Expired

Okay, so I'm making another quiche tonight. This will be the third in a week. But they're just soooo delicious and easy, how could I possibly resist? Today I'll use onions, spinach, broccoli, swiss, and maybe some canadian bacon. Perhaps I'll even toss in a little artichoke. We don't have a ton of egg left, so it'll have to be thick with cheese and veg. My mouth is watering just writing about thinking about it.

The deal is that my parents are moving. In a week we'll be out of here, and I need to get rid of all their food. Being culinarily disadvantaged, the quiche is my only resort for "throw just about anything in there"-type food. I'd do frittatas as well, but they're just slightly too eggy. I'm a big fan of throwing veggies, beans, and pasta together with some italian dressing and calling it "pasta salad," but my dad insists that we first use the enormous jar of four-bean salad they picked up at Costco in the early eighties. It says "sell by" a few months ago, so it's probably fine.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for the twenty swollen cans of tomato paste I rescued us from a couple of weeks ago. Or the three expired bottles of teriyaki sauce. Or the fifteen cans of water chestnuts. Or the much-regretted mesquite barbecue sauce I had to put in the toss pile. Of course, all this is after my mom did her round of expired-food elimination.

But now that that's mostly over with—and I scored a haul of gourmet hot chocolates for myself and my Cocoa-motion—I feel a bit out of my depth in food experiments. This afternoon's bittersweet chocolate and sweetened condensed milk fudge, which now looks like a pecan-encrusted cow pie coagulating in the fridge, may put a stop to these little endeavors. We'll see if it's pie-worthy or better as cow chips for a fire (pardon the obscure old-westerny reference; I've been watching Firefly).

What I'm really saying is this: Here lies my diet. It was a good diet, and we had some magical times together. I'll take a part of it with me for the rest of my life. Right now, however, it's time to start on that next quiche.