The # 10 Can and A STORY

 image from Honeyville Grains

On our group offering free items, a woman wanted to offer #10 metal stuff full of food. You know that I replied. I waited until exbf got to me and we started. He was bf at the time.

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I got the directions and we started out sort of late in the day. It got later faster than I thought it would. Plus, he did not follow the directions well. I made mistakes in interpreting them. However, he still made mistakes separate from mine. We argued a bit. He became frustrated but patient. He was still trying to impress me, I guess.

Mind you, these were country directions: when you get past the third stand of trees...; turn on the only paved road and.....; go over two big hills and when you get to the third hill...; turn left when you get to the biggest barn...when you pass the old Baptist church....you get the idea. I like road signs, church names and I don't like to figure out what counts as a big curve when the road is full of curves, just a curvy road in general. Stand of trees? Give me a break. There are trees all over, and I am just trying to hold it between the ditches.

We got to the end of the road and I told him to turn in the driveway. Only, it was not a driveway. It was dusk, almost dark, and it was just a yard. I ordered him to back out, and to spite me he just kept going. He was going to drive across the yard to the driveway and drive out. Okey dokey! Soon, we were mired up to the axle.

Luckily, the homeowners came home because they saw us in their yard. There were three pickup trucks! They were pretty rough looking and I was afraid. These guys were nice as could be. They tried to tell exbf how to get the car out. Finally, one of the guys got in, put the automatic transmission in some appropriate gear and we roared right out of the mire.

They directed us to the right house. The freecycler told me her house was low, below the road. Good Grief! She was in a hollow, about 70 feet or more almost straight down. We were going to have to climb a fence and try to walk down. I told her we would pass on the food since I had knee problems and he needed a hip replacement, that we were sorry.

She was so nice and brought up a dozen #10 cans. I was happy as a pig in mud. Exbf was not happy at all, just grim, but not yelling or fussing.

Exbf drove me twenty miles back up the interstate to home and then turned right around and drove 75 miles back to his home. I did not mean to be so much trouble. I just hauled the cans in and went to bed.

Back to the woman who gave me these. She was talking to us, telling us that the cans had been stored in the shed for so many years that she decided to get rid of all of them. I worried about storing the #10 cans in a metal shed that sits in the sun all summer in the South and in the winters where it freezes often enough but not for long freezes. I really worried.

I gave exbf a can of apples that I opened and put into a couple of gallon bags.  He brought them back last year, saying he did not like them. The hens got those. All the rest happened about five years ago.

All the cans were canned at the LDS place near here, well, in Nashville. The expiration dates were about five years prior to our having received them. Between the bad expiration date and the storage conditions, I worried more.

Several weeks after receiving these #10 cans, I had exbf to open one that was mightily bulging. I handed him the can and can opener and asked him to go outdoors and open it. He insisted he was going to open it right in the kitchen. We argued. It was sort of loud. He assured me a bulging can would not explode all over.

Finally, when I told him "never mind," he went outdoors. I followed him shortly, just in time to see canned peanut butter or butter, forget which, explode all over him and the great outdoors! There hung a yellow haze around the yard for hours. He was covered from head to foot. mostly from hair to waist. He had set it on a retaining wall in the back yard, making the can chest high. Only his glasses saved him from being blasted in the eyes.

The blasted wall remained yellow for days. I think the blast drovc the powder so hard that a hose would not clean it, not that he tried hard.



Nothing was edible in any of the cans. Store your #10 cans properly and don't mess with bulging cans and please watch the expiration dates!

Your turn

Have you ever had any powdered food stored in #10 cans explode in your face? Even worse, has it exploded indoors? Were you laughing too?