so I left frozen dinner meals in the car all night . got it at 3pm yesterday and found it this morning.... UGH. I refreezed it..... should i not eat it ? It was in a cooler, ice packed but they were not cold when I found them.... well one was kinda cold.
If it was not cold, I would pitch. If it was cold, I wouldn't refreeze, but instead to plan cook and eat asap/that night; keep in it the fridge till you do.
No, I would NOT eat that. Why take the chance with food poisoning?
Been there, done that!! Pitch them!! Not worth the risk. Plus, refreezing them didn't do them any favors!!
Back to the store for you!!
Good luck!!
I am AMAZED that all these moms DON"T know that food is frozen and thawed many times from the time of butchering to eating.
My wife and I had a ham for dinner last night. We were going to use it for a family dinner, but had too much other prepared food so we never used it. It had been fully thawed. I put it back in the freezer and it froze solid. Then I took it out for dinner and instead we sliced off a couple of slices and cooked it and made ham sandwiches. I put it in the frig and it got cold again. I cooked it last night with potatoes and vegetables and we had it for dinner. It was good. It tasted good and we have had no ill effects from it.
Freeze your dinners again. Use them when you want. If you read the lable on the package you will see a list of ingredients. You will see one of the ingredients is salt, a preservative. You will also see some ingredients like sodium nitrate and others I cannot even begin to spell without the package in front of me. They are all preservatives.
You left the package out in the car. What was the temperature in Peoria, at 3 pm and later. If the temp in your car got over 140 degrees, then your food was cooked in the package. IF . . . and I say, IF ! ! ! it doesn't smell wrong when you open it to use it, I would use it and cook it as instructed.
Good luck to you and yours.
Wow. ;) Sorry for your loss, but you need to throw these out!
hate to waste the $, but pitch 'em.
khairete
S.
Toss! It's not worth getting sick over. I've done the same thing, and it stinks.
I'd toss them. It's OK to refreeze large amounts of food, say a steak or roast because the have a large mass. Refreezing them does affect the texture, even then. When you have serving sized pieces they dry out and are tasteless when refrozen.
8kidsandadad: The reason refreezing worked for you was because it was a ham, a large chunk of dense meat. Refreezing doesn't work so well for individual pieces of veggies and small pieces of meat or pasta. Frozen dinners are in small pieces for ease of heating. (notes from a home economist) Yes, you can refreeze dinners but they will not taste good and the texture will be grainy. Freezing bursts cell structure releasing nutrients and flavor.
My freezer door got left open and I refroze several packages of meals that were still frosty. They were awful when I took them out. I ate one anyway and had a touchy tummy.
Toss it! I would not take the chance of getting food poisoning.
No. If it was still very cold, I would say eat it. Kinda cold, no way.
Nope, toss it. If you had not re-frozen it, you could have cooked it today and it would have most likely been fine, but its not OK to re-freeze after it has thawed.
From 3pm to this morning is not very long for food to thaw.
Considering that the food was not removed from the original packaging, & you refreezed them right away, they should be fine.
Remember, you will be heating them before eating, it is not the same as leaving a potato salad in the car for hours on a hot day & then eating right out of the container w/o cooking.
You'll be fine!
T.
Yikes!!! I feel your pain. Not only the money wasted but also the time and effort. But not worth it. Chuck it all. Two reasons. Refreezing will change texture and probably taste and more importantly food poisoning.
Sorry. :((
If it a prepared frozen meal, it is so full of preservatives, if it was cold when you found it, you are fine to referees. If it was raw meat you should dump it, although ground beef and ham are full of preservatives as well, you might be fine on those depending on how cold you found them.
Companies are so scared of being sued for food poisoning nowadays, they load prepared foods with everything they can to ensure no one will ever get sick from it, no matter what we do to it!
