You know how when you open up the lid of your washer after you've washed a load of jeans and tshirts that you always find 10 & 20 dollar bills that have magically appeared? Wait ... your washer doesn't give you money? hmm... well, my washing machine has always a good source for providing me with some extra spending money. I've had this washer for almost as long as we've been married which will soon be 38 years, and needless to say, I'm not getting rid of it anytime soon. I expect, with inflation, the new washers only give a buck or two with a load of jeans.
Anyway.... my kitchen cupboard, unfortunately does something just the opposite. And I do blame my cupboard for this and not the fact that I might be OLD and forgetfull.
My cupboard seems to magically expire my food products. I've found bottles of salad dressings dating back to 2006. Now, I find it hard to believe that I haven't cleaned out my cupboard since then so naturally, I have to be suspicious that there might be some foul play going on here. The latest problem happened just this morning.
I've been wanting to make a peanut butter, chocolate chip pie ... There's this restaurant, Harold's Inn, in Hopewell twp, that has the BEST peanut butter chocolate chip pie. The bad thing about it is that first of all, Harolds is a good 30 min drive for us so we don't go there often. Second of all, when we do go there to eat, the last few times, that pie was not available. Third of all, I can never fully enjoy the pie because I'm always too full after eating their famous chicken & taters and Fourth, the pie is expensive. I don't remember for sure but it's something over $4.00 a slice and to buy the entire pie is somewhere between $25-$30. Spending THAT much on a pie is absolutely insane to me so I try to make it here at home, as best I can. It never tastes quite as good, but really, how bad can choc chips, peanut butter chips and vanilla pudding taste ...so it's not the same, but it's pretty darn good anyway.
So, this morning, I made the pastry shell, baked it and while it was cooling, I reached in the cupboad to get out the box of vanilla pudding and guess what? Yes, indeed, the cupboard had given that darn box of pudding an April 2009 expiration date. Now, I do admit that I considered using it anyway. My family would never know and chances are we'd not get sick from eating expired pudding mix .. but then I realized that I wouldn't really appreciate how good this pie is while eating it because the entire time I'd be worried that it was going to give me some awful gastric poisoning.
So I rooted around the cupboard looking for another box and to my absolute horror, I discovered that my cupboard had given all of my boxes of pudding expired dates. Every stinking one of those boxes were older than the dirt in my vegetable garden. Nine boxes of old pudding mix. NINE. Gosh. See that one box of "Pumpkin Spice" in the picture above? That's marked as a "limited edition" . It's 3 years old now which might possibly make it a pudding box collectors hard-to-find dream collectors item. If anyone knows of anyone that collects pudding boxes, let me know. I'll let this one go for cheap to the right person.
So, now that I'm puddingless, I've created another dilemma for myself because I can't just throw the boxes in the garbage. That's a lot of boxes full of old pudding powder, which takes up a lot of space in my garbage can under the sink. So, I thought the best thing to do would be to dump out all the contents and throw the powder in my compost pile outside. Good idea! I'll just have to crush the boxes and recycle them to save space in my garbage can and be all green and stuff.
The compost pile will get extra nutrients of .... hmmm... and the earthworms will feast on the powder and .... hmmmm...
ok, now here's my concern. Will I injure the earthworms with the expired pudding powder? What if a groundhog or chipmunk or a raccoon decides to graze in my compost pile with the expired pudding powder? Will I kill God's creatures with gastric poisoning from old pudding powder?
This is what is rolling around in my head as I'm dumping the powder out of their boxes.
I decided to ask my husband. He's a really smart guy and knows a lot about some things. "I don't think animals would like pudding powder" he said in his deep, knowing manly voice.
I didn't argue with him, but thinking more about this, how would he know the dietary consumptions of groundhogs and raccoons? That expired pudding powder might just be a smorgasboard of flavor to the wildlife .. one taste and the groundhog would send out the word to all of his groundhog friends to come get this flavorfull goodness that is flowing through the soil. They'd all feast during the night and the next morning, we'd see a dozen groundhog corpses laying deep in gastric excrements that smelled of expired pudding powder. The neighbors would laugh at us for sure.
So, the expired pudding powder is still sitting in a container on the kitchen counter. I'm thinking that maybe I could flush it down the toilet. We have a septic tank though and I'm not sure if it would clog up the pipes and I did consider asking my husband that question but I know that he would give me that look that he gives me when I ask questions like this. It's that look of "I really feel sorry for her for being so dumb so I'll try to answer verrrrrry slowly and with simple sentence stuctures so that she can understand without knowing that I think she's stupid for asking".
Gosh.
So, I think that I will ponder on this a bit more before dumping it out on the compost pile. While I ponder, I might just start cleaning and organizing my food cupboard so that perhaps, it, like my washing machine, will leave me 20 dollar bills instead of expiring my food.
Happy Day everyone!
