In this throw-away age, everyone is urged to recycle.. We have a separate can for it that is set out each week for pick-up with the garbage. It’s good advice but it can backfire.
Recently, I ordered two jars of raspberry salsa that we like from the Galena Canning Company. When they arrived, the glass jars were wrapped in scads of insulation to ensure that they wouldn’t break enroute. Ken proceeded to remove the paper and plastic with his knife. I didn’t pay any attention to where he put the bottles.
The following day, I bought some corn chips in the store. At lunch time, I took one of the two bottles with a Galena label from the refrigerator and asked my husband to open it. We ate some of the salsa and commented that it had a different texture and tasted different than we remembered. The next day, we had the same lunch. Ken observed, “This tastes a lot like the barbecue sauce I make.”
The next morning, I checked our pantry to see if I had any more strawberry preserves because the jar I used for breakfast was getting low. As I scanned the shelves, I saw two bottles of raspberry salsa, right where Ken had put them when he opened the package. The jars in the refrigerator that I thought were salsa were Ken’s barbecue sauce.
My husband is a fixer who saves everything used or broken because someday, it might come in handy. When he made his last batch of barbecue sauce, he put it in old pint jars with a Galena Canning Company label without marking them. We had been eating his sauce as salsa. I used a marker to put a big K on both of them.
The next time we ate lunch; I opened one of the new jars of salsa. It was the same as we remembered.
Do you recycle?