Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a sticky substance dripping from the bottom of the pantry cupboard. It was beginning to pool in the grout in between two kitchen tiles. I knew I would have to do the inevitable.

I would have to first open the pantry and attempt to figure out which of the 900 tins of coconut milk had sprung a leak. This could take all day.

When I started to wipe up the syrupy goo from the floor, I smelled a fermented, fruity, rotting that had to have come from something inside, but what?

Greg was quick to shove me out of the way as the family’s master sleuth, no can was going unturned on his watch. I was on clean-up and he was the can inspector, removing each and every box of cereal, jar of peanut butter, bag of rice, half opened box of couscous, box of pasta, bag of pasta, box of more pasta, enough crackers to feed a small country. He would declare things like, “Nobody is allowed to buy mustard ever again, seriously, no more mustard,“ as he piled them back onto the shelf once it was given the all clear for reloading.

He asked, then assumed, then concluded, this is definitely olive oil on the floor and it must have dripped into the pantry yesterday when you (meaning me) were holding it without the lid, upside down in a pouring motion into the cupboard while looking for a cedar plank to cook the salmon.

Except his theory had one fatal flaw. I never once leaned into the pantry cupboard with a bottle of olive oil and most certainly wouldn’t have done so with the lid off.

We argued about why anyone with a brain would pour olive oil into a pantry cupboard, about the insanity of how many hamburgers one would have to eat in seventy lifetimes in order to consume all of the mustard we were hoarding and why I was assigned the rotten clean-up job while he got the fun, white-glove, re-org title.

After three shelves in, Greg found the source. It was a can of peaches and they were leaking. We’d never seen anything like it and didn’t even know we had canned peaches behind all that mustard.

Once we reloaded the shelves, cleaned up the mess and Greg re-visited the pantry to admire his project, I remembered one of the kids wanted an apple sauce so I walked over to check where the apple sauce shelf had been relocated.

Something peculiar caught my eye. In the midst of what appeared to be the best looking, most organized pantry cupboard despite what appeared to be an excessive collection of mustard was one, rogue, upside down can of tomato soup covered in a black, gooey substance.

When I asked Greg what was on the can and why it was front and centre, upside down he told me the following, “It was stuck to the cupboard from the peach juice so I put it back upside down.”

Master sleuth 101–leave no can unturned, except of course if it’s covered in goo.