Have you ever heard the impertinent retort at a restaurant - 'You want a tip.....don't eat yellow snow.'? I can remember thinking how funny this was when I was in high school, hearing it for the first time. Other 'useful' tips came from my mother and other mothers as they exhorted their children, male and female, to: don't make that face, it will freeze that way; be sure to change your underwear every day in case you end up in the hospital; keep the light over your right shoulder to save your eyesight; eat plenty of carrots to improve your eyesight; don't sit too close to the television, it will harm your eyesight (Ever notice how many of these exhortations had to do with eyesight?); don't run with scissors, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I can remember a friend whose mother was always giving us 'motherisms', often yelled from another room, and this friend would cover her ears, squeeze her eyes shut and blow air out loudly so as not to hear anything her mother said. I wonder if this childhood friend remembers anything her mother ever said?
A tip that I'd like to pass along is this: Read the expiration dates on all food packaging. I'm consistent about reading the expiration dates on dairy products and meat products and I'm learning to read the expiration dates on soda cans simply because we do not consume many carbonated beverages and once these products loose their carbonation, the flat taste can be disgusting, but outdates on cardboard packaging? Not so good at and it came back to bite me in spades last night.
I had a tasty meal planned: Lightly breaded flounder fillets, fresh broccoli, and couscous. The couscous, which turned out to be the offending food, was the pine nut variety, one of our favorites. We sat down to eat and I took one bite of the couscous and said to my SO, "Does this taste funny to you?" He tried it but in his first bite he had no pine nuts. A subsequent bite brought a screwed- p face and we both decided that the pine nuts tasted rancid. A quick look at the box by the person who has his masters degree in food engineering brought an "OMG" response. He wouldn't tell me what the outdate on the box was but he insisted that we throw out the rest of the couscous and he NEVER throws out food.
So, do read the expiration dates on all of your packages. Save yourself from having to see the screwed-up face on your SO. After all, it might freeze that way!
Ancora imparo
