Yesterday, in preparation for the sausage soup (posted below) I innocently asked my mother if she had Italian seasoning. She dug around her spice drawer, and the two pull out shelves next to her fridge for about 15 minutes, and then proudly handed me a bottle of pizza seasoning.
So I'm a food snob, and proclaimed the seasoning was too old to use. The date on the bottom of the bottle said it expired in 2003. THEN I opened pandora's box, I mean my mother's spice cabinet. Did you know McCormick has an entire section of their website dedicated to old spices?
www.spicecheckchallenge.com
It was really quite humorous. Since I like to torture my mom, I decided it was time to clean out her spice cabinet. Seriously, it was out of control.....so difficult to find anything, spices in unlabeled containers, in bags leaking all over the shelves. My mom needed an intervention, and I needed a project.
So I pulled everything out, and B and I gave all of them the sniff test, and we used the code function on the website to figure out how old some of the bottles were. We found several tins from the early 1970's (that my mother was insisting were still good!), several spices from the 1980's with $0.99 stickers on them (I don't think I've ever bought a bottle of spices that was a dollar!), and lots of spices in glass jars with green tops (I bet some of you have those in your cabinets right now!). She was quite upset to see all of her old spices being trashed, and kept insisting they were still good. But dried chives aren't supposed to smell like rubber gloves, and red pepper flakes are not supposed to be brown. So I forged on. She also had lots of spices she bought in bags from The Fresh Market, which unfortunately aren't dated, so if they passed the sniff test, they got transferred to glass containers and labeled and dated ;o)
In the end, I threw out a entire trash bag full of spices and old jars, and scrubbed out her shelves, alphabetized her spices, and labeled the shelves. Now she can find her spices in a minute, AND she gained an extra drawer (which she filled with coffee stuff).
It was fun, and fortunately since she's my mom, she has to love me even if I go through her drawers and make fun of her for old spices. :-D
1 comment:
HA! I swear there are bottles of paprika at my mom's house that were there when I was a kid.
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