Spicing things Up

The spices cabinet with John's four bags of spices/baking ingredients on the counter.

Ha!

You have to take that literally.

We're working on combining households. And aside from a couple gallons worth of rice and about 10 half-eaten boxes of cereal, we have A LOT of spices.

You know, you buy that weird spice - marjoram or lemon pepper - for the recipe that calls for 1/8 teaspoon, and then it sits in the cupboard for the better part of a decade. (Thankfully I no longer have anything that is Schnuck's brand, so you can't prove that any of my stuff is more than 9 years old.) Do spices go bad? I mean some of them have a "Best by" date on the bottom. But I figure they're pretty hearty.

So my cabinet where I keep spices is already tightly packed. And John brought over bags and bags of spices and baking necessities (flour, cornmeal, 3 other kinds of flour ... "You can't put all the flour in the canister. That's bread flour." Um, sorry.)

The contents of two of the bags. Sorta blurry. I need to stop taking pictures with my computer screen, I suppose.

The solution? "Let's register for a spice rack."

To the computer I go. I try Place We Registered #1. 12 spice racks come up. Big spice racks, little spice racks, round spice racks, mountable spice racks. But they all have one characteristic in common.

They all come FULL of !@$% spices!

If there's something we don't need it is any more spices. We have duplicate and triplicate of spices. We could make enough cinnamon rolls to line them up from Oakley to Mt. Lookout and STILL have plenty of cinnamon.

So we check PWR#2. Same result. And #3: Ditto.

I am flustered. Doesn't anyplace carry spice racks SANS spices? The hunt begins.

Voila. We found one. Our new nifty spice "stack" that claims to hold 60 spices (hmmm. We'll see about that.) should arrive by the end of the week. I hated spending the money, but it's worth it to clear up the mess on the counter.