Food Storage Muffins

So, this afternoon I decided to make some muffins to go with dinner. Don't ask what else was for dinner, today's a throw-something-together-when-you-forgot-to-go-shopping type of Sunday.

I started to assemble my ingredients, and discovered that I had about a half cup of flour. Not sure how that happened, since I try to keep bags of the stuff around. Anyway, not enough flour. So I went out to the garage for a can of the old standby: food storage flour.

Now, this food storage flour is of unknown age. A lady in our ward lived down the street when we moved in here and she moved out soon after we moved in (we didn't chase her out, we promise) and she gave us all her food storage. In my mind it was about five years old when we got it, but I can't remember if she told me that or if I made it up. Hard to say.

I opened the can and checked the flour and it smelled very metallic. Very Metallic. I couldn't tell over the metallic smell whether or not the flour was still good. It looked fine, nice and floury and I tasted a bit, and it didn't really taste at all (which is how white flour is anyway). So I called up the ward food storage specialist and asked her about it. She looked up flour in her stuff and said it's good for 10 years. Well, I've had it for three and a half years and if she had it for the five in my head, it's about 8 1/2 years old. Should be fine, I guess. I decided to go ahead and use it.

I made the muffins and changed them to spice muffins to try to hide any taste with the spices. They just came out of the oven, and I'm going to go taste one. Please hold on.

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I'm back.

Well, they taste funny. Not rotten funny, just sort of blah funny. They have sort of a weird taste in them that seems like it's hiding the spices. The kids, however, like them. I should confess here, that I've never made this muffin recipe before, so it could be that I made them wrong, or that I wouldn't like them even if I made them right. I'll have to buy some flour tomorrow and make them again and see how they come out.

As far as the rest of the flour goes, I'm inclined to toss it along with the other two cans I have in the garage and get new cans. I suspect the hot garage (they're in a cabinet, but it's warm in there, too, but not hot) is not the best place for canned flour. I expect that things like beans and rice would fare better because they don't take up tastes and smells like something powdery like flour would.

I should probably open up a can of each of the things from this lady and test them all. Back when we were first married, we used cannery flour, rice and sugar all the time and never had this kind of a problem. I need to find a cooler place for our food storage stuff. Maybe the back of a high up cabinet or something.

Oh well.

I figured out how to insert a poll on the page. I posted a poll about the flour.