They’re a lot like the lottery – an element of surprise. Is it still good a few days after? A few months? Or was this rotten the day I brought it home from the store? It’s like that insurance commercial – “We have aunts.” One is standing with the refrigerator door open, saying “expired; expired; expired” as she’s checking out items. We have a daughter like that. If anything in the fridge or the canned goods shelf and is within an hour of two of the expiration date, out it goes.
Now, I do get that there should be strict adherence to expiration dates on some things – dairy products, eggs, salad dressings, yogurt. I’ve written extensively on fruits and vegetables, which typically have a shelf life of the afternoon that I unpack the grocery bags. I bought a bag of salad greens last week. The day after I bought it, it was turning brown. Fruits do that too. Bought some bananas just the other day – they were green, so I thought I’d at least have a few days before they’re banana bread. No, the next day they’re yellow with brown spots.
As I mentioned, the Princess is a stickler for expiration dates. She really can’t pass through the kitchen without checking a few items that may be overdue for pitching out. And, to be honest, some may be. The canned goods cabinets are where I’m usually caught unawares. We all do this – you buy something “just to have it on hand”, and then never use it. That can of evaporated milk that I bought in 2012 is probably not safe. We discovered two jars of molasses – one slightly used and the other one, unopened. I probably didn’t know I had one, and so bought another for something. Still good? Probably not, but who knows? Residents of the North End of Boston will tell you they can still smell traces from the Molasses Disaster of 1919, when a huge storage tank ruptured and molasses oozed through the area like lava. And how often does one use molasses? Almost every cookie recipe had it, but not anymore. Just like our jars of Karo syrup. One dark, and one light. I can’t tell you the last time either was opened. Probably sometime around the late Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Roasted red peppers almost always catch me too. I’ll pull out a jar, only to find that it expired a few years ago and the peppers are coated with an odd grey-green mold. Out they go, but they were my “back-up”, so I don’t have any for that casserole I was making. Now I have to drop everything and run to the store. That happens too when Elizabeth is home and is cooking. I’ll hear, “Dad, where do you keep the pickled avocado and mint jelly?” I can respond, with a straight face, “I had to toss it– past its expiration date.” While she was texting us on a separate subject, she suggested that I include, as an aside, “thanks to my daughter for making sure our whole family isn’t poisoned on a regular basis.” That’s rather an overreaction, if you ask me. I’ve developed some nice strains of blue cheese by ignoring the “sell by” dates.
Our dear friend, Lady Peacock summoned her personal assistant for a fun-filled day of cleaning out her pantry. When I say “help”, I really mean “do”. Lady P doesn’t really do anything as arduous as “cleaning out” by herself. Anyway, her friend, who I’ll call “Deep Throat” because she reports to me surreptitiously, let me know that Lady P had some items going back a good 10 years, as indicated by the “best used by” dates. I remember her purchasing a number of them, and some go back before she moved to Teale Cottage from the Manor House. If I’ve told you this before, just skip to the next paragraph. We’d go up to a specialty food warehouse every so often to pick up things we both liked. I’d go in and pick up maybe 4 or 5 small bottles of things we would use while Herself waited in the car. Lady P would graze at the sampling table, on one occasion directing a store employee to “go out back and get” something she wanted to taste. She’d then emerge a half hour to 45 minutes later, fully fed and with a store employee pushing her cart. One day, she announced with delight that they had crepe makers on sale, so she bought one. We did attend a spectacular crepe event at Teale Cottage some months later, but I’d place a fairly large wager that it hasn’t been off the shelf much since. With Lady P, cooking in the abstract, well, somewhat fanciful, while the reality tends more toward take-away boxes. Anyway, on the “clean out”, a number of items, including packages of scone mix went out the door. But not without some convincing. She contemplated giving some away. Yes, everyone enjoys receiving expired food stuffs.
I read somewhere that fondue was an innovation of old cheese and stale bread. Leave it to the Swiss to come up with something which solves two problems and yet leaves nothing going to waste. That to me is an ideal solution, because I wouldn’t feel guilty. It’s sort of a food “recycling”. A generally known “secret” of the restaurant business is that daily specials are much the same – something that is reinvented to use up yesterday’s featured entrée. In a way, it’s laudable because “food waste” is a bit of a scourge. Many bright minds are looking for ways to cut down on perfectly good food that is just thrown away.
I’m not exactly sure how producers arrive at their “sell by” dates. One has to be very careful in some stores, because some of the items are perilously close to expiration. I’ll take a chance if it’s something that Her Ladyship and I will be using soon, like tonight’s dinner. The store and their supplier are trying to make it difficult for me – the dates when the product passes into oblivion are in microscopic letters. Maybe I need to have one of those magnifying glasses with me when I go shopping. I think Publishers Clearing House had one on sale, all though strictly speaking, I’ve been banned from ordering anything from them.
The Princess is home for the weekend, so I’m assuming that a healthy percentage of the refrigerator’s contents will be “voted off the island”. She refers to opening the freezer as roughly equivalent to an excursion into the Valley of the Pharaohs. Just like that insurance commercial – Dr. Rick working with young homeowners becoming their parents. The one where he pulls a dark blob out the freezer, and says, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me what this is.” Our freezer is like that at times, although it’s usually either chicken or fish, and they’re the same color.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a great routine about determining the expiration date of milk. The cow whispers the date in the farmer’s ear. That would seem to make about as much sense as any way of determining the date, because some are about a month out, while others give you just a few days. Then I feel rushed, and eat bowls and bowls of cereal so it doesn’t go to waste. We had, of course, a favorite milk – Smart Milk it was called. A 2% but tasted like regular whole milk. It was very popular, according to my contact the grocery store, so of course the dairy took it off the market. Usually, producers do that when they’re going to bring out something new. But in this case, no. So, we’ve had to settle for sampling, and as we don’t use much milk – only for recipes and such, it’s a long, slow process.
Which brings us, of course, to that critical question – how to balance shelf-life and seldom used items that, let’s face it, don’t last forever. Well, we’ll probably continue to do what we’ve done before. Buy, and then much later, throw it out. Rather like any number of left-overs, which we fully intend to use up but don’t. They get pushed to the back of the fridge, where we find them weeks or months later, wondering what they were, when we had them first, and how to thoroughly sanitize or simply throw out what they were in.
I'm Thinking...No! 