Sorry. I got distracted. What I'm really talking about in this post are actual spices, not the Spice Girls (though I do love them).
How many of you have a spice rack? You know, one that looks like this:
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| Crate and Barrel |
Or this:
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| Amazon |
Yeah, us too. How many of you actually use all the spices that came with the rack? Not many, Yeah, us too. Out of our rack of 16 spices, we use maybe 5 on a regular basis. That wouldn't be so bad if those were the only 5 spices we ever use, but we also have a cabinet full of spices we use all the time. What's worse is that to reach the cabinet, I have to stand on a chair or a step-stool because it's above our stove.
I'd had quite enough of this, so I decided to reclaim our spice rack and turn it into a useful kitchen tool instead of glorified counter art. I took inventory of which spices we used and which spices we didn't.
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| Turns out, you acquire lots of duplicates when you don't know what spices you already own. |
Any spice we didn't use got thrown away, but the bottle it came in didn't. I rinsed out the bottles...
...and refilled them with the spices we do use.
I used office labels we had laying around to cover up the original spice names on the jars. Our spice jars went from looking like this:
To this:
Now, our spice rack is much more functional, and I don't have to stand on a chair to reach the chili powder!
We have a truly ridiculous spice cabinet. It's about five shelves high and there are individual spice racks on every shelf -- we have SO many spices, the usual stuff and the bizarre. I'd say we only use 10% of our repertoire but then every once in awhile we need something strange and lo and behold, its up on the fifth shelf.
ReplyDeleteWhen we move, I'd like to make a spice drawer for our most-used spices, at an accessible height and easily readable.
That's nice that you have lots of spices available just in case. Unfortunately, for many years, Adam would never check the metaphorical fifth shelf, so we had up to 3 separate bottles of one spice in our cabinet. Oops!
DeleteThat's awesome- I'm a little jealous. I was organized at one point with all of my spices in little jars that were labeled clearly...but we've been adding more and more so it's up to 3 full shelves of spices!
ReplyDeleteI really need to do this, there are spices on the rack that I've never heard of and certainly don't use.
ReplyDelete