There are found items – and then there are found items. I guess it depends on how much hunting you put in to find them – and how much you are surprised by what you find.
I have a very small kitchen. I like it a lot – you can stir something on one work surface and reach behind you to get a teaspoon out of the drawer on the other side of the kitchen. That small.
I’m not into small kitchens per se, though it does mean you can get into the cooking when you’re at it. But it also means you need to be wise to how to fit things into a small space.
As time has gone on, more and more food items have tended to go up on top of the cupboards. (Don’t get me wrong, I also keep food in the cupboards. And the fridge. And the freezer. And under the sink, otherwise known as the area where jams and pickles get kept, in the dark.)
But there is more food to keep – particularly if you do things like cook gluten- or dairy-free food. Not all the shops sell what you want, so I tend to buy more at a time when I can get those items. (To be honest, I overstock. I’ve admitted it before.)
I’m telling you all this so that you understand about the space on top of the cupboards. A lot goes up there. Occasionally items get hidden behind other items. And so on.
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All this is help you understand why I discovered soya chunks on top of the cupboards. They were behind something else. I did a bit of kitchen sorting a couple of weekends ago, and found them there.
‘S is for soya chunks’ is not exactly expected. S might be for sunshine, or stones, or squashed items in my coat pockets that I discover on my way to school pick up.
But soya chunks it is. Because it conveys something about me and food: there are always new things to try. I like food, I like cooking (most of the time), and I like trying new ingredients. And most of the time, I do use them. Really.
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I love the lure of food shopping – the discovery element. I particularly love it when abroad, because then it’s exploring in its best sense.
We don’t always know what items are. We may find familiar items next to unfamiliar ones. We may wonder why bread and cigarettes cost the same, and imported yoghurt costs almost twice the same as either. (My experience in Poland, the first time round.)
I don’t get to go abroad so much these days. But a bit of pottering in a Chinese supermarket, a Polish deli, a Mediterranean cash and carry – that almost counts. It is food, but it is not fully familiar to me.
So it is that items like soya chunks get discovered. Or gram flour. Or little cakes of rice that you soak for a long time and then add to a stir fry.
Some of it can be working my way through alternatives to wheat flour. Some of it can be considering ways to expand our diet, and enable the junior eater of the household to try new things.
And some of it, of course, is culinary opportunism.
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The soya chunks are sitting on the work surface by the cooker. They look a tiny bit like the dog biscuit our first dog used to eat (and which I would pinch from time to time).
My sous-chef likes the look of them, and reckons that you can eat them as they are – maybe like small knobbly rusks. But I don’t think we’ll risk that.
What they need is some ideas – maybe a rifle through the cook books. Maybe a quick check online. For now, they sit there, taking up food preparation space, and looking at me, just a little accusingly.
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The extra thing to know about me and food is that I hate wasting it. Call it the inner environmentalist, or the part of me that was surely told to think about children who didn’t have enough to eat. (That thought is still true today, but the style of it suggests that it comes from an older relative.)
So I’ve bought it, I don’t always know what to do with it – but I will use it. Sometimes the household endures experiments because I didn’t want to throw things away. (Some of the experiments also turn out well, but it’s fair to say that they don’t always.)
Between the ‘how do I use this?’ and ‘I should use it!’, some items go back up on top of the cupboards again, there to be discovered when I do a bit of reorganising. And others are left down To Make Me Use Them, like our friends the soya chunks.
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It’s fairly easy to have found items in our homes, at least in Western countries. I do my best not to bring unnecessary stuff through the door in the first place, but it can happen.
With food, it can be easier to make the excuse. Because food doesn’t stay in the same way as a table, or a scarf, or even a second-hand book. Food is there to be cooked, to be eaten, and for the cycle to start again.
There are more dangerous habits to have, I know. But in the meantime, I need to stop backing away from the soya chunks, or at least use things up before I decide to travel again by food shopping.