Corona Chronicles: Kitchen shelves are spiced up

Now I or HP (Husband Person) make home-cooked meals at least five days of the week in normal times. These meals will require some herbs and spices of sorts, but certainly not all of them at once. Some of them you use more regularly, like the mixed herbs or chicken spice, but my ginger spice and cloves didn’t go to private school so aren’t used quite as much. But there they sit in their big hundred millilitre bottles that are three-quarter full, until they expire and have to be thrown away. Two days later, I will stumble across a recipe that requires ginger spice and will need to rush off at a furious speed to our local supermarket to buy another bottle. And so the cycle continues.

Personally I feel a bit sorry for that ginger spice as they really are a bit like the awkward girl with glasses and braces in high school that never got asked to dance at discos. (Hey, back in my day there were no Christian Dior or Jeep glasses – you had a choice between hideously frumpy or Great Auntie Mabel styles).

It’s the same with the mint sauce. Now, I don’t know about you, but we certainly don’t have roast lamb once a week. Heck with the current prices of lamb, my bank manager won’t even let us have it once a month. So for the two to three times a year we do have it, we have a big jar of mint sauce, that you know, without doubt, has no remote chance of being finished before it expires. And the cranberry jelly has more chance of turning into wine than it does of being finished before its sell-by date. I mean, not sure about your part of the world, but the turkeys normally only appear in our kitchen around Christmas time.

And let’s not even start on the poor horseradish sauce which sits lonely and forgotten in a dark corner of the fridge. (Although I have zero clue as to why I even own a bottle of it, but please don’t tell it as it may hurt its feelings!)

So, my dear manufacturers, to lessen the social anxiety and psychological damage of these herbs and spices and condiments, could you be so kind as to package them in smaller dinky-size bottles too so that we have choices when we buy them? This way we can flatten the curve and stop these poor blessings having to be sent to their grave when they expire.

Yours in nutmeg and five-spice powder

MP (Mom Person)

Missed some of the other Corona Chronicles? Check them out here:

Corona Chronicles: Witty Joburg resident documents past five days of social distancing

Corona Chonicles: A guide to sorting your cupboard when you have an emotional bond with your clothing

Corona Chronicles: Lockdown makes Joburger confront gridlocked passage and a lipstick dilemma

Corona Chonicles: Are mops considered an ‘essential’ item?

Corona Chronicles: Chicken or beef?

Corona Chronicles: Worry over wine stock after husband accidentally breaks three bottles

Corona Chronicles: All dressed up and off to the shops she goes