Mom, do you know how many jars of honey you have?!
She’d just pulled them all out of the cabinet in disbelief.
The backstory:
The owner of a local honey company was the woman who yelled, “Hey! You can’t bring that in here!” to get the attention of a nearby cop towards the guy with a gun as he broke through the fence around the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and so she and her husband were the first ones as the guy started that particular mass shooting before the cop got him.
They survived but the medical costs were huge and the surgeries numerous.
So I bought a jar of each of most of their flavors of honey because it was some small thing I could do to try to offer support.
I mentioned The Honey Ladies here at the time: they do beehive removal from places the bees are very much not wanted and rehome the hives to farms. The Cherry Blossom is divine, but my favorite is their Poison Oak—seriously, it’s a thick dark caramel and the least sweet honey I’ve ever tasted. No reaction to it in case you’re wondering.
By comparison, the others are good but I just have been in no great hurry to finish them when I could have my favorites.
Why am I mentioning this? Because the number of jars of open honey, big to tiny, 2 oz souvenirs to large jars, were driving my daughter to distraction.
Thirty-seven.
In no way was I expecting that number.
Some of that is unexpectedly artificially flavored honeys from other sources and every one of those is old and has gone bad. Mango honey from Florida? From mango blossoms? Not so much. Fermented? No thank you.
Tossing should be the easy part, but having smelled skunk spray at 3 a.m. this morning, can you even imagine if I tried to compost the stuff outside to give the animals something to really fight over. Can you imagine drunk skunks.
You cannot throw foodstuffs in the trash here. Those jars are solidified, and I’m not sure what the best way to get rid of them is; I’m hoping to hear suggestions.
But meantime: if anyone local wants a taste testing, I have opened jars of perfectly good raspberry blossom, wildflower, and blueberry blossom honey from the Honey Ladies and you could even talk the cherry blossom out of my hands. There’s Acacia from who knows where, five mostly-full mini bottles from a sampler kit my daughter bought for me at Trader Joe’s a year ago and a nearly full jar of creamed honey from Koophaus in Morgan Hill that are all hoping for a new home. I have no idea what the 2 oz one is, but it came with what could only be described as a bride’s tiny girdle. Which got the ultimate Millenial put-down: “That’s tacky.”
I’m keeping the jars from local beekeeper friends–and a half gallon of Poison Oak. Because who would want to rescue hives from such a source more than once so I bought a whole lot while it still existed because it is that good.
But the others. The ones that are perfectly good, but have been opened. They sit there not quite loved enough but not in any kind of giftable state.
And then said daughter came around the corner as I was typing this and before I could ask why is this post being weird on the formatting, told me, You know what we can do with this. Here’s the recipe I found that uses the most honey: bake it and doorbell ditch it and then if they hate it they can throw it away and we NEVER HAVE TO KNOW. But it’s out of the house!
Maybe we could even…being radical here…mix the types?