"sublime"d Cool Whip and stale(r) croutons

We had Thanksgiving with a huge group of friends this year. One of the things we signed up for was the salad (because even though nobody really eats salad for Thanksgiving, you still to have one or it would feel kind of weird). Salads for holiday dinners need to be nice, so of course we bought some croutons to put on the salad. Croutons from Costco. So we now have a huge bag of croutons.

When I was growing up, croutons were for very special occasions. I always wanted to just get a handful of croutons and just eat them plain, but my mom generally said I couldn't. Croutons are for salad. Not just any salad--special salad.

So now I have a huge bag of croutons, but I feel like I can't just eat them plain even though I'd like to. Croutons are for salad. Special salad. So I feel like I need to save them for special salads.

I explained this to Ryan, and he said, "I know. That's why I'm eating them. Because if we don't eat them, then they'll just sit in the pantry and go staler than they already are."

This led to a comparison to what happens to Cool Whip in families that don't use it very often and save it for special occasions. The special occasion just never comes up because they don't use Cool Whip, and then several months later there is freezer burned Cool Whip in the freezer and it gets thrown away. Or there's a mysteriously empty container of Cool Whip that still has the plastic seal around the lid. (This is a process called sublimation, where solids go directly to the gaseous phase. It really happens--watch the snow disappear even when it's never gotten warm enough for it to melt.)

So we made an executive decision, and the executive decision was that we are going to eat our croutons--plain, on our salads at dinner every night, whatever. It will be hard. We may feel guilty at first for being too casual with our croutons. But that seems better than letting perfectly good croutons go stale(r).