My spice cabinet was out of control.  I would reach for something only to discover that I didn’t have any.  This is terrible news when you need garlic powder to make your homemade garlic bread.  Especially when you can’t SEE everything.  Things were hidden behind other things and it has been utter chaos.  Time to take care of this monstrosity.

After taking everything out and putting like with like, I discovered that I had five (FIVE) containers of minced onions.  No garlic powder, but plenty of minced dried onions.

Several years ago I put some of my most used spices in small half pint mason jars (does anyone else have a longing to go watch Little House on the Prairie right now?).  I put labels on the tops and left it at that.  I loved having my spices in these jars because they will hold the entire contents of most spices you buy in the store, but I could never see at a glance what was what.

I laid ALL of them out so that I could see exactly how much of everything I had and what I needed to add to my grocery list for next time.  See!  Why do I have two containers of Old Bay?  We do not have low country boils here at our house, so what am I going to use this for?  Do any of you have any tried and true recipes using this?  Send them my way.

After determining what I actually had and what I needed to add, I scrubbed out the cabinet.  How do these things get so filthy?  I’m not preparing food inside this cabinet so I just don’t understand how it could be so grungy. 

Then I transferred everything into my beautiful little jars.  I seriously love them.  They are a great size, each jar has a slightly different pattern, but still uniform enough to fool your eye until you look closely.    And they bounce when you drop them on the floor.  This is important at my house. I used these labels for the sides of the jars.

Aren’t they lovely?

All of the bulk items go onto the top shelf where they are accessible but not in my way and the middle shelf are things that I can’t put into my jars like the maple syrup that Liv puts on her eggs.  That’s the only way for years that I could get her to eat eggs after her six hour allergy test when she was ten.  I’ll write a post about that later.

First I tried to arrange all of my spices in one of the small drawers next to my stove.  It would be convenient, but it was way too small.  I also did not like the quick labels I made for the tops.

Then I decided that I needed to utilize one of my big drawers because I have so many spices.  I dragged the three pans I was storing in here out and put them into another cabinet and cleaned everything.

I found this vinyl liner at my local Dollar Tree.  It is amazing.  It’s slightly padded and it keeps the jars from sliding about.      Next I wanted clearer labels for the tops of my jars. 

$1.00 for 60 at the Dollar Tree.

Now!  It’s not perfect but we all know that’s not going to happen at my house.  And I know that it will evolve like always.  But, I am very happy with it.  Hayden laughed because I am a control freak and put everything into alphabetical order.  It just makes sense to my brain.  Now I don’t have to spend ten minutes looking for the garlic powder.  I know it’s in the G section.

I can finally check this off my to-do list.  Yay!  How do you store your spices?

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