It's About Me

Archive for May, 2009

Friday afternoon the dogs started barking like we had a visitor. And we did! The UPS man with my spice tins. I hustled down to the gate with dogs in tow and got my little box. The anticipation of seeing, touching and playing with my tins was beyond sane, but I embrace my OCD characteristics so wasn’t too embarrassed to be as excited as I was.

I sliced open the box and what did I see?

Oh baby, come to momma.

Seriously.

Is it so wrong to salivate over stainless and plastic? Don’t judge me.

I ran to the pantry and got the first of my 50 some odd spices. I started with the little ones. If you remember, I counted these out carefully before my order, and got just the right sizes of everything. Because I’m anal. And I wanted it to be ‘perfect’. Remember this next picture. It will become important later. As will my last words of ‘carefully’ and ‘perfect’.

I can already feel the zen like ambiance filling the room. Can’t you?

Curry powder. In it’s own tin. With it’s own label. Goodbye little plastic bottle, hellllooo my pretty stainless tin with shiny blingy plastic see-through lid. My first one and I’m already feeling pretty smug.

I even went and got the labeler to make it ‘just right’. (I had a picture of the labeler. Honest. Because it’s important to the story. The whole story. Or not.)

I have a lot of this size tin. Most of the regular sized jars will fit this size tin depending on what the spice is. Ground items fit easier than bulkier items like flakes, while neither are quite bulky enough for the next size tin. I should note though that at this point, I’ve been filling the tins with those half-size jars. You know, the stuff you don’t use a whole lot of, like Allspice and Nutmeg.

I was clicking right along, quite proud of myself. Labels. Check. Spices filled. Check.

BJ comes in and says “Hey, those look great. Isn’t that text a little small?” He fills his tea glass and leaves. Hmmmph. Whatever. It’s not too small. Maybe it’s too small for old people. Who need reading glasses. That are bald. And sweaty. And should be mowing the grass. I know what’s right and what’s not. I know what it should look like. Don’t be telling me what to do.

So I remade the labels.

Time to start in on the standard size bottles. Isn’t that just beautiful. What color do you want your walls, Shelly. Oh, make them Cardamom please. Cardamom? Have I ever used Cardamom? 2 ounces of Cardamom really fills that tin.

So does seven and a half ounces of Celery Salt. Okay, okay. That’s not true. I used a lot of the celery salt. Which is good because now it will fit in my shiny new tins. But if it didn’t, I could throw away what didn’t fit. Celery salt is pretty durn cheap.

Isn’t that just BEE-U-TEE-FUL? The only thing that would make my heart feel any better would be clear labels. I was really secretly miffed that we had no clear labels in the house. Which likely means I’ll be remaking the labels. Soon. Don’t tell BJ.

I’m really diggin’ the new tins.

I have Cilantro flakes. I am not sure which decade I bought these. Or for what purpose. I don’t really like cilantro. But it does give a deeper insight into my spice hoarding behavior. You should see my fabric and yarn collection. I don’t use it, but I have a lot of it. You can tell BJ. He already knows he married a freak.

Looks like somebody’s been using a lot of cinnamon, Devon, and didn’t tell me we were out. Note to self, buy more cinnamon.

The Holy Grail of gumbo fixin’. Filé, pronounced FEELAY, is ground up sassafras leaves. It’s peppery, and bay leafy, and thymish all rolled into one. It thickens the juice of gumbo and is a staple in this house. Yum. When the new canner gets here, I’m going to make some gumbo. Not sure though how much will make it into the jars.

All the little jars were wrapped in tissue paper to keep them from getting scratched, and as I unwrapped them, I wadded them up and tossed them on the floor beside me. Or, as I discovered, the cat on the floor beside me.

How do cats (or dogs) get in such positions? I started pelting him with the paper wads. He didn’t care. Never woke up. Goofy Tut.

You’re probably wondering why I have ugly green carpet. I wonder that every day. I want hardwood. Honestly I’d prefer dark hardwood, but hear that dog toes scratch it. With two big dogs, that would get ugly quick. Not quite as ugly as hunter green carpet, but the zen like quality of that dark wood would immediately be tarnished with stress related headaches if it got scratched. Plus, it’d be covered in sand within two days. The lighter stuff won’t show the dirt near as much, and around here that’s important. Ask BJ.

Cue the sad music. I bought this True Lime for my mother when she started chemo. The chemo made everything taste nasty to her and she couldn’t hardly drink water it tasted so bad. If she ate a little something sour first though it really helped. She came out for her birthday in January 2008 and I had this for her. It’s never been used since and I can’t bring myself to throw it away.

See this? Remember that first picture of the little bottles of spices? I found these little tins in the bottom of the box. After I had almost used all the other sized tins.

See. One is shorter and a little wider. The other is taller and holds more spices. I wasn’t going to go back, rip off the labels, and refill the small tins with the small spices. I ordered enough extra of each to continue. No, I haven’t used lotion on my hands since 1987.

Can peppercorns be beautiful? I think so. The variety of colors is inspirational. I feel a new website design forming in my head. Or colors for my kitchen. Or the laundry room. So pretty. And in a big giant tin.

Check it out. All the spices in their own little tins. My heart swells with pride. I hear angel choir music in my head. The whole room brightens and a voice from Heaven booms “Well done my good and faithful servant”.

It did. I swear.

Out with the old…

In with the new…

Oh baby, you knowwwww what I like…(a nod to the Big Bopper)

And you would think this would be the end of the story.

But it isn’t.

Because the cans are all stacked on top of one another. And that drives me nuts. I built ‘shelves’ out of Office Depot boxes several years ago, but time and heavy spices has played a toll on their structure.

And the tins weren’t stacking right, no matter how I put them in there. So I took them all out. Removed my handy little shelves,

with cardboard reinforcement, and grabbed some

foam. Super thick foam. Big giant sheets of it. It pays to have a garage shop full of machinery work related stuff. I also found this in my newly reorganized small appliance cabinet.

Three seconds, or so, later and I had some new shelves.

I am nothing if not resourceful. Thanks Dad. A tribute to the man who can fix a leaky roof with bubble gum and cars with paper clips.

Check this out. Tell me this isn’t zen. Tell me this doesn’t make you happy just glancing at it. Tell me this isn’t better than sliced bread. It’s like 4 glasses of wine and a xanax good. Not that I would know about that. But I imagine, daily, how great that might be.

I am at peace, Grasshopper.

Go create some zen in your cabinet.

I’m a freak of nature when it comes to cleaning up. I can honestly let the house go to the point of CHAOS (can’t have anyone over syndrome) but when it’s time to reorganize, I’m very OCD. It has to be perfect. Which is probably why I procrastinate cleaning. I wan’t it done a certain way, and it takes a long time.

Anyway, yesterday was a clean out the cabinets day. And while they look awesome, there’s a pile of junk still on the counter that’s driving me crazy today so I’ll shortly be attacking that, and then cleaning out that dreaded plastic bowl/Rubbermaid/Tupperware cabinet where I have 33 bowls of different sizes, and 9 lids that don’t go to any of it.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook then you didn’t get this link yesterday for these awesome spice tins. I bought 60 of the round ones in different sizes after I counted all my spices and saw how much of each I had. Sixty spice tins, plus shipping and handling: Total $61. On top of that, I got a notice an hour later, they had already shipped! It sure beats the set of 6 for $19.99 you get at Bed Bath and Beyond. Go buy yourself some today.

Anyway, I set about cleaning out my spice cabinet, and the remaining portion of what I call my ‘pantry’. I like my spices in alphabetic order and generally they stay that way for at least 6 to 8 months before a crowded pantry, husband or laziness starts getting things out of control.

I started by pulling all the baking stuff, boxes, bottles and packages of who knows what on the counter. That sure is a lot of stuff!

I have a lot of baking things. I don’t usually bake. I can’t handle the sweets. But, I like to cook, and experiment. This is leftovers from my infamous marshmallow concoctions. They were To. Die. For.

When all was said and done, I took some of those wayward plastic containers and put them to good use. All that mess on the counter?

The cans though need some help. They’re orderly, but you try to find the can of corn there in the back. This is what drives my OCDness crazy and makes me spend hours online looking for those awesome pull out cabinets where you can see all the stuff at once. I can’t afford new cabinets, but will spend hours dreaming and decorating about how exactly the kitchen should be redone. It’s an endless cycle.

Next, was the small appliance cabinet. I literally collect kitchen things I think, and if it’s out there, I’ve bought it, tried it, and it’s now in the garage sale pile. In this cabinet were over 50 of the tea cup plates, and about the same number of tea/coffee cups. You know the kind that come in a set of dishes but yet are really too small for coffee, and really, who uses those little plates to set the cup on?

I kept them because I saw once on Martha where you can glue the saucer and cup together, fill it with candle wax and you’ve got a cute and handy little candle to give away, decorate, whatever.

I don’t make candles. But I kept them just in case.

I also had about 50 different kinds and size of cookie cutters. Copper ones from Martha, cheesy ones from the grocery store, and a myriad of others in between.

I don’t really make rolled cookies either.

After making some hard tough decisions about future projects that will never happen, this is what I get.

Did you know I owned a triple set of cheesecake pans in various sizes? And a spice/coffee mill? And an electric knife? Well we do now don’t we! And I can see them.

Trash. And two boxes of garage sale stuff.

Sometimes it’s good to be a little OCD.

Woke up today with a hankerin’ to get the kitchen in order. The plastic bags, foil, wrap, and wax paper boxes kept falling out at me every time I opened the cabinet, my spice cabinet (along with an entire baking section) was so full the doors wouldn’t close all the way.

I started the day off dragging it all out to look at. It was a mess. I piled the boxes of baggies, garbage bags and other stuff into a chair.

I got to thinking about how the best way to organize this mess. So many boxes! With them all open, I couldn’t stack them neatly. They always fell over. The baggies, all 5 different kinds/sizes wouldn’t stack. The 3 different foils, wax paper, cling wrap, and parchment wouldn’t stack because they were opened too. So I set about putting each thing in its own kind.

Snack baggies, in a snack baggie. (wouldn’t fit, so I put them in a bigger one.)

Freezer bags in a freezer bag. Sandwich size in a sandwich size. Quarts in quarts. You get the idea.

I even put garbage bags in baggies, large and small.

When all was said and done, all the baggies fit into the largest baggies I had.

The best part is that those big giant bags also held all of my rolls of stuff!

So guess what my cabinet looks like now?

This here makes me smile.