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Cooking from an empty larder

I’ve been trying to keep the pantry pretty bare, except for buying ingredients for the dinners. It’s been working surprisingly well, except for the times I’ve kinda hung onto a little bit of this or that for too long – like the salad dressing I put on my work lunch salad last Friday. The greens were leftover from Thursday’s dinner and they were fine, but the dressing had been in the house since before the fridge died last summer – it was like when a person has inoperable cancer – the repair guy came, opened up the back of the fridge, said, “nothing can be done”, closed it up and went away. The dressing, the bright red french kind, was kind of separated, but I just stirred it back together and ate it anyways – I thought a food that processed couldn’t go bad. Saturday morning I woke up with a bad stomach, that I thought was from eating a bowl of grapenuts and a cup of hot chocolate at midnight when I got home from Jorma & Bromberg at the Barrymore, but now I think it was the dressing. Mark & John agreed when I told them the story – and thought I shoulda know better than to eat the old dressing. Still, it’s not near as bad as what consuming too much coleslaw had done to me the weekend before.

Tonight for dinner we had the last of the cream of vegetable soup, and I made some muffins and sweet-sour cabbage to go with.

This morning, I ran the last slice of week-old meatloaf and a serving of macaroni salad down the disposal, hoping to avoid future stomach aches.

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