Tuesday 9 December 2008

Zen and the Kitchen Cupboard

Today I took a chance and entered a place that only the brave dare risk.... the kitchen cupboards. For those of you who do not believe in Black Magic and the dark arts, trust me, it exists; I found a box of it stashed away at the back, all covered in dust and with a sell by date of some time in 1998, I was quite surprised that it hadn't walked out on its own. My mother's kitchen is living proof that the space/time continuum is real.

Aside from the nuts that time forgot..... they've been reposing in the corner of the top shelf since at least 1991, and everyone is too scared to tackle them without a back up plan and an armed response unit; we have the sardines that no one is likely to eat, mainly because they're the ones in tomato sauce which nobody likes, the sixteen partially consumed rice packets of every shape, colour and variety, three forgotten packets of biscuits, twelve tins of miscellaneous food stuffs.... and about three hundred different condiments and sauce bottles, some without labels..... kamikaze sauce tasting..... any takers??

However, these are not the only culinary horrors that lurk in my mother's repertoire.... there is the dreaded dusty cupboard with Dad's collection of liquers..... I should perhaps point out that my father passed on over thirty years ago, and prior to that he had very little to do with the liquer cabinet, so you do have to bear in mind that some of them have been there since approximately 1960.... Mercifully, time is a great healer, my mother has, mostly, now forgotten about them. So male guests can heave a huge sigh of relief that they won't be required to tackle a particularly soupy Tia Maria, or a rather pungent cherry brandy, or worst of the lot, the Drambuie, which I promise you is older than I am!

I have been serruptitiously throwing these things out.... It would be a lot quicker and easier if I just hired a skip.... or even a succession of them.

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