Food Color Fail

I have a complaint.  I know, I’ve said it before and I try very hard not to make this blog an avenue for venting, complaining or ranting, but I’m perplexed and I have to talk about it.    This is about food coloring.

I’ve used food coloring as long as I can remember to color all sorts of things from baking to science experiments.   When I was little we had a small, rectangular box with four tiny bottles with red, blue, yellow and green food coloring.   We would get a new box every few years when we’d run out or low of one or more of the colors.  

Today, in my pantry, I have one of those very same food coloring boxes with the same four colors inside.   What I’m frustrated about is the packaging.   The lids on the bottles narrow to a point at the top and are subsequently hard to get out of the box.   If you can get one bottle out, the rest are easy, but since I typically only want to use one or two of the colors, I don’t just dump the box.   That, and I’ve had lid accidents and spilled food coloring is no fun to clean up.

Once you have two or more of the bottles out, getting them back into the container is another trick.   They used to be completely round (I think) but now they have truncated sides so the only way to get them all into the box is by rotating them so the sides touch.   Then there’s the problem of one falling over and laying down into the box while you’re trying to get them aligned—which necessitates starting the whole alignment process over again.

With all the innovative advancements in packaging that’s happened in the forty-some years since I’ve been using those little food coloring jars, why hasn’t something been done to make them a joy to use instead of a frustrating experience?  

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter has taken to naming her stuffed animals.   For a long time my son didn’t like stuffed animals at all, but of late he likes to collect them and have them piled in his bed.   The other night we had a sleepover with Gavin, my son and my daughter all sleeping in sleeping bags in the bonus room.   My son said he needed to go get some stuffed animals and ran into the bedroom. I followed him, telling him he could only have five.   As he made his selections, he called out their names—names he must have given them—which I hadn’t heard before.   He chose, “Syrup” the brown dog, “Blackout” the monkey, and “Pedipaws” the lemur to bring back to his sleeping bag.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter likes to get the mail.  I asked her if we got any bills when she brought the mail inside and she said, “what are bills?”   I said, “things you have to pay money for.”   She firmly said back, “that’s boring.”