Insane Kitchen Hoarding Disorders

[haresfur]

I'm really ashamed but I have a tendency to accumulate:

And that's not the complete collection, but you get the idea. Yes, I probably have more carbon footprint tied up in keep-cups/travel mugs than I would ever use getting throw-aways. In my defence, some were freebies, some were inferior designs that were replaced, and some were bought when I realised that I didn't have anything to drink from on a camping trip. But still...

[ChrisTaylor]

Back when I first moved out of home and started cooking for myself, I cooked a lot of curries. Had bags and bags of spices. Mustard seeds and nigella seeds and fennel seeds. Star anise pods. Caraway. Several varieties of chilli powder. White peppercorns, green peppercorns. Black. A rainbow of mustard seeds. Every time you wanted something--a half teaspoon of fenugreek--you'd have to rustle through a mountain of zip lock bags. Burrow through packets of dried whole Kashmiri chillies and bay leaves and sesame seeds. And then, every so often, you'd have to clean up the mess when the seal broke down or a bag split, spilling ground turmeric or nutmeg pods or black cardamom everywhere.

I used some spices, such as coriander seeds and cumin seeds, often. Others, like fenugreek, didn't get a lot of love. Eventually I'd end up with a massive pile of bags of stale spices. I'd discard them and ... start again, often--stupidly, yes--buying another bag of juniper berries or dried oregano or cinnamon before I really needed. Or hunting down and paying a lot for mastic, even tho' aside from that one recipe that called for an 1/8th of a teaspoon's worth I didn't have the slightest idea what to do with the rest of it.

I'd do pretty much the same thing with other ingredients. When I discovered bean and lentil curries were nice, I stocked up on canned chickpeas and canned broad beans and canned mixed lentils like it was the End of Time and Everything Else. I'd buy packets of dried pasta, using 200 grams of this and 400 grams of that, leaving all these opened packets with 50 or 100 grams of spaghettini or penne everywhere. Condiments, too. Every so often I'd have to discard stale bottles of sesame oil (incidentally, don't ever drop a near-full one of those on the kitchen tiles when you're clearing shit out of a cupboard--the smell lasts for weeks) or fish sauce. You know, when the cupboards got to a state where you realised rats or even a whole family of gypsies or something could be living in there, right behind the three half-finished bottles of balsamic vinegar, and you wouldn't even know.

I've stopped now. I promise. I really will get around to those half-finished packets of linguine and orecchiette.

EDIT

My housemate at the time was much, much, much worse, though. I lived with him for three years and in that time I saw him cook maybe ... twice? 'Cook' in the sense of 'place some eggs in a fry pan while consuming tea'. He'd buy these tiny little cartons of milk, God knows where you can find cartons that small (not those individual plastic cups with al foil lids, but actual tiny cartons). He'd open two and once--one to make tea with, the other to bury behind all my condiments and shit until he wound up with a stinking cardboard tub of matured cheese. He'd buy a heap of tomatoes ('dinner' was one of two things: food court-grade 'Asian' food purchased at the end of the day, when everything's being thrown out for next to nothing, or a toasted sandwich of cheddar and tomato) and just dump them all in the fridge. Sometimes he'd forgot about them or maybe just have a fortnight's worth of takeaway and I'd wind up having to get rid of a freezer bag of passata. The worst, I think, had to have been the mangoes: must've bought a couple and then just dumped them in the bottom of the vegetable freezer. I found them several months after the date of purchase during one of my semiannual kitchen blitzes. The liquid that had pooled at the bottom of that fridge looked and smelt like it was half way to home brew mango beer.

Edited October 15, 2011 by ChrisTaylor (log)

[haresfur]

Oh, I forgot to add that one of the steel Thermos bottles was an award for bringing my own plate to a company picnic that was touting energy savings. The packaging that the bottle came in contained more cardboard and plastic than the little paper trays used for serving the hot dogs...

[Mano]

After reading this thread I thought, "For the first time in my life I feel normal."

[StanSherman]

Two people. Three refrigerator/freezers, one solo freezer and a RV with refrigerator/freezer. We have a limestone basement that doesn't fluctuate more than a couple of degrees. 400-500 quarts, 300-400 pints, 50 1/2 gallons of preserved home grown produce. This weeks project is taking the popcorn harvest and putting it into jars. (12) 1/2 gallons so far.

I sure hope the end of the world comes soon, cause I'm starting to get a little self-conscious with the Amish laughing at me.