“Where’s all my food?” Christi was helping me get ready for my family Fourth of July party. I went to the grocery store and when I got back the kitchen cupboard fairly sparkled in its cleanliness. But it was empty.

I should have known better than to leave my daughter alone with my belongings. A couple of months ago she helped clean out my garage and I had to stop her from throwing Moira, my Infiniti, on top of the towering mass of perfectly good stuff I had been saving for years that she thought I didn’t need.

Donna Fielder

My kitchen trash can was overflowing with boxes and bags and cans. Christi didn’t look a bit guilty. She has been known to go through my fridge looking for freezer burn and tossing still edible blocks of cheese that only needed to have some mold shaved off the edges.

“Why did you throw away all my food?” I asked her as she proudly stood aside for my inspection.

“Muh-ther,” she rolled her eyes. “If it had an expiration date in 1999, it wasn’t food anymore.”

Before she arrived I had shelves full of food — canned goods, plastic bags of pasta and peas, boxes of instant potatoes and powdered onion soup — all the culinary basics.

But there was a ton of other stuff in there too. You know, those cupboards are sort of catchall places.

Mine had a checkers game, two sets of dominoes, quite a few bottles of assorted alcohol, cookbooks, a vacuum cleaner, three old sets of silverware, some jars of stuff I canned a couple of decades ago, a plastic washtub full of used candles — most of them from my pink phase — and my gun cleaning kit.

It was admittedly a mess. But I just wanted my daughter to tidy up a bit. She inherited my mother’s neat genes. They hopscotched right over me, I guess. She shudders every time she opens one of my Ma Kettle closets, and she went after my cluttered cupboard with gusto.

“Mom, what is this?”

I looked up from my own excursion into the dangerous wilds of my coat closet. She was holding a jar of something I canned or jellied or pickled many years ago. It had retreated into unfood and consisted of a long string of something awful dangling from the lid to the bottom of the jar.

“That you definitely can throw away,” I muttered and went back to digging old “Happy Birthday!” gift bags off the top shelf.

The cat gets part of the blame for the mess. That cupboard door won’t latch and Ranger loves to open it with a clever paw and play in there.

Once he found an economy-sized bag of plastic forks. It looked like a plastic utensil explosion had blasted through my kitchen. He nonchalantly batted a stray plastic butter knife down the hall while I crawled under the dining room table fishing for forks.

Then there was the mashed potato flake blizzard of 2003. That was one for the weather records. It’s amazing how difficult it is to pick potato flakes out of cat fur.

Am I the only one who didn’t know canned goods had expiration dates? I always figured if it was sealed up nice and tight in a can, it would be there for the Rapture.

Turns out that English peas and cream-style corn go bad after a few years, at least in theory.

The stuff Christi threw away wasn’t really all that necessary, I guess, or I would have already eaten it.

But when I get a craving in the middle of the night, it rarely is for Campbell’s Bean with Bacon Soup.

I panicked when I saw the shelves with only two cans of tuna fish and a can of smoke-flavored Spam left to get me through the holiday.

I dug furiously through the trash bags for something unexpired and eventually came up with a box of Jiffy cornbread mix, which I added to my stores.

The canned goods shelves are bare. But the top shelf is loaded with dusty bottles of Scotch and tequila, cute little jugs of Chambord and tall vials of vodka.

Thank goodness booze lasts forever. But now I have to find a July Fourth recipe for hot dogs in Drambuie sauce and apple pie a la the recipe.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.