Mount Cinnamon

The other day I was at Oryana's, which is a natural foods cooperative, so of course my kind of place. It's a little pricey...but what can you do. Good stuff costs.

Anyway, a nice lady had made some collard greens soup and was giving out samples. So of course I tried some. And it was really good! So even though I'd only gone in there for Oat Bran cereal, which is creamy like Cream of Wheat but nutritious like oatmeal and only available at Oryana's that I can tell, I wound up looking for all the ingredients for collard greens soup so that I could make it at home.

Well, the first thing I realized was that I had no idea what "collard greens" were. Something green, I guessed. I perused the vegetable aisle and was just about to give up and humiliate myself by asking for help when I saw a sign that clearly said "collard greens." Whew!

Turns out collard greens are really big leaves! And I mean really big! I wish I had taken a picture so I could show you, but I've already cut them up and made the soup, so that's out of the question. (And now I've blown the end of the story! Shoot. Ha ha--not really.)

Anyway, I bought my collard greens, some chipotle powder, an onion, and assorted other ingredients and traipsed back home. I didn't buy ALL the spices, because I was pretty sure we had most of them already. And here's where the interesting part happened: we did indeed have everything I needed. AND THEN SOME.

I'm telling you, these spices cupboards...yes, cupboards, plural...were jam-packed with enough spices to...I don't know, do something extremely spicy.

The only problem was, I couldn't find anything. It was a mess!* I started looking and realized drastic measures needed to be taken. i.e. ORGANIZE THE SPICES.

So I started taking spices out of their respective cupboards and grouping them together. I began to realize that we had many duplicate spices. Mark got home in the middle of this project, and I had spices all over the counters. One pile was a group of four containers of cinnamon. Look at this, I said. We have FOUR CINNAMONS! And I'm not even near done!

Oh, Mark said. I'm sure you won't find any more cinnamons.

We began working together, with Mark graciously acceding to my somewhat OCD request that we put all the spices more or less in alphabetical order. Spice after spice came out of the cupboard, until we were basically surrounded by a loooong line of spices all around the kitchen.

Then Mark began sorting the spices and getting rid of old ones. And something else happened: we made what can only be considered an archaeological discovery. CURRY POWDER FROM 1976. Yes, 1976. And heck, that's the expiration date...it's probably even older!

We decided to set the curry powder aside for our own personal, future historical museum. After all, curry powder that's lasted that long deserves to remain. And besides, Mark smelled it and said it's fine and he's going to use it to make his next curry dish.

I'm not sure this is such a great idea.

Anyway, after saving the curry powder, we did toss a whole bunch of other spices and we now have a totally organized spice carousel...yes, just one...that has everything we need. EVEN LABELS. Now you know I'm OCD.

Oh, but there was one thing that wouldn't fit on the carousel: our cinnamon collection. Final count on the cinnamons??

ELEVEN!

Which we've whittle down to five. Cinnamon toast, anyone?


*Edited to add: it was only a mess to me. Mark could find whatever he needed.