Week 1: The CT To Do tasks: Ta Da!

Our assignments for the first week were:

Breath
Rummage through your food storage and dispose of:

1. Food that is officially expired, according to the date on the package.
2. Food that may or may not have gone bad, but you're not going to risk eating it and finding out.
3. Food that you know in your heart you're never going to eat, regardless of whether you ought to want to.

Before we left for our vacation, I emptied the fridge. All that remained upon my return was the pantry, the freezer and my designated food cupboards upstairs. It's difficult to clear out the pantry as the husband is in charge of putting out the garbage and he tends to get grumpy when he sees meat leaving uneaten. I'm going to have to face the wrath or sneak it out, somehow. The pantry is pretty good. I have too many packages of Jello--I took them off my Mother's hands when we cleaned out her pantry--but it's reasonable, other than that.

That leaves the two cupboards upstairs. I elected to clean the top one. I try to keep just what I need on a daily basis in here: everything else is supposed to be in the basement. Unless it's been opened. Then it needs to find a home.

I managed to get rid of several boxes of various crumbs. No, really. There were graham crackers, vanilla wafers, chocolate wafers and, yes, pre-crushed and boxed cornflake crumbs. I also tossed a box of rancid triscuits.

I am stymied by this however.


(Yes, that box once held a Walkman. Some of its contents likely date from that era.)

They are "spice" mixes. I've seven, count them, seven packets of chili spice mix. There's also one package of Yorkshire pudding mix my daughter got from her grandmother for Christmas. They never expire, as far as I can tell.

But I know I haven't used anything from this box in over a year: maybe two....or three (or ten).

It just seems like "too much waste" to throw them all out, whoosh, just like that. But they need a better container and I really cannot justifying buying something.

Oh Woe.

But, except for a few matters, (I'm not going to touch the whole spice buying, storage, and retrieval issues) I am done. And I confess, I read Wende's Week 1 post just before we left, so I knew this was coming. I took photos of the cupboards, therefore, before we left on vacation.


(You can see how trying to find the olive oil or the butter in a split second while the egg newly cracked by my budding children-chefs begins to stick to the beat-up non-stick frying pan could be a bit of a challenge.)

(Sorry about the blur.)

And, now, it's all clean and (mostly) organized. I should have laid paper, but the task was daunting enough without fussing with all that.


(Yay, no more stuck eggs!)

Bones
Give your refrigerator, stove, and most important one or two cooking appliances a good wipe. If there's something that needs to be fixed on any of them, this is the time to do it.

Blech. The oven needs a wipe.