Vintage Holidays, The Easter Edition

What do you serve on a holiday? Why, mashed potatoes mixed with rock-solid ranch seasoning of an unknown vintage, of course! You know your food was made with love when the seasoning has to be laboriously scraped from its container.



I'll admit that they tasted good, but there ARE leftovers....

A Tale of Two Cheeses

These cheeses were lovingly named in the 80s or 90s. They have been peering at me from above the pantry shelves for years. I honestly thought they were some jams in a box since I could only see the side, boy how wrong I was.....

I have never before met cheeses named as these two were, but I have to say it certainly made it harder for me to part with them. 'Swissy' and 'Sharpy' are not real cheeses, don't be fooled. If you are able to zoom in on Swissy you will see he is actually a 'Pasturized Process Cheese Spread Swiss-Type Flavor'. Um gross!!! This is worse than plastic cheese!!!

After making proper introductions, I felt comfortable becoming more intimately aquainted with Swissy so I opened him up....

....and sniffed him. I did say we were properly introduced, right? It seems that while this isn't actually a real cheese, it smelled like that powdery 'cheese' you find inside those square cracker sandwiches. Gross but not disgusting. Given the age and the fact that there might be a hint of dairy somewhere in the food I chose to pass on eating any.

I did however, take a look at Sharpy, an unidentified type of 'Pasturized Process Cheese Spread'. I would venture to guess he was supposed to be a sharp cheddar. He didn't seem to survive the storage as well. The metal ties on each end were corroded and powdery and inside you can see the pool of darker fluid around my finger mark. That was as far as I dared to go with him. I could only imagine the smell that could come out of him since he was gooey.

I'll have to pass on these.

Goodbye Swissy and Sharpy! It was nice to know you.

How does old spice paste taste?

I have to say, this one was pretty good! I don't have anything to poke fun of, so this will be a disappointing post. The gross ones are the best, aren't they? If they weren't, this project wouldn't be any fun.

The slightly greasy bottle of Moroccain Spice Paste had only been expired for 7 years. "Only" is a relative term here--we've had scarier findings.

Adding the spice paste to some water and rice in a rice cooker produced pretty good results! I added in some ground lamb and cilantro and successfully passed it off as regular food. Hopefully, no one who ate it will read this. 

Moral of the story--always ask questions when I hand you food ;) 

Vintage Seeds - The Experiment, Day 14

Well, for the record, vintage seeds are a bad idea. They just plain don't grow. The newish seeds exploded out of the ground with a vengeance, not so for the vintage seeds. As you can see on the left, nothing.

Even with a fluffy 10 lb cow grazing on the sprouted beans (and peeing on them from the smell of it) the new plants are thriving.

I feel betrayed by the vintage side. I had such hope.

Soup de jour

Well, more like "soup de century" since these two boxes of Lipton Chicken Noodle Cup-a-Soup have been sitting around on a shelf for quite some time. With their pre-1994-style nutrition fact labels, the little packets of sodium-filled joy were cying out to be rehydrated. How could I deny them?

As I held the quivering spoon full of hot liquid up to my nose, I have to say, it smelled like soup. And, more surprisingly, it *tasted* like soup! Well, as close to soup as those things can get, anyway. Luckily, although it's been several hours since I slurped down the Cup-a-Soup, I haven't had to make a mad dash for the bathroom. Good thing, since I went to work not too long after ingesting it. Probably not the smartest decision in my life, but luckily it turned out ok.

After passing the taste test, the rest of the packets now belong in my Emergency Food stash at work--in case I end up not bringing dinner with me. It happens pretty regularly, so they shouldn't last too much longer (thankfully). Maybe I'll follow the tested recipe from The Lipton Kitchens I found listed on the box. Apparently, it's restricted to cheese lovers only. I am definitely a cheese lover, so that authorizes me to add in some shredded American cheese. Do they really need more than one kitchen to test adding shredded cheese? If that sort of "recipe" comes from the Lipton Kitchens, I'd hate to see what they have lined up for Thanksgiving dinner.

The only thing that worries me is that, although they seemed fine, should I really be eating 15-year-old shelf-stable chicken? Especially since the box boasts "No Preservatives." I'm just going to reassure myself that those tiny hard nuggets of chicken have been well protected by all the added salt and MSG, and leave it at that.

Cherries Galore

A long time ago, probably in the last millennium, someone thought it was a good idea to purchase a vat of maraschino cherries - a half-gallon of them to be exact. Well as it turns out, they were not so popular.




8 years after their expiration date they aren't looking so hot. There is a bit of brown goo on the right hand side (maybe you can see it if you squint really hard). I bravely opened the jar but found that the smell was less of a maraschino cherry smell than it was of a formalin smell - think high school dissection lab. Perhaps not surprising since the New York Times apparently once called them "The culinary equivalent of an embalmed corpse."

Rumor has it that maraschino cherries were made from Oregon cherries (Go Beavs!) since, to make a long story short, their cherries got all mushy in transportation and were considered sub-par. The allegedly delicious Italian maraschino cherries were taxed so highly no one bought them so now we're stuck with duds.

Maybe I'll stick with fresh cherries from now on.

I-Scream Cone

I think I heard somewhere that New Englanders eat more ice cream than any other part of the country. I certainly feel like I have contributed significantly to this number but miss the roadside ice cream stands in the winter. There are a few more weeks (or days hopefully) until the stands open again so what better way to get ready for the summer ice cream frenzy than by warming up my ice cream muscle with 5 year-old chocolate-dipped ice cream cones and some ice cream from a box?!?

As you can see from the picture, the bottom cone is crumbling and missing most of one side. The chocolate is crumbly (and all over the counter) and unfortunately what little taste it had was chalky.

On top of that, the cone itself was chewy as can be expected at that age. Well the ice cream was good and I ate the cone first to get rid of it before getting down to business.

Well, I can only look forward to warmer weather and fresh ice cream in a new cone. Preferably with the milk cows the ice cream came from in the distance (though I could do without the flies)!