Decades ago, I had a few dreams about the boxes of Jell-O gelatin and pudding mixes in my grandmother’s kitchen cabinets. The dream would start off with a household scene in any form – from the 1970s, when my grandfather was still alive, or the 1980s, when my cousins were teenagers, or in the 1990s, when the house was empty and dark and dusty and I was there to help clean it out.
In each of those realistic dreams, I would open a drawer or a cabinet and see it full of Jell-O boxes from the 1950s.
That Jell-O scene from the dream came straight from memory, just like the rest of those dream scenes. My grandmother’s kitchen was always stocked with boxes of Jell-O of a package design and style from before my lifetime. I don’t know if they were really from the 1950s, or later or (shudder) earlier, but they were always there. They were within easy reach – in a place that would have been handy to store things that were used regularly – and the arrangement of them never changed (thank goodness she never served them to us). That blast from the past absolutely fascinated me. That must have been what she served my mother and aunts when they were children – imagine! And for some reason she stopped, and the Jell-O boxes remained frozen in time.
There is no danger of that “frozen in time” ever happening in my house. Every now and then – and it has started again now – I go through every food item in the kitchen and the freezer to use it or throw it away. I do not allow myself to prepare any meal that does not include at least one item already in the cabinet.
That 5-pound bag of dried garbanzo beans? We are going to eat chana masala until it comes out of our ears.
The 20 quart bags of frozen pumpkin pulp left over from the fall? Pumpkin curry soup every day, and hurry with that before we are back to 90-degree days and thick hot soup becomes unbearable.
The three or four cans of sweetened condensed coconut milk I bought at a great clearance price at Food Lion, then never used because a couple of days later I got serious about cutting back on desserts? Maybe I can find a recipe for something to bring to someone else’s party.
And then there’s that Cowboy Corn some vendor at the farmer’s market talked me into buying last year. I hate eating canned corn. Why did I even buy it?
It’s spring cleaning time. And as I finally reach the back of my cabinets, I find some gelatin mixtures that I had bought at a Mexican store, thinking it would be fun to try something new. However, what looked tempting and exciting at the store did not inspire any appetite or interest at home.
The last time I purged all my cabinets in a spring cleaning, I left those gelatin packets thinking I would surely use them now that I remembered having them.
I’d better just chuck them straight in the trash, lest any future grandchild discover them decades from now and the cycle of weird foods in grandmother’s kitchen continue.
