I have no problem eating leftovers.
I'm talking left*-a-long-time-*overs, way after any of those "eat within a week" warnings have expired. I've also been known to keep refrigerator staples—condiments, yogurt, pickles—for months past the "use by" date. In fact, there are probably a dozen items in my fridge that predate my almost-three-year-old son. This lifestyle, if you want to call it that, applies to my freezer as well. Just last month I used the final hunk of pork from a whole pig I bought in 2009. And it was delicious, which maybe had something to do with the powerful, flavor-masking oomph of the chile verde seasonings, but still...
One time, however, even I went too far.
Back in the early '90s, I was just out of college and living in Washington, D.C. For some reason, my boss let me house-sit while she went away on vacation, and my only task was to feed her golden retriever. If you've ever been broke and house-sat for someone who isn't broke, you know the joy of that first night: opening up the cupboards, rummaging through the fridge, ransacking the liquor cabinet—generally shaking the place down for the best food and drink.
After a few days eating exotic canned goods and drinking beer someone bought months earlier for a party but never drank, further snooping revealed a chest freezer in the basement PACKED with what were still called "TV dinners." Growing up, I used to beg for these things. Now was my chance to gorge. I mowed through Hungry Man turkey dinners, some Elio's pizza squares, even a few Lean Cuisines. But I wasn't done. At the bottom of the fridge, caked in ice, was a Swanson Sailsbury steak dinner, complete with mashed potatoes and apple cobbler. As TV dinners go, it was the aluminum-wrapped holy grail.
I threw it into a preheated 350-degree oven and, 45–50 minutes later, sat down to eat. Now, being alone, I employed the "back of the cereal box" technique to entertain myself. Only this time I read the box that my TV dinner had come in. A splash of color caught my eye: On the back of the box was a promotional offer for a set of drinking glasses, not just any glasses—USA Bicentennial glasses. My eyes quickly went to the fine print.
The offer expired December 31, 1976. Fifteen years before.
I'm not going to lie: I finished the deliciously salty, expertly engineered meal. My only complaint? The apples in the cobbler were mushy, but hey, they had been harvested almost two decades earlier. Now I know that if I was ever trapped, starving, on the arctic tundra and found a frozen wooly mammoth, I would eat it.
Preferably with some Salisbury steak gravy.