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Like Animal Planet, but in our kitchen
At the beginning of June we went away for the weekend to attend a wedding. When we came back, our kitchen was occupied by a small swarm of tiny flies. I practically tore my hair out trying to figure out what they were and where they were coming from.
I finally found the source of those flies last weekend. I was rushing around the kitchen gathering my things for the Big Kahuna. Race nutrition, water bottles, breakfast food. But the basket holding the water bottles was a mess, and I knocked a few bottles loose when I grabbed what I needed for my race. I thought to myself, Let me just take a second to pull that out and reorganize it... GASP!
The basket sits next to a stack of baking pans, which are there because... I ran out of space in the other places where I store baking pans. I do a lot of baking. Hiding under those overturned pans was a potato in a torn-open plastic bag. You know how Trader Joe's sells potatoes in a brownish plastic bag? One of those. Except I could see through the semi-opaque dirt-colored plastic that the bag was swarming with little critters and basically coated on the inside with funk. And suddenly I could smell rotting food. GROSS.
Yeah, SarahL, you were absolutely right, even though I thought I had cleaned my kitchen thoroughly. I still shudder at the memory of discovering that grody nest of bugs.
But, yeah, so I was rushing around trying to get out the door for my race. We did the damage control: removed the offending material and everything in the vicinity, cleaned the brown potato goop that leaked onto the wire shelves, sprayed a LOT of Windex, and washed everything washable within a five-foot radius. Some of the mess dripped down onto my awesome homemade batik mixer cozy, pictured above. So now I know: the mixer cover is washable.
These flies, whatever they were -- too big to be real fruit flies, I think -- really like wine. We discovered that the best way to trap them is to leave an inch of wine in an open bottle. To everyone who has been in my house since June, I swear we don't normally leave old wine sitting around in open bottles. (It's rare that we leave any in the bottle at all.) Red is best for this purpose only because it disguises all the fly corpses floating around. Want to see what happens when you leave out white wine? How about a little cabernet? I bet you're really thirsty now!
September 12, 2008 10:27 PM
Glad you finally got them!
We, however ... are still searching for the source of ours.
I am way more grossed out by the mushy brown potato juice than by the flies in the wine. I've done exactly the same thing (only with a whole bag of potatoes at the back of a cabinet) and, well, eeeewwww. The smell is the worst part, no? But now you get to rest easy knowing that once you've killed this batch of flies they'll stay dead this time.
On the upside, your one dedicated reader-who-is-also-a-seamstress (that would be me) got to see your awesome batik mixer cozy again. Any chance you can send a link to a pattern? I have a mixer that needs a cozy.