Culinary Quandaries and Repetitious Beauty

Killy vocalized a strong distaste for our spice rack a while ago.

Well, not the rack specifically, as we'd tracked down some very lovely and inexpensive chrome wire racks when we moved into our current apartment. No, the spice containers themselves were the culprits, a cornucopian melange of colors, shapes, and sizes. We cook at home a lot, thus the orderliness of spices quickly became a source of contention. One false move with the cumin instead of the cinnamon and your Saturday morning pancake breakfast extravaganza instantly falls down several notches on the Deliciousness Scale.

Killy prefers an alphabetically arranged spice rack, of course, as any rational person would. I preferred to arrange them by overall container shape and color, resulting in five or six groups of similar spices—spice families, if you will. I memorized the overall shape and color of my favorites because, well... they are my favorites. For example, I put Red Pepper Flakes on just about everything and I know it's tall and plastic with a red label. Now, in the heat of battle with a pan of shallots and tuna steaks, the last thing I need is to get bogged down with reading twenty-nine labels (until getting to the "R's"). I thought it would be faster to look at the group (family) of five tall plastic red containers, skipping past two or three (Basil, Oregano, Ground Mustard) and quickly narrowing it down to the Red Pepper Flakes. Done and done, right?

As you might imagine, Killy was not a fan of this method. In fact, she probably skipped reading the entire paragraph above, as well it deserves. I will admit my reasoning involved a small amount of laziness, but in my defense, the discrete groups *were* nicer to look at than what I considered to be the arrangement of a demented person if you weren't close enough to read the labels (ie: alphabetical).

This is all I could find of the evidence, hidden partially (mercifully) behind our Quaaludes jar:

Killy is quite tolerant of my madness, as you can see.

Pressing on: I found out that our local grocery store West Side Market stocks spices in nice (and cheap) little glass spice bottles. After a prototype phase and Killy Certification, I picked up twenty jars of peppercorns (we go through them like crazy), dumped the contents into a large tupperware, washed the jars, removed the labels, made some new labels, and (with Killy's expert assistance) transferred the spices into their new homes and alphabetized them:

Common sense prevails once again in our very own kitchen.