The other day, I made a recipe from Vedge: trumpet mushroom cioppino with fennel and leeks. Dang, it was tasty.
It called for Old Bay seasoning, which is not something I keep on hand, so I went looking for a recipe. Hoo boy, it has a lot of things.
First, I had to figure out if I even had a key ingredient: celery seed. It’s not something I cook with often, but I’ve bought a lot of weird little packages of spices over time. It took me several minutes to shuffle through my spice tub o’ doom to find it. The rest of the ingredients I knew I had, but finding all the individual containers was time-consuming.
I’d love an ACTUALLY ORGANIZED spice collection, but I don’t have a good system. When I’ve tried, I never seem to have enough small containers to grow with the random little bits of things I pick up: those tiny Spicely boxes, bulk spices, etc. Some things end up in too-large jars; others stay in baggies with twist-ties that completely wear out. And simply stacking things in the tub in some semblance of logical order never seems to hold up. I don’t presently want to throw a bunch of cash at the problem and invest in a big set of spice organizers, so…the mess of a tub it is.