Sunday, October 19, 2008

Vegan MOFO Day 19 - Spice Overkill? I think not.

How many times have you started a recipe and realized you were missing one of the spices you absolutely had to have? This used to happen to me all of the time. It still happens once in a while, but not very often. Let me show you why.


This post has two fold purpose. One is to pimp my bad ass spice collection. The other is to force myself to re-orgainze and clean said cabinet because lately it has gotten out of control, making it difficult to find anything.

I try to keep similar sized jars on the bottom in alphabetical order. Notice the word try. I'm not nearly as anal as I would like to be, but I try.

The middle shelf hails the larger containers of spices, spice mixes, overflow bulk spices, and other specialty spices. The top shelf is a catch all for whatever doesn't fit on the other two shelves. But is heavy on the sprinkles and sugars for decorating cakes and cookies. There are also a couple of small bags of bulk spices hiding in the bowl up top.


Tonight we did a loose count. Apparently I have over 100 different spices/mixes. My spice obsession is a fun one. When I travel, I try to find some local exotic spice that is not already in my collection. This seems to get more challenging as my cabinet gets ready to explode. Like my cookbook collection, it is a bit out of control. I have tried to make a pact with myself to abstain from purchasing more spices until I use some of these up. I'm no good at pacts with myself by the way. I just hope the new Penzey's catalog disappears before I get my hot little hands on it.

3 comments:

Jen Treehugger said...

WOAH that's some Spice collection!
I know what you mean though - there's nothing worse than following a recipe and you're lacking an important spice ingredient!

Veg-In-Training said...

So true. I need to give some love to a few of the spice mixes that have been neglected for a while. I see Northwoods potatoes in my near future. YUM!

JohnP said...

We have so many of the same problems! I love your collection!