The Pantry

     Having brought home a rather large portion of groceries, I decided it might be a good time to clean out the pantry.

     My pantry can house many a mysterious item.  

     Since it was already looking like it belonged to Ms. M. Hubbard, I knew it would not take too long to clean.

     Pantries have a way of collecting goods and services in their far back recesses.  Items that do not get used very often, like a can of pumpkin, so they just keep being rotated further into the abyss.  

     One of the first things I came across was a can of sweetened condensed milk.  Actually, I found three cans but the first was looking kind of rough around the edges....literally......it had rust on it.  I checked the expiration date...02/28/2007....a seven year old can of sweetened condensed milk......I think it is a safe bet I can pitch it.

     I'm wondering why I even have sweetened condensed milk.  I do not make fudge or candy or whatever else can be made with this stuff.  I think I was probably looking for evaporated milk and grabbed the wrong thing.  The other two cans do not have an expiration date on them, so I guess they are safe to put back in the pantry.

     The next item of mystery was a small jar of sliced pimientos.  I know it has been in there a long time because it has an actual price tag sticker on it.  Most kids today would not have a clue what that is.  The only thing I can think of that I would use sliced pimientos for is cheese spread.  I'm sure that whenever the last time was that I made cheese spread, I had eaten half of it before I realized I had forgotten to add the pimientos.  They still look quite lovely, their pretty red tender slices swirling in some golden liquid.  They are a bonus item.  They do not expire until October of the year 2020! There were a couple of more dots of ink past the first 2 & 0 but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.   

     Then I found three 5 year old cans of cranberry sauce, the kind that slides out of the can in one piece, and two 2 year old cans of sweet potatoes and the above mentioned, moved to the back of the pantry, pumpkin.

     My oldest daughter reminded me of the time she and her younger sister had to clean out the pantry.  They found a bag of opened marshmallows.....that were hard as rocks.....that they began to hurl in my direction......across the kitchen....while they laughed like idiots.  Hardened  marshmallows can be used as weapons of mass destruction.

     If there was a prize to be given to the oldest item in the pantry it would have to go to the two packages of yeast.  Their expiration date was 09/01/1999.  If I hang on to them for another ten years they will be considered antiques.  Maybe I will keep them, after all there were seeds found in the great pyramids of Egypt that were still good.  Somewhere there is a place, far far away, deep in some mountainside that houses a storage facility for seeds, just in case there is a raining of hardened marshmallows on mankind that would wipe out a large portion of not only the population but the plants on earth.  Maybe they would like my two packages of yeast.

     I could open them up.  There might be an image of the Virgin Mary, Elvis or some ancient alien code that would unlock the mysteries of life on the inside of their small foil lined packages.