was very careless about food hygiene and misrepresented the situation to your parents in a way that made you look like the bad guy, which is all clearly unreasonable.

But having taken on the task of cooking the food you went to bed early leaving your DH to take the food out of the oven (not so much of a big deal) but also stay up and cook it to fridge temperature which takes a long time and little of checking and is actually a pretty complicated task for someone to do without instruction for someone who wasn't involved in the planning of the meal.

The fact that he made this mistake suggests that he's not particularly clued up on food hygiene and storage. If my DH started a time-critical task in an area where he was more competent than me and went to bed leaving me to finish it off, Is be pissed off if he had a go at me for misunderstanding his instructions.

I know a lot of men do weaponised incompetence to get out of household tasks, and if he has a history of doing this type of thing, or regularly does advanced meal prep with good food safety, then YANBU.

But honestly, it sounds like a miscommunication and that you are blaming him for not doing a thing that is more obvious to you than it was to him (which he will see as you being unfair) when you are actually angry with him for him not being supportive when you were tired and overworked in order to do something that should really have been his responsibility and instead of easing your burden he just made it worse.

Wow. What a waste.

It’s a USA site and UK standards differ. And if you google further you’ll always find different advice, UK advice is that it’s fine to leave hot food to cool overnight, as putting it into a refrigerator while even still warm risks raising the temperature of the fridge and harmful bacteria growing as a result. Which won’t just affect the food you’ve put in there, but the entire contents of the fridge. Do we really need websites instead of common sense to guide us in what’s safe to eat and what’s not ? What did people do before fridges and before sell and use by dates ? Shock horror, in the days when people cooked from scratch and budgeted, pots of stew/soups were routinely left out on the stove in a covered pan overnight to be reheated and eaten the next day. No wonder so much is wasted if people have no basic understanding of what’s safe and what’s not.