I like falafels, and a couple of times in the past I\u2019ve made them at home from a mix.<\/p>\r\n
So at some point in the distant past I acquired another box of falafel mix, with the intention of making falafels. But then I didn\u2019t get around to making them.<\/p>\r\n
And of course as time went on, the likelihood that the mix was too old to be good increased, which made me less likely to make them. But I hate throwing out food, so I just left the box on the shelf.<\/p>\r\n
But I recently bought pita and hummus for the first time in a while, and the falafel-mix box was just sitting there, and I now have convection-oven capabilities so I can get something resembling frying without dealing with oil and a frying pan. So last night I decided to go ahead and try the mix.<\/p>\r\n
(I was pleased to see that the only added ingredient I needed was water, so if the mix turned out to have gone bad, I wouldn\u2019t be wasting any additional food\/ingredients.)<\/p>\r\n
Turned out to be really easy to prepare. Following the instructions, I poured the mix into a bowl, added water, let it sit for 10 minutes, preheated the toaster oven, and then formed little patties and put them on a baking sheet. (In the past, I think I\u2019ve tried to form round balls and immerse them in hot oil, which I recall being significantly messier.)<\/p>\r\n
They finished cooking, and I took a bite of one\u2014<\/p>\r\n
\u2014and it was terrible. It had very definitely gone bad.<\/p>\r\n
So I had something else for dinner, and I\u2019m composting the mix.<\/p>\r\n
A relatively painless experiment, and now I have one less box of expired food in my cupboard.<\/p>\r\n
Next up: a box of latke mix that expired in early 2017.<\/p>\r\n
(The falafel-mix box has a \u201cbest before\u201d date stamped onto it, but that date says \u201c0V1501A,\u201d which reads to me more like a starship serial number than an expiration date.<\/p>\r\n
But I suspect it means that the mix was intended to be used before January 2015.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19614"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19616,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19614\/revisions\/19616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}