Went out of town for a night to stay at a friend’s countryhouse 90 minutes away. Wife packs the cooler with some ice from the freezer to chill the wines she’s bringing for lunch on the drive.

Next day (Sunday) we drive back, wife asks what we’re doing for dinner. I suggest we defrost the burgers in the freezer. I drop wife and daughter off at the front door, find parking. Arrive home 5 minutes later, see she’s already got the burgers defrosting on the kitchen counter.

Then I look more closely, and these things are not only defrosting, but blood from the meat has dripped onto the wooden cutting board. (Why is she placing it right on the board without a plate?)

So I get a plate, put the meat on it, then think, wait, how has the meat already started dripping onto the board when she just got home five minutes ago and took it out?

I touch the meat, it’s soft, not frozen at all.

I burst into the bedroom, she’s in the shower. I yell, “WTF, you left the meat out on the counter all night when you went to get the ice out!”

Our freezer is packed, so she must have had to remove the burgers to get the ice out, and forgot to put it back before heading out the door.

I’m like, fuck! Now we have to throw out a kilo worth of grass-fed burgers, and I absolutely *hate* wasting food, especially food for which an animal died. (I love meat, deem it a health food, but I still respect where it comes from.)

So I start thinking. The burgers were frozen solid and up against one another. Probably took a good six-hours to defrost fully. And then they were probably refrigerator temperature for two more hours. So it’s only been 24 hours, and 16 at room temperature. And you see meat in at the butcher in glass cases sitting there all day.

She asks me to google it, and I say no point because you’ll just get a bunch of over-cautious pussified people saying once it’s out two hours, you throw it out. In Europe people are always leaving meat out much longer, though usually after it’s cooked.

So we smelled it (fine), salted it, put it in the fridge and resolved to cook them well done, i.e.,we chose to fuck around and find out.

That was last night. Knock on wood, hope I’m not jinxing it, but so far, so good.