1. Finally, I've gathered all those broken corn chips and corn chip crumbs (yellow chips, white chips, blue chips, whole grain chips, etc), from all the crinkly, conserved bags and constructed a chip/bean/cheese/salsa pie. The verdict? Topped with a little sour cream, it was reasonably good and the kids ate it with relatively few questions.
2. A can of organic pumpkin pie filling?? What was I thinking...and when?!? This is clearly leftover from my days at the Park Slope Food Coop. Let's see....joined straight out of college in the mid-1980's and suspended my membership when we moved out of Brooklyn in 2005. This could be a rare vintage can of heirloom pumpkin. While I'm absolutely certain the contents are at least safe, if not fresh, I'm leery of bringing a pie made from the stuff to a family Thanksgiving meal. So, I make a pre-Thanksgiving pie (as though the kids like pumpkin pie soooo much...). Upon tasting the filling straight from the can, it's a little bland and tinny. Unfortunately, I had no other canned pumpkin pie filling experiences with which to compare it, so I made a straightforward pie. It was perfectly passable, but nothing exciting.
3. Polished off a jar of Thai chili paste with garlic...used that in a noodle stir fry. This worked fine...
4. Attempted some rolled oat breakfast-type bars..was able to use the last of some dried cranberries (lightly sweetened) and some Lebanese Halwima with chocolate. This last is a crunchy halawa spread that I'm certain I bought at Sahadi's on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Again, pre-2005 vintage. The bars were edible but crumbly and a little bland....I can't legitimately blame the Halwima, though, nor the cranberries.
5. Beans, beans, plenty of beans. Cans of organic pintos, black beans, chick peas, refried beans, etc. I'm getting very creative with burritos and tacos...
Going forward, which can of what foodstuff have I got my eye on ? Well, there's some French pureed chestnuts with the warning/instruction of "A consommer de preference avant fin: 1991". Hmmmm.... even my single year of college French is enough to give me pause. My main experience with chestnuts is at my Italian grandmother's dinner table around the Christmas holidays...and those were roasted...and I never liked them all that much. Now, I'm not sure what these canned chestnuts tasted like the day after they were packaged, at the height of their tinny goodness, so I won't be able to gauge how much degradation the taste may have undergone, if any. I've found a chestnut cheesecake recipe that looks darn good. I mean, it IS cheesecake after all, so I'm thinking that even if the French chestnuts have lost ALL their flavor, the cheesecake will be just fine..... More news as it develops (provided I survive any gases that may escape upon the initial opening of the can).
See.....as I wrote, I wasn't really looking for a job!
