Musings of a Southern Mama

For the past week, I’ve had an upper respiratory infection (self-diagnosed), which has caused a great deal of coughing and overall feeling of yuck.  I have coughed so violently it feels like I might have pulled a muscle, broken a rib or worse!  My friend Beth Ann swears she found my lung outside her home in Iowa (I’m in Georgia).  The way I’ve been coughing I figured this could be a reality so I asked her to pack it in snow and mail it back to me.  At first Beth Ann said she would absolutely send it back but then later informed me her husband had backed his car over my lung before she could retrieve it. I have such nice friends, but I digress…back to the story.

I decided since I was feeling puny it might be beneficial to eat a nice warm bowl of oatmeal.  Since we were out of the handy individual microwave serving packs of creamy blueberry and strawberry, I used a box of Quaker Oats I found in my pantry.  After preparing the oatmeal and adding a banana and sugar to make it more appealing, I sat down and began to eat.  I noticed it tasted a bit off (kind of stale), but since I don’t eat plain oatmeal I figured that’s what it was supposed to taste like and though it was awful I finished the entire bowl. 

As I was putting my bowl in the sink, I noticed I left the Quaker Oats box on my kitchen counter, so I decided to see if it had an expiration date.  To my shock right there on the bottom was printed “BEST IF USED BY APRIL 08!”  April 2008?  It’s February 2012!!   Worried I might have given myself food poisoning, I posted this oatmeal expiration gem to facebook as a possible final status update. 

Again, enter my friend Beth Ann, who told me to “rotate my stock.”  Since I trust Beth Ann (except for the lung incident), I decided to go through my pantry, refrigerator and spice rack to toss out every expired item.  Thankfully, my pantry was clean of expired items as was my refrigerator, most likely because I tossed a lot of things during a recent move (yet somehow that oatmeal slipped through), but when I got to my spices…OMG!  When all was said and done, my spice rack was practically empty except for salt, pepper, Season All and chili powder!

As I sat the expired spices on my kitchen table I began to add up the cost in my mind.  In case you haven’t purchased any recently, those things are freaking expensive!  There must have been at least a hundred dollars worth of outdated spices ready to be tossed.  It was a disturbing sight.  My hubby tried to convince me spices, “don’t really expire,” but I ignored him and threw them away just to be on the safe side plus, I recall seeing him web surfing for life insurance policies recently…hum.    

There’s no moral to this story other than to say A) listen to Beth Ann and rotate your stock (just don’t ask her to return a lung), B) don’t listen to your husband who has been life insurance shopping when he says things don’t really expire, C) don’t eat oatmeal that expired four years ago – although, for the record it didn’t make me sick or kill me (obviously) since I’m writing this post – and D) go through your spice rack and let me know how many expired spices you need to throw away. 

Here’s what I tossed out:

What the heck is a caraway seed? Poultry seasoning? Ridiculous!!