Cleaning out the freezer and…pork ribs from 2011. Ah, such carefree days….

Your ‘best by ‘ dates, I laugh at them. Ha! Ha, I say!

So, how’d they turn out? Well, unless something rather untoward happens in the next eight hours, just fine. Why wouldnt they? These were vacuum sealed, and have been sitting below zero for the last eleven years. The moral of the story here? If you package meat properly, and keep it consistently frozen, it should be just fine literally a decade later.

This is now officially the oldest meat I have eaten out of my freezer, wildly trouncing the five year old turkey I had a few years back.

Ah.the memories……..

A reader was thoughtful enough to send me this link and there’s some interesting details in it. Specifically:

What consumers didn’t know was that canning lids (around since 1884) and canning jars (around since 1858) are no longer being made by Ball and Kerr, the two big manufacturers of American canning supplies. A few years before the pandemic, these companies had sold out to a mega-corporation called Newell Brands.

….

Since Ball and Kerr were just two more of multiple brands bought out by this company, consumer demands for any one product are not a priority for the mega-corporation. When the 2020 pandemic created a huge demand for canning supplies, Newell Brands decided it would not try to sell Ball and Kerr products at every store handling canning supplies as in the past, but only through online giant Amazon and select major chains such as Walmart and Ace Hardware stores.

I didn’t know that. Did you? I’ve not verified the information on my own, but if true it would mean that domestic production of canning supplies is all under one company which may or may not care about how available those items are.

There are, of course, offshore options. When theres a void in the market you can usually rely on the Chinese to swoop in, create a knockoff version thats 1/10th the quality at 1/2 the price, and then flood the market with it under several different names. Everything I read says that the Chinese canning lids are 50/50 in terms of efficacy.

Clearly canning lids have sort of migrated into the Uncertain Goods category. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stock up on a healthy amount of them, albeit much later than I should have.

Finally decided to pull the trigger and purchase the wildly expensive, but well regarded, Country Living Grain mill. No sooner had I ordered it than the price went up a half hour later. I suppose demand must be high, but geez…it went up something like $70 not long after I ordered it. Fortunately, I beat the increase.

I purchased it because I’m finally at a point in my life where I can afford such things, and also because I’m expanding my cooking repertoire and I’d like to grind my own cornmeal. This, naturally, means I need to start stocking dried corn. I already have a small (<50#) amount of wheat sitting in storage (thank you LDS cannery), but given my enjoyment of things like pasta it makes sense to have the materials to start making it from scratch. Sure, I store flour…and it stores well enough…but not as well or as long as the wheat itself. So…grain mill. I figure between wheat, corn, and rice I’ll be pretty well covered for making things like flour, porridge, polenta, etc.

And, because I’m a suspender-and-a-belt kind of guy I ordered the spare parts kit and a few other accessories as well.

I’m rather looking forward to experimenting. I haven’t baked bread in quite a while and I’m wondering how much of a difference in flavor will be noticed between freshly ground flour and store-bought. There’s a bakery three blocks from where I live and once in a rare while I’ll get some bread there and, dang it, it’s good. So good that just a thick slice of it and some soft, creamy butter is practically a meal all by itself. But, in addition to bread, I also wanna take a swing at making my own fresh pasta and that sort of thing. Also, I’ve found a recipe for a cornmeal porridge that I really, really like and would like to try with fresh cornmeal. So..I guess it was time to spend the money and get the grain mill.

Now I need to head out to the places that sell bulk grains and start seeing whats available. Nice thing is, even without an end-of-the-world it’ll still be nice to have fresh bread and that sort of thing.

It’s not just theory…you really do need to rotate stuff from food storage. Today’s example: salsa from two years ago. It keeps just fine in the classic ‘cool, dark place’..like my basement…but I figured it was time to update. So…a quick trip to CostCo. As you may notice, there are some markings on the lids. The ‘C’ in a circle indicates it was purchased at CostCo, the price is marked on it, and the date.

I keep quite a bit of this sort of product on hand. Cook up some chicken (or open a can of chicken), shread it up, cook it in a bunch of salsa, mix in a large amount of cooked rice, cover with Mexican cheese blend, and eat with corn chips. Cheap, filling, and pretty yummy.

But, the takeaway here is that you need to rotate through your stuff otherwise when you finally need it you might not like what you find. Also, ‘best buy’ dates are wildly conservative.