The Cleaning of the Kitchen Cabinets

Ah, gentle readers!  It's an exciting week here, as my beloved sister and adorable niece are coming to visit.  The anticipation is nigh unbearable.  Even the cats sense the impending joyous reunion and have celebrated by pulling down the new drapes four times, vomiting on the new sheets twice and turning over the water dish once.

My adorable and lovely niece, unfortunately, is afflicted with a nut allergy.  That means that I'm burning off the energy of anticipation by de-nutting the house.  Step 1 is the cleaning out the kitchen cabinets.

Woe unto me, gentle readers, seriously woe!  For even though the cabinets were just cleaned out eight months ago when Mom and I moved back into the house after the Great Falling of the Poplar crisis last spring, we have somehow managed to accumulate a plethora of mysterious food-like items.

This evening, whilst you, gentle readers, were doing something exciting, lucrative or possibly illegal, I found the following in just two of the kitchen cabinets:

• Five bottles of vanilla extract
• Four bottles of lemon extract
• Four bottles of pancake syrup, three of them open
• Nine packages of birthday candles, eight of them white.
• A six-inch solid sculpture of the Great Pyramid of Giza made of brown sugar.  Which I dropped on my foot.  Which hurt.
• Five bottles of olive oil, all of them open.
• A plastic container of flakes of something tan-ish.  Could be coconut flakes.  Could be toenail clippings.
• A ziplock bag full of a mysterious yellow powder.
• A can of organic beets.  I hate beets.
• 1/2 pound of bay leaves.  Seriously.  Do you know how many bay leaves it takes to make up half a pound?  Enough to cover the entire damn kitchen floor when I drop them, that's how many.
• A bottle of pinkish stuff.  It was once either red wine vinegar or fish sauce.  Either way, it's permanently sealed itself into the bottle, so its true identity is lost to posterity.
• A single, lost cube of chicken bouillon.

Of course, now that those two cabinets are de-nutted for my adorable, lovely and brilliant niece, I have no idea what to do with all of this stuff.  Logically, I should throw most of it out, but, well, what if I suddenly need organic beets and I don't have them?  I mean, that's at least $1.29 I won't be seeing again in a hurry.  And what if I intended to buy all of those birthday candles?  Is there a big birthday coming up?  Birthday candles don't go bad, after all.  Surely, I'll use them up eventually.

And, ah!  the bay leaves!  Suppose the zombie apocalypse comes tomorrow, and I get assigned by the Director of the Human Preservation Society to cook soup for one hundred terrified survivors?  Where will I find bay leaf then, I ask you?!  Will I not fall into a black despair if I've composted half a pound of bay leaf when the pathetic remnants of a once great society come to me for a last flavorful repast?

It doesn't bear thinking about.

So into the cabinet most of this stuff goes, unaccompanied by any nuts or nut-related products.  And don't go calling that hoarders show on me either, or you'll find a bottle of mysterious pink stuff sitting accusingly on your doorstep.