My pantry is a mess.

Even though we are no where near Spring, it feels like Spring cleaning time at the Auble household.  And by Spring cleaning, I mean it's time to clean out the pantry.  You see, Thanksgiving and Christmas are a bit of a whirlwind for me with nonstop cooking, baking, decorating, buying, re buying, re baking; I barely have a second to breath.  So once it is all over, I like to go through my holiday tornado ravaged pantry and make it all pretty again.  This is also when I seem to find out that I have multiple bottles of red food coloring, bags of sugar, molasses, and anything else I kept buying because I couldn't find it when I first needed it.  This doesn't just apply to my kitchen life mind you, I also just ran across 3 Ghostbusters t-shirts when cleaning out my closet.  I had bought the same shirt 3 times, and I wonder why I am un-employed *sigh*.

The offending pantry

Have you ever found something in the back of a cupboard that you just had to buy (tamarind pulp) and once you got around to using 4 years later, found it to be expired?  That is a sad fact of life for me.  It's always something that I had really good intentions for, but never quite made it into a recipe.  Good news about the tamarind pulp though, I ended up using it as I saw no mold or expiration date.  I made a pretty mediocre steak sauce with it, but was still smugly satisfied with myself for tearing open that package.

-Jenny