Originally published by The Clifton Courier July 24

Last time I took a holiday, I prepared a bunch of columns before I left to ensure I could still irritate the fine township of Clifton even while I was out of the country. I wrote a bunch of ramblings that somewhat resembled recipes, which weren’t exactly time sensitive and, therefore, could be described as timeless. Classics even, at a stretch.

This time I plan on employing the same strategy, but with a mundane little twist to spice things up slightly.

I’m moving house before I leave and I have a lot of items on my shelves in the fridge and pantry to clear out before I take off. There are half-finished items that I can’t really justify taking with me to my new digs, but can’t handle throwing away. They’re still good; just opened.

So I’m setting myself a challenge to create appetizing and hopefully entertaining recipes using the stuff I have leftover in my pantry and fridge. It’s kind of like a low-budget Ready, Steady, Cook except I have no time limit and I’m allowed to drink wine while I do it.

So that’s what you’re going to get for the next few weeks, you lucky, lucky duckies.

But before I get into these questionable recipes, I have to acknowledge the ingredients that cold not be saved. These items were in a container I took home with me from Armidale, stored at my parents’ house while I was in Sydney and, for some reason, thought I would use when I moved back to Brisbane. As you can imagine, they are well past their use-by dates. Most of them are half-used, waiting to be turned into health slice or bliss balls or something equally as annoying, but that wasn’t to be.

Bee pollen: Yep, bee pollen. It was, at one stage, one of those super trendy superfood things. It was the kind of stuff influencers used to sprinkle on top of smoothie bowls. I have no idea what it was supposed to be good for or how it was supposed to transform my life, but I thought it would taste kind of honeycomb-y. And despite someone who puffs up like a balloon when stung by a bee and gets hit pretty hard at hay fever season, I thought bee pollen would be a goer. Don’t worry – it didn’t cause an allergic reaction. In fact, it was the opposite; it was extremely underwhelming. It had the texture of Nescafe instant coffee and the taste of old flowers mixed with boring dirt.

Cacao powder: Another superfood thing that was supposed to make smoothies pop. It didn’t. I don’t care what anyone tells you, cacao is not just as good as chocolate. It’s chocolate’s very dull cousin.

Black chia seeds: I would put this in my smoothies, but I never really understood why. They’d always clump up and get stuck at the bottom of my container, so I probably never ingested enough of them for my bod to milk their benefits.

LSA meal: This was ground linseed, sunflower seed and almond meal. I’m not sure why I bought it, but I imagine it was for sprinkling of some kind. According to the packet, it’s high in fibre, so that was obviously the drawcard. I love fibre. Fibre is my jam. But this stuff clearly wasn’t.

White quinoa: I do eat this stuff but I found it very intimidating to cook. I guess because you’re supposed to cook it like rice. I once tried to cook rice in a saucepan and nearly burnt the arse out of the pot. That incident has apparently traumatised me to the point of only ever cooking rice in microwavable sachets. I know, it’s pathetic.

Almond meal: Most of the stuff on this list is just wanky superfood dust that I didn’t like but couldn’t justify throwing away because it was so exxy. But I do like cooking with almond meal; it makes for delicious, dense cakes. I think the problem here was that, because it was covered in packets of crap I was in denial about buying, I simply didn’t see it. It had a weird smell by the time I realised I had it and I had to let it go.