Sugar Plus

Tom reported about a second incident of groats in our demerara sugar pot. "My coffee had groats in it, then in a hurry I made another one with white sugar that turned out to be salt." He spat out the first sip in an instant and ended up leaving the house without his morning coffee.

In order to fully understand this, you should know:
1. That I only buy demerara sugar that comes in transparent containers
2. The groat incident from last Passover.

Last Passover after the meal, we were serving coffee. The sugar pot was on the table and our guests started sweetening their coffees. They tasted the coffee and looked puzzled. It wasn't sweet. I explained that brown sugar is less sweet than white, so they added some more. The "sugar" didn't melt, the coffee was still not sweet and undefined brownish material started aggregating at the bottom of the cup. With the guests half worried about possible poisoning, I rushed to the kitchen for a quick investigation and concluded that hubby added groats to the sugar. The groats were stored in a container that previously contained sugar and they looked similar to his kitchen-untrained eyes. The incident finished with relief, much laughter and embarrassment and a fresh round of coffee with groat-less sugar.

Since then, I finished all my groat stock and didn't buy anymore, so I was positive the sugar could not possibly contain any. This time it was couscous. How it got into the sugar container is still a mystery.

When I open a package of dry food (rice, pasta, whatever) that comes in a paper or nylon bag, I like to store the remaining contents in tightly closed Tupperware or glass containers. I store different types of flour in identical Tupperware containers and I put a little label (cut out from the original paper bag) inside the container, so I can reuse the containers for different contents without worrying about external labels glued to them. As a lesson learned from the groat incident, I added a little label for salt in a former sugar container. Hubby thought that wasn't enough and glued an additional big fat label on the outside as well.

But when in a hurry, who has time to look at labels? Not to mention applying logic before the morning coffee.