Before and After photos

 BEFORE

AND

 AFTER

Psyche!

Fooled ya, didn't I?

I bet you thought you'd see me in a cover-up dress and then a bikini? Nope. This is the kitchen pantry cabinet make-over.   And truth is - the after doesn't look all that different in a photograph from the before. But if you're trying to cook in my kitchen  - well - then you can really tell. This cabinet is usually a jumble of cans and envelopes and bottles. There were things in it that hadn't been seen in years. Cooking had become frustrating and I was beginning to buy duplicates. And there is that sense of wastefulness about not eating what I have - not honoring my present riches in the quest for greater ones. So yesterday the whole cabinet was emptied - one shelf at a time - starting at the top - scrubbed down, reorganized and now, though it's still full - it is also functional.

The bag of give-aways was much smaller than I thought it would be - but there are some cans to take to the food bank.

The cans of food have been organized to facilitate how we eat now. And by golly - meals have been planned to eat up the stuff that I am tired of looking at and probably won't buy again. We eat a lot of Asian-inspired stir-fry and there are bamboo shoots, bean sprouts and water chestnuts - and they've been in the cabinet a long time - but they will be gone before February 1. Ditto the canned chicken and cranberry sauce. They will make a nice casserole with leftover Thanksgiving stuffing mix on some frozen winter evening.  Tuna will get together with noodles in a casserole too - I have a good low-fat recipe.  The canned fruit will go into green smoothies till there are none left. Cans of beans and tomatoes rotate swiftly through my kitchen so I don't have anything in particular planned for them. I did give them more space though.

It's not that I won't buy these things again - it is that I won't buy them before we eat up what we already have.

Where I made the biggest change was in the spice shelf and rack. Spices are hard to keep organized and if you buy wasabi for just one recipe the durn jar hangs around forever. My spice rack is old enough that the jar lids are cracking and only McCormick spices fit in the holes. Yet it's the easiest way to get at spices. And what in the world do I have so many seeds for? Sesame, fennel, celery, allspice, coriander, it goes on and on.  I am not that adventurous a cook!

The librarian in me likes things in alphabetical order but organizing the spice rack solely in alphabetical order means I give precious real estate to spices I rarely use, so this time I organized it in a more Dewey-like way - a la category -  and then put things in alphabetical order.  I love the McCormick's grilling spices to use on tofu. Tofu is pretty tasteless so I vary our stir fry with these spice combos.

So now there is a side of the rack that is ONLY for tofu stir-fry flavors. The other sides have the more general spices and herbs - in alphabetical order, of course. starting with Basil - which I use all the time, not allspice - which I use only at Christmas time.

After my frenzy of tossing-of-the-old, there are now some empty spice jars with rickety lids. I believe the Penzey's store in Richmond sells this size jar and lid so maybe I can spiff them up a bit.  They will be dedicated to the curry spices - another staple in our family, so that I can have them ready to hand. As for the spices in the cabinet - they are either exotics or duplicates or the jars are oversized. They all have dots on them and if they aren't used in 6 months I am tossing them.

Something else I learned while reorganizing things is that I won't be buying the big French's Worcester sauce any more. It's just a shade too big to fit on the shelf with the rest of the bottles. This cabinet is not adjustable so I will change either the brand or the quantity I buy. I hate having that big bottle up high.

I also pulled out all the loose recipes from the space underneath the cabinet - next to the microwave. I'm going through them today and keeping only the ones I want to try again. Inspired by my cousin, who already did this,  I plan to make a loose leaf notebook of the recipes I love - like this one:

Cuban-Style Pork and Sweet Potato Slow Cooker Stew

So - in honor of my Clean Kitchen - a sight you might not get a chance to witness again - here is the 20 feet of kitchen counter in all its glory.

Happy New Kitchen Year - want an orange?

Whole Grains

Whole grains. We're always hearing about how important they are for us. Lots of fiber, essential vitamins and minerals. All that good stuff. And then, if you live out in the sticks, you're given your options. Dry cereal or factory baked bread.  Mind now - I totally love bread. If I had to pick a single Desert Island Food it would be bread. But I have yet to find a store bought whole grain bread that meets my picky standards. Something in the recipe, possibly whatever it is that gives these breads any shelf life at all, just ruins it for me: Gummy, sugary, just disappointing all around.  Even the fancy bakeries in the city have let me down.  I'm looking for a bread that's hearty, fragrant, rich, full bodied, fun to chew and that means, like the little red hen, I have to bake it myself. Fortunately,  I like to bake bread and often do, but I can't always bake it and to get me to light up my oven in the summertime requires a visit from the queen.

Dry cereals don't appeal to me. A filling size portion of dry cereal needs to be a cup and a half.  I love me some hot oatmeal - and I like grits well enough. I like all good tasting grain products. But I'm tired of what is available locally - which is whatever you can get from Walmart or Food Lion: Some interesting flours but only a few and besides - flour means baking and I am curious about what these grains taste like just plain.

And so, my 2011 food quest is to sample Whole Grains in as many ways as I can. I started with what's already in my house which was Quinoa flour and pearled barley. I already knew I liked barley and I was curious about what the cookbook authors meant by quinoa's earthy taste.

Duh. Earthy means it tastes like dirt.

LOL well, no. It just had that hint of dirt - earth - scent and taste when I dipped my finger into the flour and tasted it. And the authors (dang. I don't have the book near me) did warn me that the earthy tasting flour does well cut with something sweet in the bread, like pine nuts. I didn't have any pine nuts and I really didn't want to make a sweet bread.

I used their recipe which is a pretty basic bread recipe ... 3 cups liquid to 6 cups dry. I used 3 cups whole wheat, 2 cups all purpose and 1 cup quinoa and, as per the recipe, double the yeast. which is good since I had to quit making the bread mid-way and put  it in the refrigerator after the first rise. As such, it came out a little denser than I think it would have been if I'd been able to stick with the normal time schedule. Happily, I like dense bread.

Unhappily, the quinoa gives a slight bite or tang to my bread. It fades quickly and can be completely masked by a nut butter - almond or peanut worked. Interestingly, jelly and blueberry butter did NOT mask the tang.

I don't call it good bread unless it's good with nothing on it - so I would give quinoa a go-by  as a flour product. I'm not sure what I'll do with the rest of this bag of flour either, since I'm really not tempted to bake anything more with it ... but I am still researching recipes. I may change my mind.

As for the barley - oh. well. YUM.

I already knew I loved barley. I love it in soup and BD insists it be put in pot roast - and sometimes I comply. The down side to barley and most of the whole grains is it takes a long time to cook them. With barley, though, you can cook up a big batch - it swells to three times its size so 1 cup uncooked will give you 3 cups cooked - and refrigerate it. I like it hot with a few raisins, cinnamon, a dot of butter and a little milk. Yum. In fact - I will have some for breakfast today. And it's yummy in salads. But we had it with a shrimp stir fry made up of a pound of shrimp, a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables, sliced mushrooms, some garlic, a pinch of pepper flakes, about 1/2 teaspoon of powdered mustard  and maybe 1/4 cup soy sauce. a little water, a teaspoon of corn starch for thickening .. even my picky eater husband loved it.

I love how long you can chew barley - it makes a half a cup of breakfast cereal last a long time and it lasts a long time in my tummy. Three days now I've had it for breakfast at 8 and wasn't hungry at all even when noon rolled around. That alone is enough to make barley my new favorite grain ... but there are So Many Others out there - and I plan to try them all.

Happy Hump Day