Mmmmm Marinara

I found this vintage marinara sauce. No expiration date to tell me how old but I've seen it around forever. It also had a lovely crust on the inside of the jar when it was opened.



It made a great pita pizza though. :)

More Cherry Madness?!?

Seriously! I found some more. Brown, flaky and gooey in their jar with no expiration date in sight. After the taste test they were found to still taste good so stay tuned for an update with some homemade Cherry Garcia ice cream.



It looks like a diseased liver, that's going to be some nasty looking ice cream!

If I Only Had A Snoopy Sno Cone Machine

I'd stick these icy suckers in and see if I could make some shaved fruits. Not having the machine I'm making the ever popular smoothies out of them. The fruit is still good, even having an expiration date of 2005. This makes the fruit a minimum of 5 years old.

Yummy!

Extreme Vintage - Finast Edition

There hasn't been a Finast Grocery store around in decades but the matches linger on.

I think this is what they mean when they say, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.

Shrimp Cocktail Anyone?

Would you still want them if the lid of the jar had a blackish discoloration on it? I sure wouldn't!

I'm In Love!

....with this Coffeemate powder. I wake up every morning just craving my coffee with a raft of powdery creme brulee goodness in it. It expired in January 2008 but I don't care. I've been drinking it every morning for weeks trying to think of something mean to say but I have no snarky remarks, only sadness that this jar of processed powder will soon be gone, never to return again.

Why oh why must you be a special edition!?!?!

(Note: For those who don't know me I'm a coffee snob, no flavorings, no powders, other than chocolate, no coffee for that matter unless it's really, really strong or in the form of espresso, I'm so sad and confused that this could ever happen.)

PSA

I was sent this link in an email today by a concerned friend. It tells the actual amount of time to keep food before you should throw it away. The email said that she thought of me when she came across the article, I'm not sure why....

Anyway, here is the link for those of you who prefer not to live on the edge.

The link I was sent was this. The comments are priceless, they come in the form of "OMG I can't believe I have salad dressing in my fridge from 2007, gross!" Oh, if they only knew how the other half lived. :)

That link led me to this.

Apparently you aren't supposed to eat pizza after leaving it out on the counter all night. Shoot, I thought if you cooked it again you were good. Happy reading!

Some of You May Have Eaten These Last Weekend....

....and have absolutely NO idea they were made with chocolate chips that expired in December 2007. Not only that but there are a whole lot more where those chips came from.

They are good, don't get me wrong but you're still an unwilling participant. Sorry about that, I'll try not to let it happen again!

Oh Please No!

I ate this vintage manwich sauce not really knowing what a manwich was other than what the commercials from the 80s told me. I probably begged for the stuff back then thinking it was something really great. They say hindsight is 20/20.



Being a vegetarian, I made this Manwich with fake hamburger. The fake hamburger was of questionable vintage, you can see it is very icy which happens when food has spent a bit of time visiting the freezer. This added to the challenge.


I opened the slightly crusty jar of Manwich sauce (purchased at Star Market) which apparently although having the extra chunky bits added to it, is nothing more than a jar of poor quality barbecue sauce. I smelled it and was not impressed.



Not to be dissuaded, I browned my ground beef (isn't that what you did with all '80s meals?) and dumped the jar of sauce on it, stirred well and put it in a hamburger bun like they said. I could feel it rotting my stomach but I finished it like a champ and proceeded to complain for about 2 hours until the feeling passed. I don't think I'll be eating it any more.

I guess the 5 year old can of Manwich I also found might have to go directly into the trash. I couldn't even donate it to a food pantry and feel good about myself in the morning if it hadn't expired.

Even the Cat Wants In

When deciding whether or not throw away these old cat treats (they expired two years ago), the cat found them. After she repeatedly flung them off the shelf where they were kept I finally let her have them.



Apparently even a cat who is fed million dollar cat food wants some vintage kitty treats every now and then.

Blueberries of Happiness

Or maybe not....


This bag of blueberries from Big Valley had turned into a big mess. It was 3 parts freezer burn, 4 parts ice and one part (that's stretching it) shriveled-up blueberries.



Apparently ice counts in the weight listed since when I thawed them out, there was less than a cup of blueberries in that huge bag.



They smelled like vomit and freezer burn so I think they will be better used as compost for the garden than for food.

But Wait, There's More!

Apparently the vintage title isn't really limited to food around these parts. This container should probably be renamed 'Just Barely Wet Ones'.

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)!