I hoard food. This is a particularly bad habit held over from my formative years, when my mother would berate me for eating too much and then, in practically the same breath, berate me for wasting food. She would try to hide food from me, so I started keeping a hidden supply for myself, like a good fat girl. To this day, I still keep secret stashes all over the place, so I can have a treat when the urge strikes me. It’s a good system.

.. except it’s a totally lousy system, because my brain is all kinds of broken. If I don’t have any treats handy, all I want is junk food all day long. If there ARE snacky things available, I don’t crave them. As stupid as that is, it works quite well most of the time – I provide treats for others, since they’re there I don’t want to eat them, and everyone is happy.

This doesn’t work well with my super secret stash, though. During our last trip to London, I squirrelled away Marks and Spencer Millionaire Shortbread Bars and brought home probably close to 20 of the gooey, delicious, chocolate-and-caramel-over-shortbread treats. I love them madly, and eat way too many of them when I’m in the UK. I’ve smuggled the bars home from Europe before, but either played fast and loose with the clearly-visible expiry date on the packages, or, as is far more likely, ate them all up before they could go bad. This time I either assumed I could continue the pace of eating multiple sweets a day without dying, or .. I don’t know what I thought, or why I wasn’t smart enough to freeze the damn things, but my ridiculous treat hoarding has bitten me in the ass: the bars are way, way past the (July) expiry dates. I tried one a couple months ago, and it was .. not good. So today I get to throw out almost half my secret stash, because I was too stubborn/dumb/forgetful/not insane enough/dumb to eat them all while they were still good. Now I have no treats, and I’m sad. Clearly I should just book another trip to London. And maybe this time think about using the time-stopping powers of the freezer to extend the shelf life of my delicious secret yummy happy snacks.