Dates on food

Note to all readers: I'm not a microbiologist, things I write in this post are my OPINIONS and EXPERIENCES, not necessarily legally or scientifically confirmed facts. I have NEVER had a food poisoning in my life, never. Neither have my children.

 Here in the outer rim of Europe, we have only three types of dates in our food/products.

One that is very rarely used is date of manufacture/packaging/harvesting. It is used on for example on strawberries on summer or wild fish (harvested 28/06/2026; fished on 27/03/2026) or on something, that is usually eaten on the very same day it is bought (and cooked). (you know strawberries can go bad very fast, so it is up to buyer to see how long they are edible)

More common is expiration date. It is a date after which something should no longer be used, either by operation of law or by exceeding the anticipated shelf life for perishable goods. To be honest, I rarely think expiration date as the the last date I will use that product. However, I want to strongly emphasize that I do not recommend anyone to use food after the expiration date! It requires knowledge and accuracy to be able to determine whether something is still usable - and this is greatly depended on how the product has been stored. Usually, the food ingredients that I use after the expiration date are, for example, dairy products, whose shelf life is already several weeks before that expiration date. And then there are products that are often spoiled BEFORE that expiration date, minced meat and especially minced chicken is one of them. So DO NOT USE food after it's expiration date, if you do not know what you are doing. However, the food does not spoil microbiologically in the freezer, its quality may suffer from long freezing, but it is microbiologically just as edible as it was when it was put in the freezer. And if it was spoiled before freezing, it will be spoiled after freezing too.

The best before date is exactly what it says. The product is at its best before that date (it’s often a month/year, not a day/month), but it’s still edible after that date. Depending on the product, it can be edible for years after the best before date. Who has ever noticed salt gone moldy? I use eggs several WEEKS after they best before- dates. And I store eggs on top of our dishwasher, at room temperature. Here eggs are not washed so they keep longer (here if eggs are washed, they can't be sold to consumers, only to food industry or bakeries). I'm not going to list here all products and how they must be stored and how long they will keep - internet is full of information on that. Some of which is total bullshit, pardon my french.

Then there's loose fruits and vegetables, and they have no date on them. It is up to me, you/whoever is buying and eating them to see if they are good or not.

What to do with free food...

I'm preparing communal coffee meeting tomorrow. I had to fetch coffee machine (a big one, like they have in those roadside service station shops in the US tv-series and movies). While I was there, I was asked whether I wanted to have some free food (kind of a food pantry, again). Well yes please!

I got salmon fillet! It was on it's last legs, so no use to put it into freezer, it would've been spoiled while thawing. Carrots, cabbage, courgettes and a lonely wrinkly red bell pepper.

So, what do you make out of those?

I usually bake salmon in the oven, but this one was a bit on the smaller side, so it wouldn't feed us all. And all the veggies... Well, you can ALWAYS make stir fry, can't you?

Ok, veggies vere a bit overcooked, I miscalculated timing with these. I cut the salmon into small strips/pieces, marinated it with soy and teriyaki sauce and then quickly fried, cut all veggies and fried them with garlic and some spices, and cooked noodles. I have sesame seeds and used those to garnish the dish. Very nice indeed.

It was so good, that ys ate rest of the veggie stir fry with noodles today. He doesn't eat fish, it makes him feel odd (his own words, not sick, but odd) but he said salmon was very good anyway, he tasted it!

Noodles and spices were not free, but I tried to calculate costs: soy sauce and teriyaki maybe 0,20€, noodles 1,25€, oils and other spices 0,25€? So for less than two euros we had very tasty dinner (and some lunch, too) for all.

I'm very thankful.

Baking with 6 year old yeast

 I'm going through my pantries and freezers. I know I have some oldies but goldies in there - and then some which are not so... perfect things.

So, the yeast. I thought I've used all of the ancient ones, but I found one more lonely OLD packet of block yeast (I have a whole box of block/fresh yeast from last autunm from the rejected foods I got for free/with little money). Me being me I didn't put it in the compost bucket, no. I put it in a little bowl with warm(ish) water and some sugar. And then I waited. And waited, and waited some more.

And then, after five or six hours I saw some bubbles! Next morning (about 14 hours after I took it out of the freezer) I saw this:

IT'S ALIVE!!!!!!!!

I gave it a little more sugar and a spoonful of rye flour. After few more hours it was bubbling very happily, so I made a dough. And me being me I just didn't make standard bread dough. No, because I have several carrot-rice casseroles  in my freezer (also from the rejects). It's a common christmas dish here, and we like it, but like 10 containers is just too much in one christmas. So...

My five grain and carrot bread dough! Five grain: rice, rye, wheat, barley and oat. At this point rice looked a bit funny on the surface.

We eat more buns than loaves, so:

This picture doesn't tell the truth, they we very orange. Sometimes the colour fades in baking, but not this time!

So butter, a nice cup of tea and all was well. You really can't tell there's rice. But you absolutely can see there's carrots.

Maybe I should tell the yeast producer how resilient product they have 😃