I've been sick all week and I woke up this morning all ready to be productive. Well, honestly, I was supposed to go golfing, but it was cold and crappy out, so I decided being productive was a decent alternative. Also, I have a sitter coming over tonight and I didn't want to scare the poor girl off with the state of my house.
I had some bananas on the counter that were well-beyond edible and I decided that I should make some banana chocolate chip muffins. They are yummy, my kids will eat them and they make me feel less like a failure for once again NOT eating the bananas. I have such good intentions, I really do.
I went to the cupboard and got out the sugar and realized I had no flour.
Never fear! I knew there was an old bag in the back of the pantry. And by "in the back," I mean, top shelf, can-barely-reach-it-even-when-standing-on-a-stool. I climbed up on the stool and reached way up there with my stubby little arms and pulled down the barely-used bag of flour. I swear, it weighed twenty pounds. Ok, maybe only ten.
I took the binder clip off of it and took a look at the expiration date.
Better if used by 05APR09.
Hmmmm. Better? As in "Better safe than sorry?" I tossed it. All ten pounds of it. I sure hope that garbage bag is as strong at the commercials say it is.
I climbed back up on that stool to see if there was another bag of flour up there. And of course there was. I wouldn't be me if I didn't have multiple, almost-used-up bags of all kinds of stuff sitting around.
Check the expiration date:
Better if used by 17May10.
At least it was a year younger than the first bag I dug up. And there was probably only a cup of flour in the bag, so it wasn't nearly as wasteful.
After that second bag of flour, I just started tossing stuff. I figured if I had years-old flour, most of the other things on that shelf were probably past their expiration date too. It was kind of cathartic throwing away bottles of sno-cone syrup that I had been squirreling away for the "next" summer. Looking at the flour evidence that "next" summer was probably 2008.
And then I discovered one last, mostly empty, sack of flour. And I looked at the expiration date.
Better if used by 25Aug04.
Seriously? My brain shut down for a minute. Wait. What year is this? 2012. This expired in 2004. A little quick math tells me that was oh, approximately EIGHT years ago. And if it expired eight years ago (still struggling with this) I must have bought it like ten years ago. That sack of flour is as old as my daughter.
Conclusion: I should clean out my pantry more often.
By the way, I am a little ticked off that those Box Tops expired. I bet the school could have used them six years ago.
