Monday's Dinner - Velveeta Cheesy Skillet

Velveeta Cheesy Skillet – this was last Monday’s dinner, along with some fresh veggies of course. I must have grabbed this box of Velveeta Cheesy Skillet on impulse about a year ago in the clearance section at Target, probably around its best-by date. It’s hard to read the date in the picture but it reads “Best When Used By 15 FEB 2015” (and Monday’s date when I made this dinner was 16 May 2016!).

It was a typical hectic Monday and, with nothing planned for dinner, I went frantically searching the kitchen. I found a bit of ground meat in the freezer and this box of everything else needed to make a one pan skillet dish (Velveeta Cheesy Skillet) in the back of the cupboard. Perfect… except that the best-by date was well over a year ago!

Monday's Dinner - Velveeta Cheesy Skillet

The preparation:

I put the frozen hamburg over low heat as I began to inspect the many little packages contained within this box labeled Velveeta Cheesy Skillet.
All packages were sealed and showed no signs of any punctures or leakage – so far so good.
There were dried noodles in a clear wrapper – we know those have a very long shelf life; there was a dried spice package – again with a long shelf life but they can loose flavor – decided to go for it since nacho flavor is pretty spicy to begin with; there was a salsa package and knowing that tomatoes are the first among their cousins to go bad when canned we knew we’d want to inspect this package more closely; and that left the most concerning package of cheese. The package was Velveeta cheese and we’ve had plenty of Velveeta logs get stuck in the back of the fridge for extended lengths of time so again we weren’t too concerned. Giving the cheese package a squeeze, it was still very soft. When I cut the package open, everything looked and smelled just fine too. The last package I opened was the salsa, it also looked and smelled fine but since it needed further inspection I dipped my clean finger in for a taste test before ruining the whole dinner. No acidic taste, so we were good to go – all packages passed inspection!

The results:

It may have been slightly better a year ago, but we all found it quite tasty and ate it with no complaints. This picture is of the leftovers, so it doesn’t look that great, but it did look just like the picture on the package when it was still warm. I wanted to wait a few days and make sure that the 3 of us survived before making a post… just kidding, I’m not that much of a dare devil… and you should not be either (please see our note below). Some dates are just more important than others and that’s why we attempt to explain signs of spoilage on each of our individual product pages.

Additional Information

Note: Although best by dates are generally misleading, we are not advocating completely ignoring dates on all packages. They should be taken into account as one of the many indications that a food MAY have gone bad. That’s why we include a “how to tell if xxx has gone bad” section on each food page, to give you other things to look for when making a decision about a product. After all, it’s always a possibility that foods could go bad even before their best-by dates if they were mishandled somewhere along the way.

To find out how long cheese lasts, check our cheese page.

To find out how long salsa lasts, check our salsa page.

To find out how long pasta lasts, check our pasta page.

To find out how long spices lasts, check our spice page.

To find out how long other foods are good for, please visit the Dairy, Drinks, Fruits, Grains, Proteins, Vegetables and Other sections of Eat By Date or use the search function below.

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