Oh yes, your eggs are still good. Not a problem. You can always do the freshness test to reassure yourself. Float one in a bowl of water. If it sinks it's still quite fresh, stands less so.. floats midway, starting to get old and floats... bad.

Just as a point, our power was out for sixteen hours during Irene and we didn't lose any food and didn't get sick at all from it. About half way through I did put some ice packs from the big freezer against the milk cartons.

Sorry, and btw, I'm glad you got your power back! It's one thing when you're expecting it from a storm but quite another when it comes on you suddenly.

I'm glad that you could salvage most of the contents. It's really rough out there with the floods, fire, high wind, heat. Crazy!

I would not have tossed those things. Imagine that in the early morning, you pack a sandwich with sliced meat, mayo, tomato and onion, and go for a long walk. Now it is lunchtime. And you've been hiking in a rather cold climate. Would you throw away the sandwich rather than eat it? No harm done, it's only a few dollars, but I'd eat my sandwich. We all survived before insulated lunchboxes.

I'm glad your power is back on, sooz, that's a pain when there's no preparation. Here power usually goes out in the winter, and it's cold, but you can stick the contents of your fridge/freezer in the snowbank and it stays cold/frozen.

I agree, the eggs are fine. I'd have kept the other stuff too, if milk goes sour, you can tell, and if it tastes OK, it's fine. Grandma even used the sour milk for baking.

I've left salsa in a bowl on the counter for 4 hours, my homemade stuff without all those added preservatives too. After all, what is in salsa? Onion, peppers, tomatoes, maybe some vinegar. Nothing that will spoil in a cold environment in 4 hours.

I can't help you on the lunch meat, I seldom eat the stuff. Most of it seems on the edge of being spoiled when I buy it, so I'd have probably tossed it too.

Annie

Thanks everyone for your input. The weather the past few days, and the day of the power outage, has been in the stifling high 80s. There was a run on ice, of course, and since every single traffic light was not working, there were massive traffic jams everywhere.

If anyone is still reading this thread, I have a pound of lump crabmeat in the fridge that I got from Costco a week ago. It's still sealed and was in the fridge the whole time. I think it's still *good*...what say you?

BTW, all the eggs are sinkers :O)

Power outages are common here, often for no reason anyone can discern. Earlier in the summer, the power went out around 11:00 at night and was still out the next morning. It was an extremely hot night and day, so I didn't open the fridge at all, eating crackers for breakfast. I went into town shortly before noon to eat lunch and when I got home around 1:30, the power was back on. I left the fridge closed--it was running constantly--until late afternoon and then proceeded as usual. Everything was fine.

The link below should provide some guidelines for you. Personally, any susceptible foods (foods that grow bacteria rapidly such as raw meat) that were at 40-degrees F or higher for over 2-hours would give me concern and they would get tossed.

-Grainlady

Here is a link that might be useful: CDC - Power Outage Information

Our power was out 6-1/2 days after Irene. Obviously we didn't trust anything after that amount of time so lost the contents of the refrigerator & the large freezer. But, we did learn a valuable lesson. Vac-packing foods makes clean-out so much easier...no mess. We'd anticipated the loss of power so we put the Ben & Jerry's in Zip-Locks. We also packed Zip-Lock bags filled 2/3 with water in every nook/cranny of both freezers 2 days before the storm. I 'think' if we'd gotten power in 4 days that would have worked excellent but, unfortunately, we didn't. There was still some ice floating in the bags though after six days, almost seven. Refrigerator/freezer combo still got a good clean-out with Chlorox but at least there was no stinky goo to get out. We lost the stand-alone freezer to flooding. It did stink but it was because there was seaweed tangled underneath not because of spoiled meat drippings, etc.

Vac-packing is wonderful!

Sorry you lost power for a few hours, Sooz. It's a PITA.

/tricia

sooz, I wouldn't hesitate to keep the crab either. Because items were still cool after that amount of time, I wouldn't have the issue that I would have if you had left them sitting on the counter for 9 hours, and you have no way of knowing whether 40 degrees was ever reached, whether it was reached after 4 hours or after 8 hours and 45 minutes.

So, the absolutely safe answer is throw it away. I think that if you are not elderly, ill, a small child or have a compromised immune system, that's a bit extreme. If it smells good, tastes good, looks good, I'd eat it.

As for the eggs, my extension service tells me that there is a greater chance of salmonella in the Northeast than anywhere else in the United States. Approximately one in 10,000 eggs are infected with salmonella there, less in other parts of the country.

When refrigerated, salmonella grows much less quickly than it does in unrefrigerated eggs.

In Europe and most of the rest of the world, eggs are not refrigerated. However, consumers in those countries often shop every few days or weekly. Leaving eggs on the counter for a couple of days really isn't problematic, but storing for longer periods unrefrigerated really reduces the amount of time they will keep. So, the eggs are safe, without question. As I noted, anyone can tell is milk is spoiled, just smell it. The sell by date doesn't mean you just dump it down the sink at that point either, it's good for several days after that.

Annie

I am not a serious or pro cook. If I were, I would need to protect my reputation and would probably throw all sorts of things out under all sorts of situations. But instead I use my nose. If it smells bad, it probably goes.

I remove fuzz from jelly and cut the mold off yellow cheese. There are enough antioxidents in lunchmeat that it wouldn't have even crossed my mind to check it. Obviously, I'm with John on the mayo in the tuna sandwitch and would push the arguement back a few mellinia. The refrigeration back then was a little poor especially in the summer and our ancestors made it anyway.

However, I would certainly use my nose on the crab meat.

I, too, dealt with the Southern California power outage. We left our chest freezer closed, not opening it for any reason. Everything was just fine, still frozen solid, when we got up Friday morning. For the small freezer, the only reason we opened it was to remove the ice bin completely and put the little bar up. We dumped all of the ice into one of our smaller ice chests, then used the opportunity to thaw out the bin.

Into that ice chest went half-n-half, coffee creamer, and a few other things that worried us. We could also dip into that little ice chest to get ice for drinks, since there was no ice in the bin (and the ice dispenser wouldn't work anyway).

We have a small fridge, too, which got connected to a small generator that we recently inherited. That's where the drinks were kept. Once the generator was off, that fridge kept things pretty cool, and it really doesn't bother some drinks to get warm anyway.

What I tossed: mayonnaise (discovered it was past "best by" date by a landslide), fat free mayo (ditto), Miracle Whip (really past the date!!!!!), and some leftovers from previous meals. The vegies were fine, Welch's and V8 were fine, eggs will probably be fine. The OJ was iffy - drinkable but not at its freshest taste, hubby said.

Donna

Commercial mayo is so full of preservatives that it's shelf stable even when opened. However in the event that it might become contaminated from something on a knife, refrigerate it.
If it was only 9 hours and things were still cool I am sure everything was fine.

When Irene passed thru my part of NJ, power was out for about 13 hours. During that time, opened fridge/freezer as little as possible. After power came back on, never even thought about tossing a thing?!? Everything in freezer was rock solid. Have no idea what temp in fridge was, but stuff seemed cold to me. My freezeer frequently verges on avalanches... pretty much full to the rafters. It's my understanding that a FULL freezer is a "good thing". Luckily, power outages in my area are not very common. If I lived in an area where they happened more often, I'd fill some kind of containers with water and freeze in any open spaces. YEARS ago, my Dad "found" a case of pint bottles. He always had a few frozen that he'd put in his golf bag... as they melted, he had a cold drink.