In my previous home, I had two cabinets in my kitchen. Not like, two and a little cubby, shelf or extra little cabinet on top of the stove, but two. Total. For dishes, food and everything else. Two would be rough on a college kid living on Chef Boyardee, but for someone who likes to cook, it was downright ridiculous. It was three years of opening a cabinet door and fleeing the room before getting knocked over by an avalanche of various forms of pesto and chutney. As you might imagine, my current kitchen, having no less that eight full sized cabinets and a pantry, felt pretty damn palatial when I moved in. I thought I’d never, ever fill them up. It took about three weeks before the spills started again. My spice cabinet is the worst. I have bags, tins, shakers…all creating traffic jams preventing me from reaching whatever spice I happen to be looking for at any given moment. At some point I installed a turntable, thinking that would help organize and navigate. It doesn’t turn anymore, and if I do get it to turn (because sometimes I’m that stubborn), a clot of multiple spice jars ends up bursting free, all flying in the direction of my face. The problem only compounds itself because when I go in there looking for something, I’ll inevitably not be able to find it or just decide I don’t have it out of sheer frustration. So I buy another. That’s how I ended up with four jars of curry powder. It’s all good. Curry powder is nice to have on hand, and when I decided it was time to post a quinoa fried rice recipe, curry powder seemed the perfect seasoning blend. I’m looking on the positive side. In a way, it makes sense, because Indian curry powder has at least four different spices mixed in there. So it’s okay to have four jars of the stuff clogging up my cabinet. Right? And then there’s the fact that this stuff was amazingly delicious. I’ll always deal with a little organizational annoyance for a good meal, and the fact that it came together in less than thirty minutes…perhaps next time I make this I’ll devote those saved minutes to organizing my kitchen.
