Life was so much simpler then

[austin_dern]

One nagging little thing about my father: I don't believe he's aware that I can actually do stuff. Some of this is my fault, in that I can be rather scatterbrained about getting to things. I blame that on my natural tendency to form patterns in getting things done, and unexpected things just don't have a place in the patterns, so they're hard to get to. (But if I get a pattern that includes something, just try and stop me from doing it.) Anyway, the route he's taken to coping with this behavior problem on my part is to explain what he wants ... very slowly ... using very few words ... in one block ... as if he were ... waiting for me ... to finish my ... stenography.

And there's over-explaining. He asked me to water the plants around the front door. It's been a dry and hot summer, with smaller birds occasionally bursting into flame, and the plants need the moisture. I would think being asked to water all the plants leading up to the front door would adequately cover the request, but before leaving, he made sure that we walked all ten feet of this path and he identified all the plants by name, as if I would ever know a plant by a name, and saying, ``now, water the (plant name), make sure it gets water''. Again and again and again.

Sunday, by the way, we got rain for several hours, and it seems to have minimized the worst of the heat wave, at least for a couple hours.

Meanwhile I'm taking my revenge by going through the refrigerator and throwing out the expired food. I grant there's some room for margin on expiration dates so I'm giving stuff that's only barely expired some leeway, especially when it's something like soy sauce that rots poorly if at all. But we had four --- count 'em --- four salad dressing bottles which expired in 2007, and more dramatic results for 2008. There was also a ketchup bottle with odd crystallization patterns inside it. My parents aren't going to believe how much faster the refrigerator compiles now.

Trivia: The word ``ketchup'' seems to derive from Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Cortez on Jupiter, Ernest Hogan. You know ... yeah, this is an awfully interesting book.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I've had to do the toss-expired-food at mom's place for years running. The freezer is a particular worst. Thankfully, regarding Mom's pantries as a source for my personal groceries, which are much more tightly controlled and have very little expired, or even purchased before the start of the year[*1], makes this an easier task. The "Augh, no." gets discreetly tossed; the "Hmmm. maybe" comes home with me to get used promptly, and the rest can slowly expire. But more cleaning needs be done; I recently found food that expired in 2005.

The freezer as mentioned is a tricky and horribly overstuffed bit. It's a sincere mess, and left to her own devices, the bread heels and unidentifiable meats in there might be around for her retirement.

--Chi
[*1] Actually long-expired would be the Vidalia Onion Salad dressing (2005!), but it still tastes good- REALLY good- and it's the one I focus on the most for my salads, using it at least 50% of the time to try and finish it up. K is more around-the-map on Salad dressings, I think confused by not having multiple bottles of salad dressing around since the Reagan Administration. K's also had four open boxes of breakfast cereal, and has stocked the fridge with three flavors two-liters, two flavors of 20-ounce bottles, and no less than 5 separate flavors of 12-ounce cans. ... I remember visiting K before in Maryland and seeing exactly one two-liter of soda in fridge, and that half-empty. I think plentitude confuses him. I buy the soda in large quantity on sale, but we have the pantry to store it, and it doesn't all need to be in the fridge crowding things. (Sorry. mild rant.)
Outside of the Vidalia Dressing, spices, and slow-spoil sauces like ketchup and hoisin... the only things here from before the start of the year are rice, flour, baking powder, honey, and brown sugar. The rice is my fault, as buying a 10-pound bag while mom had 4 pounds of it still at her place was a silly choice.[*2]
[*2] Mom does not like rice, either.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suppose salad dressing is the easiest food to get ridiculously obsolete, since it does have that low rate of use, and it's easy to get many flavors in there at once, and it's not like milk where when it goes bad you see it from the way the substance starts throbbing and overflowing the containers and grabbing surrounding food items. Once in grad school I nursed a ridiculously oversized ... I think it was vidalia onion dressing, come to think of it (my parents bought this thing which might fit in my mini-fridge, if the mini-fridge were not expected to have any shelves in it) ... for about a full year.

It took me a while to get past the idea of having one opened soda bottle, one opened salad dressing, one shampoo, on anything until it gets used up, even if there's more in stock. It still feels a bit decadent to have four different flavors of soda cans ready and waiting.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I buy about two heads of lettuce a month, myself; so we go through a fair amount of salad dressing here. K needs to eat a lot more veggies, will rarely make any on his own, likes salads- so I end up making them often with meals.

This Vidalia onion dressing is rather huge indeed; it's the second one liberated from Mom's basement and still has a good third left.

I tend to view a solid limit of variety on soda, salad dressings, cereal, etc as two- switching off, while using up at a fair pace. I've got four open boxes of coffee, mind, but the K-cups are individually sealed, and the shipping is free with four boxes, and those will last me the year anyway.

Left to my own druthers, there would be one flavor of 12-ounce cans, and perhaps two 2-liters cold at any given time.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's quite a bit of lettuce, although when I was living on my own and making most of my meals I would tend to get one or two bags of prepared salad per grocery shopping, which I tried to make a weekly thing. I would tend to eat not quite enough to need two a week, but not quite so little for one a week to be right. And then I would get into a mood where I didn't want any at all and the bags would turn to putrescence instead. So I guess it really isn't all that much lettuce after all.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I've had lettuce spoil, but it's a fairly rare thing. I'm *very* self-strict about eating things before they go bad, even if I'm not really in a salad mood today.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not so strict about eating things before they spoil, but then my budget makes it acceptable to write off the loss of a quart of milk. If I were living under tighter circumstances I know I'd be more careful.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

If K weren't living here, I'd buy milk by the pint. ..as it is I buy heavy cream[*1] for my coffee by the pint most times, just because I know while 1.09 for a half-pint and 1.49 for a pint is not a volume deal, I'm throwing half the pint out because I don't drink coffee that fast. Managing food stores before the spoil is part of my profession, so I'm nitpicky. Going to the grocery store about thrice a month, also keeps me from having tooo much about.

--Chi
[*1] Light cream or half-and-half if they are appreciably on sale, and occasionally a pint if so, as well.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That was one of the little things of life which I had to learn, actually, that the volume deal was not invariably the best deal. There are just some things that I can't use fast enough to make the per-volume discount worth it, particularly in the days when I had limited cabinet or fridge space or had to lug everything by hand back from the store. They don't tell you that in what's billed as Home Economics, where the per-big-standard-unit price is all that's worthwhile.