The Salad Dressings Dilemma

Saturday night I cooked a delicious dinner that for some odd reason included rather bland broccoli.

It tasted too dry for me to stomach and so I decided that I would use some low cost ranch salad dressing as a dip for it.

I went to the refrigerator and found an open bottle that simply had April 04, 2008 on it.  It didn’t say anything else - no born on date, best before, expiration - nothing.

Figuring that it was an expiration date I went to the pantry and found this…

Chunky Blue Cheese dressing - and it even says right on the front “Great for DIPPING!”

I was in heaven.

Then I looked into the fine details and found that it said, “Best When Purchased Before February 24, 2004″- technically not a expiration date.

I know for a fact that I most probably did buy this bottle of dressing before February 2004, so I should in theory still be able to enjoy it as a better dressing than the ranch. 

Yet there was something in the back of my mind that wondered if the bottle really would know that even though it was bought before the date listed that it should still be better than the usual some four years later.

Needless to say, I was stuck in a pickle here.

Do I go with the four year old “Best When Purchased Before” dated bottle, or with the mysteriously labeled bottle dated this year.

Life’s tough sometimes…