A Sour Taste in My Mouth

HELP! I CAN’T REMEMBER MY PASSWORDS

By Neil Offen
Columnist

Never keep sour cream in your refrigerator more than six years.  It’s a lesson to live by, along with avoiding ground wars in Asia or trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

I have learned this lesson the hard way.

You’re probably wondering, as indeed I am, why we felt the need to have sour cream at all, since it tends to be far more sour than ice cream and doesn’t come in pistachio. The reason we had it, of course, was that it had once been on special at the supermarket; you could buy one and get one free, even if you didn’t want the first one in the first place.

So, for quite some time, we had two little containers of sour cream in the fridge but managed, several years ago, to use most of the first container when we ran out of our supply of gluten-free unsalted mustard we had bought at another buy-one-get-one-free special and thought sour cream would be a reasonable substitute.

But we haven’t found a pressing need for the second container of sour cream and so it just stayed there, moving further and further toward the back of the refrigerator, approaching the no-man’s land where the jar of expired Kalamata olives was hiding. Through no fault of its own, it got pushed behind the leftover rice dish that was made with grapefruit juice when we ran out of water. It got jammed behind the remains of the cake my wife had made to celebrate surviving Y2K. It was pushed almost out of sight by the extra portions we had saved of the tuna casserole we couldn’t convince our kids to eat when they were still living at home, before they went off to college and had lives of their own, where they could browbeat their own children into eating tuna casseroles.

In other words, the sour cream container became part of the furniture of our house, a dependable touchstone like the smoke alarm on the wall that no longer worked or the metal turkey-lacing skewers stuck in the sink’s trash disposal that made that reliable grinding sound. We have grown accustomed to our little container of sour cream. It was a member of the family we knew we could depend on to always be there, like cousin Howie, that leech.

Then, the other day, we realized we actually needed sour cream. It was late, and sour cream stores throughout the community were closed, so we had a sour cream emergency. My wife was going to make a sour cream pound cake, an old family recipe she was certain didn’t belong to her family, but wanted to make anyway. We had all the ingredients until we realized the sour cream pound cake definitely would need sour cream.

Fortunately, I remembered that our old container was right there, behind the small pot that could have held lentil soup but might also have been our daughter’s sixth-grade deviled-egg-class chemistry experiment.

We rearranged the refrigerator furniture and triumphantly brought out the sour cream. It was all green. We didn’t think it was pistachio.

Carrboro resident Neil Offen has been a humor columnist for more than four decades and on two continents. He is the author of “Building a Better Boomer,” available wherever books are sold. This reporter can be reached at Information@TheLocalReporter.press