wot are we like?

Dau.II and her feller came across country to visit for a few days last week. When you double number of mouths, it opens up the menu a bit. It's not really worth making, from scratch, a chicken pie for one; with company there can be economies of scale . . . and >!lamb vindaloo!<. [aside: vindaloo is borrowed from Portuguese de vinha d'alhos - the wine and garlic marinade which starts the process off]. The vindaloo was all hopped up with spices because we are all well 'ard on the scoville scale. One of the consequences was that Bob le Plongeur had to wash-up 3 spice jars.

There was a time when we'd bags of "Indian" spices and decant them into little jars on the spice rack. But if the family have left home and you're not inviting the neighborhood to eat regularly, then many of the volatiles have evaporated or gorn orf before the big bag is empty. So now I buy red white black pepper; cumin, turmeric, coriander, from ALDIDL in robust glass jars with solid plastic snap-lids incorporating a shaker [examples L]. It is a terrible wrench to throw these handy, cleanable, functional and re-usable objects away. We have a box in the shed that has enough of these glass mini-bottles to make a complete chess-set - black and white pieces both.

In these The End of Days I'm doing my best to insulate my future self from regret about the food and materials that I heedlessly sent to land-fill before I knew any better.  It will be embarrassing, noisome, and dangerous to be making trips to a post-Apocalypse Powerstown dump excavating a cliff of trash 20m tall looking for glass jars, steel cans and shirts-missing-a-button.