rotten in under 24 hours

I came home thinking I'd be able to fire up the stove and heat up the soup I had made the night before: this was primarily a potato-based soup made with leftover carrots and onions, all pureed along with heavy cream, and enhanced with some leftover chicken bouillon. But I made the mistake of leaving the soup in its pot, with the lid on, on the assumption—justified in the past!—that all the boiling would have sterilized the soup. Ha ha—wrong! When I got back to my place tonight, I immediately smelled that something was off, and when I took the lid off my pot, I saw, hilariously, that the soup had begun to bubble and puff like dough in mid-proof. The odor carried hints of kimchi, and when I dipped in a spoon and lifted it out to see how deep the damage went, I saw right away that the entire soup was rotting. Although I had wasted a whole brique of heavy cream in this endeavor, I was so amused by the rot that I chuckled even as I was dumping the befouled soup down the sink drain.

As I hinted above, I've left soups out before, even in warm weather, without ever having had a problem like this. I've certainly never had anything rot on me in under 24 hours! Normally, when you're making soup, all that boiling is enough to sterilize both the inside and the outside of the pot, not to mention sterilizing the pot's contents. So this is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. You, Dear Reader, will be tempted to roll your eyes and shake a finger at me for not having containerized and refrigerated the soup, but that's because you've probably never thoroughly sterilized your soup before. All I can think is that, in this case, I somehow failed to sterilize everything, and whatever bacteria had survived became fruitful and multiplied.

Ah, well. Sad but, at the same time, funny.