One day last week, I came home and found a note on my door. It was from the management office of my building, letting me know that they'd be entering apartments on my floor beginning today. Apparently there has been a mouse problem (eww, I know), so they are planning to come into every apartment and look for and then seal off the places where the mice are entering (I totally wrote mouses there, without thinking about it!).
The note asked us to be sure that kitchen cabinets are empty. Right.
I live in a Capitol Hill efficiency. I have a galley kitchen. I don't even have a kitchen table, because there is no room for one! I have exactly two cabinets above the sink, and then a built in shelf thingie across from it where my dishes live.
Last night when I got home, I began to clean out the cabinets. While doing so, I decided it would be a good idea to throw away food that may be past its sell/use by date.
I threw away about 1/3 of my food! Seriously! Apparently I buy food and then don't use it, which I knew, but I didn't think I was that bad! Sure, sometimes I will have a brilliant idea to make a new recipe, so I buy the needed ingredients and then lose interest by the time I get home (haha), but I found a box of pasta, that was unopened, but the date on the box was November 2004! I didn't even live in this apartment in 2004! That means that when I moved in there in June 2005, I took expired food with me from my old house up by CUA!
I felt awful; I had to throw away unopened boxes of pasta, cake and brownie mixes, several canned goods. Normally I would have just donated them to a local soup kitchen or the like, but some of them were so old, I didn't think they'd take them!
Am I an awful person?
What is the oldest thing you've found in your cabinet?
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All of my cabinets are filled with newer stuff since I haven't been on my own too long. But I swear our milk always goes bad. I don't think we've ever finished a jug before it went bad!
A year ago I was incredibly bored at home for Christmas. My mom lets things get pretty cluttered and I love to organize so I was going through her medicine cabinet tossing stuff. I found a bottle of some sort of cough syrup that was, I kid you not, over 20 years old. Ew.
I suck at using our groceries. I buy things, use like 1/10 of it, and then it sits in the fridge or the cabinet to slowly await it's death. I always vow to not do it the next time I go to the grocery store, but I always fall for the "it's cheaper if you buy more of it" marketing ploy. My medicine cabinet is just as bad...two weeks ago I gave my brother Day Quill (sp?) that expired in 2005 (which means it has moved with me at least 8 times).
We clean out our cabinets pretty regularly because a) we have very little cabinet space and don't like to waste it with old food and b) I'm paranoid about roaches. But I did once find a buried pack of pitas in our cabinet once that were so old they'd become sort of liquidy. That was disgusting.
I hardly have any time to cook anymore, so mine are pretty bare right now - spices have expired - I still need to chuck those.
This happens every now and then. I'm not sure what the oldest thing I've found was though.
Sadly, our pantry is much like that too. I tend to stock up on things when they're on sale but then I forget about them.
I dont think that I found really old stuff at my apartment, since I only started living "on my own" in 2006, but at Dave's place once, he opened a can of New England Clam Chowder for me, and it was definitely NOT looking like it was supposed to, and turns out the can was from approx 2004. GROSS.
I never check my use-by dates. Now I don't even want to think about all of the old pasta i've ingested.
I'm a pantry stocker too. But when I'm bored and have nothing to do (unfortunately this happens quite often) I look in my pantry and decide to make stuff based on what I have.
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