No Country for Old Milk
When cleaning out your kitchen gets personal
I’ve almost made it through the teff flour. That went into a recipe for peanut-butter cookies that I found printed on the side of its bag. The oat, brown-rice, quinoa, and buckwheat flours are proving to be more of a challenge. I spent most of the summer using them in fruit crumbles, but I can eat only so much fruit before things get a bit, well, fraught for my digestive tract, so the bags of flour — souvenirs from the week in early 2012 when I thought I was gluten intolerant — remain in my pantry, as inscrutable and indestructible as Easter Island heads. I’ve considered mixing all of them together, along with the bags of xanthan gum, potato starch, and tapioca flour, just to see what would happen, but I’m fairly certain that what would happen would be something bad, and that would entirely defeat my purpose for the next few weeks, which is to use up all of the food in my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer before I leave New York City for San Francisco.
In the twelve years I have lived in New York, I have moved nine times. On each of these occasions, I have stared at my assorted foodstuffs with equal parts tenderness and abject annoyance, knowing full well that my aversion to wasting food means that it all will be going with me. As a result, I have items in my refrigerator and pantry that are older than the Obama administration, provisions that I convinced myself I would finally eat because it would be such a travesty not to, and yet, here they are still.
There are the Armenian walnuts in syrup, purchased in 2007 and each still fresh as a daisy; the bags of lentils acquired during the winter of 2010, when I was in the throes of a curry fixation; the ten-grain baking blend from King Arthur Flour that some well-meaning person gave me a year or three ago and I stuck in my freezer, where it regards me with silent scorn each time I open the door. And there is the two-pound bag of miso, the one I bought to make that miso butterscotch recipe from the Momofuku cookbook without bothering to ask what I’d do with the remaining one pound, twelve ounces. If I’d bothered, the answer would have been “use one teaspoon at a time on no more than six occasions over the course of the next three years.”
I refuse to move any of this to San Francisco.
And so I’ve been playing what I’ve come to think of as scavenger’s roulette, a game that entails using up as many ingredients as possible in one dish and then seeing what happens. Veggie burgers, ice cream, and dips have proven to be great disposal methods. Last week, for instance, I dumped cooked barley, rehydrated dried porcini mushrooms, and a dip I’d made from lentils and roasted eggplant into a food processor, shaped the resulting goo into patties, and fried them up into something that was actually not half bad. Tomorrow I’ll bake another batch of those peanut-butter cookies and stir them into malted-milk ice cream, along with the pint of chocolate chips that’s been sitting in my freezer for the past year. The bag of bulgur that’s been haunting my cabinet since 2008 is headed for more veggie burgers, followed by the miso, and, probably, some dried chickpeas. Candied orange peel, white-chocolate chips, and that half-eaten jar ofdulce de leche? More ice cream.
I sometimes feel the need to qualify this behavior, to reassure others (okay, myself) that a vast gulch lies between me and the kinds of people who hoard their old receipts and toenail clippings. The primary and most comforting distinction, I suppose, is that I don’t want to save anything; I want to get rid of it, but resourcefully. As with all things, though, good intentions are frequently thwarted by reality, which is, in my case, the reality of wanting to go out to eat or of knowing that, no matter how much I might try to convince myself of the inherent worthiness of bulgur, I’m not particularly excited about eating it.
Fortunately, I know I’m not alone. My friend Laura shares my affliction; she may as well be one of my Jewish ancestors contemplating yet another Romanian winter in the shtetl. Eat everything. Waste nothing. Early in our friendship, we recognized our mutual compulsion and established a system of trade: when one of us was about to go out of town for any more than forty-eight hours, the other would assume responsibility for any item in danger of imminent decomposition. Many dairy products were saved in this fashion, as was the odd tub of hummus. When I told Laura about my plan to eat my way through my kitchen, she nodded in understanding. And when I e-mailed her later to report the almost embarrassing sense of satisfaction I felt upon using up some barley, she wrote back, “Oh, man, I know.”
Thus, I remain determined. I suppose if I were more enterprising or enjoyed photographing my half-cooked meals, I would start some kind of blog chronicling my attempts, and then try to spin it off into a cookbook called something like Stingy Living. But I’ve got the rest of my apartment to pack, and there’s something about this whole thing that doesn’t beg daily dispatches. Eating one’s way through old food is not about making grand statements. It’s about victories so small that they can be viewed only through the same lens used for gazing into one’s navel.
But that doesn’t make them any less significant, not to me, at least. The process of packing up twelve years of my life and crossing a continent feels so large and unwieldy and jumbled with moving parts that it’s almost too surreal to comprehend. But polishing off an aged bag of brown rice? That’s easy. The sense of control it imparts may be fleeting and ultimately misguided, but for the brief moment after I put my fork down on my empty plate, order is restored.
And then that moment passes, and I start wondering if my local ecology center will compost the quart container of pumpkin and sunflower seeds I bought in a Jerusalem market last year, or if maybe it’s time to start experimenting with nut butter.
