I've got a week off work. A whole week with no early taxi ride to an airport, no alarms, no work emails and absolutely no plans to do anything particularly productive. So naturally, I've started it with a cold. Not just a little sniffle either. I feel rotten. Having a new puppy means that it's a bit difficult to take myself back to bed with a hot drink and a box of tissues, so I decided that the most sensible thing to do was bake a cake - a date and walnut cake, to be precise.
Now, I haven't baked a proper cake for ages, so the first job was to check what ingredients I already had. I'd already bought some dates (that's where the idea originated from), but I wasn't entirely sure what was lurking in the baking cupboard. And here's where it all went wrong.
Our kitchen has one of those pull-out cupboard units with four shelves. In theory, it's a brilliant storage solution. In practice, it's where ingredients go to disappear. Nothing is particularly handy, you can't see half of what's in there and retrieving something from the back involves moving approximately seventeen other things first.
After rummaging around for a while, I decided that the whole thing needed sorting out. Because obviously, when you're feeling ill and you've got a week off work, emptying a kitchen cupboard is exactly the sort of restful activity you should be doing. What an archaeological expedition that turned out to be.
First up, three bags of flour that were past their best-before dates. Three! How much flour does one household need to own, especially when nobody can remember the last time they baked anything?
Then came the spices. I'd estimate that about two-thirds of them were past their best-before dates, with most dating back to between 2020 and 2024. But the winners, by quite some distance, were a jar of garam masala and some turmeric.
Best before 2015. Twenty fifteen.
That's eleven years ago. We've had seven Prime Ministers, a pandemic and two more grandchildren have been added to our family since those spices were apparently at their best.
And I know for a fact I've used both of them since 2015 - we're all still alive... just!
To be fair, a best-before date isn't the same as a use-by date, particularly when it comes to dried herbs and spices. They're more likely to lose their flavour than suddenly become dangerous the day after the date on the label. Although I'm fairly sure my garam masala has been contributing absolutely nothing to our curries for quite some time.
I also have to wonder how many times I've bought another jar of something because I couldn't find the one I already had. Probably quite a few, judging by what came out of those shelves.
So, what started as a perfectly innocent attempt to make a cake has turned into a full cupboard clear-out. I've rediscovered ingredients I'd forgotten we owned, established that I probably don't need to buy any more spices for a while and, hopefully, made it a bit easier to find things in future. Whether it'll stay tidy is another matter entirely.
And after all that rummaging, sorting, checking dates and putting everything back in a more logical order, I was still no closer to having a date and walnut cake because I haven't got any bicarbonate of soda or walnuts.
So now I'm going to have to nip to the shops.
UPDATE : the cake!
UPDATE #2 : the cupboard I'm tidying today is the one with all the plastic tubs from the Chinese takeaway that we keep 'just in case we need to store something in the fridge'. Wish me luck!