An embarrassing confession

[Primrose]

It's all very well preserving the surplus produce you grow but one does need to be realistic about your ability to use it up, especially if you're a small household.
Over the weekend we cleared out all our kitchen food storage cupboards and found enough home made jam & marmalade to last the rest of our lives! , We also found two large bottles of blackcurrant, redcurrant & blackberry syrup I made in 2012 (yikes,) which had totally solidified into a solid jelly blob! . The only way I can think of getting rid of them is taking them down the tip because immersing the bottles in hot water had not melted the jelly.

Am I the only person guilty of such over storage? And this despite giving away produce away in the past. I won't bore. (or entertain you) with some of the ancient relics we found but some almost deserved space in the British Museum !

Signing off hanging head in shame......

[retropants]

oh yes, me too! I have been clearing out the garage and found some 2009 damson jam and pickled red cabbage!! The Cassis in the dining room is about 15 years old, I'm sure it will be fine.It's not that I don't want to drink it, I just forget it's there!

[Primrose]

I'm glad I'm not the only person with these embarrassing caches. What grieves me is all the time And trouble I went to pickling lots of cucumbers, beetroot,red cabbage etc only to find that they were put at the back of the cupboard to sit out their "maturing" time and then forgotten about.

Mr Primrose has now made a complete inventory of everything we have which is stored on his iPhone. I don,t know how long this good habit it will last but it will hopefully ensure our grocery shopping is better organised and we don,t buy stuff just because we can,t remember whether we've got any in stock or not.

We have a tall food cupboard which goes from floor to ceiling and I keep stocks of dry goods like pasta and rice in those big glass sweet shop jars. I was shocked just how much stuff was lurking in the dark depths of the cupboard which are rarely accessed. Good job I'm not over fussy about "best before" dates. The good thing is that future shopping bills should reduce in size a little while we try and run down some of these surpluses.

I think I must get this storage habit from my grandmother & mother as a result of being a wartime child when food was short and on ration. Old habits obviously die hard !

Yes, our spirits/alcohol cabinet also is full of stuff bought duty free or donated by friends and rarely reduces very quickly. At least that stores well! I joked with my husband that we',ll probably have enough left to save on embalming fluid ! (Apologies Pa Snip ...your black humour lives on!

[robo]

When we sorted out my grandmother's house out after she died amongst other things we found 28 two pound bags of sugar

[Elmigo]

Last year I had way too many tomatoes to eat myself. They can't be stored forever so I gave a lot of them to my neighbours and friends and they loved it. Nothing compares home grown greens! Not even the perfectly rounded tomatoes laying in the store to catch the eyes of hungry costummers...

[Geoff]

We are storers and hoarders. I try and persuade my wife we should only shop once a month, I don't usually manage it but this year is looking good with only four supermarket shops so far. Never mind checking the shelves for ancient jams and pickles (we have almost stopped bottling fruit that seemed to hang around even worse) what about investigating the UFOs (Unidentified Frozen Objects)?

[Primrose]

Oh I have my own UFO story! I make a lot of home made soups. We have a village butcher who will regularly give us a carrier bag full of chicken carcasses which we cook down to make chick stock to freeze in plastic bags. On one occasion I ferreted around in the freezer for such a bag, found one unlabelled and threw it into the cooking vegetable mixture.

Turned out it was gooseberry purree. It looked pretty identical. I now try and keep my chicken stock bags and fruit mixtures on different shelves in the freezer. Needless to say, the soup mixture had to be tossed.

[Shallot Man]

Oh I have my own UFO story! I make a lot of home made soups. We have a village butcher who will regularly give us a carrier bag full of chicken carcasses which we cook down to make chick stock to freeze in plastic bags. On one occasion I ferreted around in the freezer for such a bag, found one unlabelled and threw it into the cooking vegetable mixture.

Turned out it was gooseberry purree. It looked pretty identical. I now try and keep my chicken stock bags and fruit mixtures on different shelves in the freezer. Needless to say, the soup mixture had to be tossed.

But what did it taste like ?

[Stephen]

Oh, I certainly have chutney made 5 years ago. It is fine but looses the distinctive flavours.

[Primrose]

Tasted like nothing you can imagine but in retrospect it was probably a missed opportunity.
All the "cheffie " tv cooking pundits come up with all kinds of weird and wonderful food combinations these days.
I should probably have served it up at a dinner party garnished with a buttercup or two and called it Meadow consume.
It might have been fun watching everybody taking a first taste and waiting for the inevitably polite responses "This tastes "interesting"!

[Primrose]

Elmigo, next time you have surplus tomatoes, chop them up and fry them with onions and garlic until you have a soft mixture. This can be frozen and will make a tasty base for all kinds of pasta and casserole dishes. A shame to waste all the results of your efforts.

[robo]

I just freeze any spare tomatoes last year it was around 170 the only thing you can't use them for when defrosted is salads

[Stephen]

I have checked:- the jar of chutney I am using at the moment is dated 2011!

[richard p]

amateurs.... we had 2005 strawberries in the crumble last weekend, we have decided the 30 year old chest freezer is being replaced by an upright one with drawers.

when we cleared out my grandmothers some of the jars of jam had dried to a column up the middle.

[Primrose]

Thank you for all your confessions. You make me feel much better. I suppose we're all a little guilty of having an over-storage problem of some items and as long as they haven't gone bad I guess they still have some kind of food value. I'm sure that in the animal kingdom when some creatures store away their food for hard times they don't worry about Use Before dates !