What can I do with these foods?

I’m not the one to ask what to do with a solid brick of sugar, but with the soda crackers, you could crush them and use them to bread any kind of delightful fried goody you would like.

Stale crackers, I crush and put out with our wild bird food. The bird delight in the crumbs, especially during spring.

Rock of sugar, I would melt and make into hummingbird nectar.

If the crackers are at all rancid, just toss them.

To melt the sugar, put the whole thing in a large pan with some boiling water and lower the heat to a very slow simmer until it melts. You can now use the sugar water for making lemonade or other sugar water based food.

I would throw the stale crackers away, They are probably stale because of mold.

The crackers can be perked up by a brief stint in the oven to drive out the moisture.

I’ve salvaged hard sugar by breaking it into chunks and zapping it in the food processor. Run it through a sieve to remove whatever chunks survive that process.

Put a piece of bread in the sugar and seal it up. Wait 24 hours. Works like a charm on brown sugar for sure. I don’t know about white.

Place an apple sliced ( quarters) into a bag with the sugar..it softens the sugar.
Sugar can be used in making candies.
Recipe:
http://www.canadianliving.com/food/saltwater_taffy.php

Put the sugar in a plastic bag and beat the crap out of it with a hammer.

:) A piece of bread is much less violent! :)

But pounding the crap out of something is very therapeutic!

LOL! Yeah. I set out our feather mattress cover to air out. I’m going to pound the crap out of it…but all I can find are golf clubs. But that’ll work!

What kind of sugar is it? If it’s literally rock sugar, that works nicely in coffee. If it’s brown or white sugar that has gone hard, try putting a slice of bread in the bag overnight – the sugar will absorb the moisture from the bread, making the sugar as good as new, and the bread will dry out (you can use it for breadcrumbs. If it’s a lot of sugar, you might have to repeat the process a few times.

I find that trying to cut or pound dried out sugar has a weird effect on its taste, but maybe that’s just me.

If you’ve already heated the whole thing or tried to cut it a few times, that might have ruined it, I’m afraid. Worth a try, though.

And now I see @Dutchess_III is a kindred bread-in-the-sugar spirit!

@janbb Is that part of the process for making pound cake?

I was amazed at how perfectly the bread thing actually worked @glacial. :)

@Dutchess_III Yup, it’s one of my favourite kitchen secrets!

@Sunny2 Yup!

Here’s what Neil Young has to say.

Boil the sugar in a pot with water and corn syrup and then add flavoring. Depending on how hot you boil the mixture to you can have anywhere from taffy to hard candy as an end product.

Last week I made raspberry lemonade, banana creme pie, and apricot hard candies. :)

If it is granulated sugar that has gotten too hard, the apple approach and a little paternce with work fine. If you totally lack patience and you are safe around hand tools, then using the happen on the sugar (if it is double bagged) will work. Use a laminated cutting board underneath for safety.

Sugar can be dissolved into water when low heat is applied over several hours. Do not allow the water to boil away or you will have burnt taffy permanently attached to your pot. If left unattended even longer, copious smoke and a real fire can result with disastrous consequences including damage from smoke and possibly fire damage as well.

Start with the safest, slowest method. If you can’t cope with that then for goodness sake either let someone else deal with it or throw the sugar away.

As for the crackers, if they don’t smell rancid and it there is no chance the crackers have been visited by rodents, then the cracker crumbs can be used in recipes that call for such an ingredient. If you are not sure they are still fit for human consumption, then put them in a bird feeder or on your lawn, far enough away from any tiny points of entry for tiny critters – you do not want to make mice, squirrels or rats feel too welcome around your house.