Coffee Break Confession: The Spice Cupboard Incident

It started out innocently enough while I was waiting for a batch of cookies to bake the other day. With a few minutes to kill, I decided it was finally time to organize our spice cupboard and toss anything expired.

Here’s the confession part: I can’t even tell you how many spices were expired.

And I don’t mean barely expired—I mean embarrassingly expired.

As I started checking dates, I realized I had actually moved spices that were already expired from my apartment… to our first two houses… and then again to our third house. Who does that??

Even worse, I know I used some of them. A few were obvious fails right from the start, and instead of throwing them away after tasting something off, I just put them right back on the shelf. There were also plenty of spices purchased for one-off recipes that never made it into regular rotation.

Of course, there was the pandemic too—when we were home more, cooking more, and trying new recipes. Those spices made sense at the time. Now? Not so much. We don’t eat at home nearly as often, and apparently, we don’t use the spices.

I felt oddly guilty throwing so many away, but let’s be honest—nobody needs a cream of tartar that expired in 2004. There. I said it.

So now I need to know: is everyone else out there cleaning out their spice cupboards on the regular? Or am I the only one with extremely expired spices quietly aging in the back of the cabinet?

Coffee Break Confessions is a little corner of the internet where we say the quiet parts out loud. If it’s not just me – it might not be just you either.

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