When things go a little wrong . . .

Day 12 of the Food Stamp Challenge:
Got home last night with a plan--bake a sweet potato for dinner, and start a batch of soup.  Got out the stock pot and got my Vegetable Barley going, then reached for the sweet potatoes.  Inside the bag was wet--and gooey.  

Sweet potatoes are NOT gooey.  Unless they have spoiled.

I have had yellow potatoes grow eyes, and spinach turn to slime, but never before do I recall having sweet potatoes turn to goo in a bag.  The entire bag is ruined.

And my day is not yet done.  I decide to eat an orange.  I bought a bag of the little baby oranges two weeks ago, and have been eating one or two a day.  But sometime during the day, something bad happened--one of my baby oranges is a ball of green mold.  I carefully remove it from the bag and wash the rest of them carefully, salvaging the bulk of them.  

New household rule: check all produce daily to see if there is anything we need to get rid of before it rots everything.

I could go buy more sweet potatoes--I am not really on food stamps, and no one would know if I kept my mouth shut (which obviously I didn't do).  But a family on food stamps--if they bought more food stamps, it would leave them less money at the end of the month.  Which we are getting down to.

I look at the bag of sweet potatoes--are they ALL gooey, or did just one go bad?  I hate digging through stuff like this.  But I do--because if I was on a limited budget for real, it is what I would do.  Of the four sweet potatoes in the bag, two are ugly.  Two are usable.  I rinse and dry them, and research why they went bad.  Apparently the two that are now goo at the bottom of the garbage (which I took out first thing this morning) apparently were not in good shape to begin with.  I can cook sweet potatoes and freeze them for up to 10 months.  Or cook within a week of purchase.

We live and learn about these things.  But when you are poor, when you are surviving on food stamps, this is the kind of lesson that can be costly: it costs you in food, and food is energy.

I went ahead and baked the two remaining sweet potatoes, then mash the pulp and throw it into two small freezer bags.  At least they won't go bad right away.