When I moved in several years ago, Lawson and I combined our rather large and old spice collections without any weeding whatsoever, and it's gotten pretty ugly. So I took everything out of the racks and cabinets and hauled it out on the back porch. There I arranged everything on the railings, with each type of spice arranged along the x axis and duplicates on the y. We had about 14 horizontal feet of spices, with the highest redundant tower at about 16 inches. Alphabetical arrangement wouldn't have worked at this point, so I used a rough taxonomy: seeds/pods, leaves, blends, things we have a kajillion of, bad ideas, unidentifiable, etc.
Here's part of the kajillion sector:
That's four containers of baking powder (not an herb or spice, but whatever), four containers of paprika, two of nutmeg, three of cream of tartar, and three of ground ginger.
And here is the grossest thing I found:
After I had it all arranged, I began sniffing, tasting, and throwing things away. In most cases I tried to get us down to one of each thing, unless that thing was garlic powder or lemon pepper, in which case we needed to get down to none, and not just because the ones we had were nine years old and rancid (and contributed by me, I'm sorry to say). For some items, like dried basil, everything we had smelled and tasted like dusty dirt, so I kept a list of what we needed to restock from the bulk herbs at the health food store.
The price of the average herb has increased tenfold since Lawson purchased this dill seed:
It took a few hours, but I managed to get it all cleaned out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look a whole lot better in the cabinet than it did before.
When I was done, I made lentils with garlic, mustard seed, and cilantro; and a vegetable curry with sweet potatoes, corn, and okra:
What IS that in the Kroger Fajita container?
ReplyDeleteI think it's clotted "fajita seasoning."
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