Clean Out Your Spice Rack
(good household management tip)

My new spice rack. It's time for a clean-out. My most used herbs and spices are: thyme, marjoram, salt, pepper, cayenne, cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, ginger, and cilantro (though generally only fresh cilantro). My least used: cream of tartar, caraway (because I loath caraway seeds), curry, and fenugreek seeds.

I am going to bust a household myth that many of you are probably still holding as a dear truth close to your bosom:

Household Myth: dried herbs and spices will never go bad and may be kept for years.

Truth: they may not go bad but will certainly be like dust in your mouth if you let them get too old and may also have bugs in them.

Like most people I don't replace my dried herbs and spices all that often. It can be expensive and you never know when you're going to need that asafoetida, right? I'd be willing to bet that most of you have at least five jars you almost never touch in your spice rack that you bought while trying out some new recipe two years ago when you were on that "world" cuisine kick. When was the last time any of you used mace?

Not too long ago my mom came to my house and made a bunch of curried deviled eggs. I love deviled eggs whether they have curry in them or not. It turns out, though, that very old curry will had an interesting grit to egg yolks while adding no appreciable flavor. I don't use curry all that often. So my mom mistakenly used my very old jar of crusty curry and all the flavor had been destroyed by time and it's great age. The lesson here is: don't ruin your food with flavorings that have lost their integrity.

How can you know if a dried herb has gone bad? Most herbs, when dried well, retain a green or silvery green hue. If your dried oregano is brownish or grey then it is probably not good anymore. The best test of all is to smell it. It should smell strongly of itself when you open the jar. If you don't have a strong nose, as I do, then pour some in your hands and rub it between them. If there's any life left in it you will smell it and the smell will make you want to use it in something right away.

With spices it's even simpler- just sniff it. If the smell isn't strong and delicious in the jar, then it's old. Did you just buy it and it doesn't seem aromatic? Then you have probably wasted some good money on old spices. It can happen. If you want to be able to store spices for longer and have them maintain their integrity, store the whole spices and grind them yourself as you need them. You can do this with many spices such as: cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and allspice.

Here's a quick list of how to cull out your spice cabinet:

• anything over three years old is likely lost much of it's integrity

• anything brown that started of green should go

• lack of aromatic scent

• webbing in the jar*

• dead or live weevils

This is part of good household management. To prevent waste in the future I have some suggestions. When trying new recipes that call for herbs or spices not in your usual repertoire, buy very small quantities from the bulk section of your store (preferably in little paper bags because those are recyclable). Buy just enough for the recipe you are trying. If you end up making the recipe again, you can buy a little more. If you find yourself using this new herb or spice frequently, then you can either buy it in a jar, or better yet, fill an empty jar you already have with a bulk purchase of it.

For those of you hoping to grow your own herbs to dry, here's a list of the herbs that maintain their flavor best when dried:

• thyme

• oregano

• marjoram

• dill

• sage

• basil (though I prefer fresh or frozen)
  

• sweet bay laurel

• stevia

• lemon verbena

• mint

(Don't bother with: parsley, cilantro, chives, or tarragon. You can dry rosemary but I see no value in this as it is very much like putting hard sticks into your food. Most people can grow rosemary and use it fresh all year round and using it fresh is much more tender and good than using it dry.)

Holding onto old food items because it would be wasteful to throw them out is a false economy. My FIL** had a box of cereal in his pantry from 1987 just three years ago that had water damage on the box. He's a very frugal man and frugality has much to recommend itself, but one can take it to extremes that not only don't make sense, but can become a danger to your health. Most food loses it's nutritional value before a year is up. All food is best eaten fresh, or eaten within a year if dried or canned. It may last through a nuclear war ten years from now, but that doesn't mean it has any nutritional value to offer besides filling up a hungry belly.

Be wary of the bargains you buy. If you are buying flour on sale and it comes in a ten pound bag and you don't use much flour anyway, you may be wasting more money than you're saving. Flour goes rancid and can get bugs in it if it isn't used within a few months. Most food items that go on sale are on sale because they are already getting old. If it's something you use a lot of frequently then it is probably a good buy.

Now go clean out your spice rack and see what you have left when you've shaken it all up, sniffed, and sorted it!





*If you shake a jar up a little and you see that there seem to be bits of herb or spice hanging on the sides of the jar, the jar has mites in it. Yep, tiny mites. Or worse? Moths. Gross.

**Sorry for outing you FIL! I love you but that cereal had to go!

The Art of Household Management

(Where it all begins)

Now that I am, at last, in a proper house* I have been finding myself thinking about what it really means to be a housewife, a homesteader (urban or otherwise), or a homemaker. They are all essentially the same thing. Different words that make us either more or less comfortable with our job as a manager of household affairs.

There is an art to household management as Martha has tried to teach us all. I think a lot of people have gotten caught up in the idea that what matters most is that you appear to be very organized in a pretty way, that your house be dust free, that it be always ready for guests in spite of the constant flow of laundry that can never ever be caught up with and which will one day animate itself while you sleep and club you over the head. I think Martha has done America a lot of good, but she has also made us afraid to be less than perfect. She has intimidated and alienated a lot of people by never seeming to have real human blood in her veins; by starting off like us and then becoming a filthy rich mogul with white slaves.

Whether or not you work outside the home, all households require some management and I think that people are losing touch with how to do that. No one is teaching it anymore. It used to be something people took pride in- the smooth running of their home. Not just women, though it was certainly more of a woman’s art than a man’s and I’m going to be dreadfully sexist here and say that it’s my opinion that the reason women have historically stayed home with the kids and ran the house is because they are better at it. There are exceptions, of course, and I know of at least one man who is better at this job than his wife and enjoys it more, but I’m speaking in generalities.

Besides, women have the boobs. Kids need the boobs. Men have boobs only when they work really hard at it by a strict diet of fat and beer. But man-boobs never do lactate, a fact I’m sure they are pleased about since it means no cracked nipples. So lacking breast pumps, babies have (throughout human history) had to be where the women are. And women have had to seek somewhere safe to nurse and care for the babies and kids. Which probably originally meant a cave or some other sort of natural shelter. But in our time, we live in houses. If we’re lucky.

I’m veering off a little there, but not much. It’s all pertinent in this day of feminist issues and confusion between our roles as mothers and fathers, men and women, husband’s and wives, friends and lovers. Who are we? What is expected of us? If I’m a woman and I don’t want to earn money for a living, does that make me a lazy ass good for nothing person? If I am a woman who wants to stay home and force my man to go hunt down some food and a high speed Internet connection- does that make me a traitor to the feminist movement? No. We’ve all talked about that here and decided amongst us that feminism is about choice rather than about condemnation of traditional roles.

I have veered off here more than intended but I think the detour was worth it. Now I want to assert that anyone, male or female, can learn the art of household management. My mother was an excellent guide and I thank her for it. I can’t say she taught me the frugality part of the job, but she taught me how much work goes into having a clean house (she paid me to do it) putting excellent food on the table every day for the family, growing a productive garden full of fresh organic fruits and vegetables, and yes, she even made our house a beautiful place to be. She showed me how rich this makes a home life. We may have had a lot of family problems, but a smoothly running house was something I could count on as a kid.

Who taught you? What was the best lesson you learned? I am asking myself today where does a beginner begin? When you come to a new house, perhaps as a new bride or groom, where do you first jump into this job? What are the essentials?

My main thought is that if this job were to be boiled down to its most basic element it would be about the flow of what enters and exits the home. Finding balance there is at the core of it all. Who comes in, who goes out, what items come in, what exits as either trash or donations…this is what it all revolves around: finding balance in the inward and outward flow through the doors of your home. I was thinking about it last night as I went through my medicine cabinet to clean out what was old and expired. I threw out fifty percent of what I had been storing due to limited uses (specific prescriptions for dead cats or old illnesses) passed expiration dates, or in some cases medicines that are so disgusting** and useless that just seeing them made me cringe.

What particularly struck me was how much money had been wasted on desperately trying to relieve problems that must simply run their course. Each bottle I emptied and put into the recycling bin represented household dollars I had spent in the pursuit of health or pain relief, space being taken up by old expired products, and lastly- but possibly most importantly- trash that will now leave my house and either go to the recycling center, the landfill, or down the drain into the water supply. While it’s great that many of the bottles are recyclable, the fact of the matter is- there is altogether too much waste going on in my house which is easy to see when examining the flow of things going out my front door.

And that, my friends, is poor household management.

So I am going to assign myself this small piece of homework for the next week: to think carefully about everything I am buying from a complete perspective. Like a breathing meditation I want to be vividly aware of the whole impact of each thing I buy and bring into my house. My new (to me) farmhouse is the vessel that holds all that is my life in it just as my body holds all that I am in it. A vessel within a vessel. I will ask myself the following questions:

Is this necessary?

What kind of packaging does it come in?

Will this be safe in our water system if I must pour it down the drain later?

Will this end up in a landfill?

Can I make something similar to it out of things I already have?

Can I buy this in bulk to save money and packaging?

I think that this is the first and most important part of good household management:

Asserting control over the incoming and outgoing flow of stuff and people through your door.

Limit the trash and poison you let into your life in the first place and your whole life will be cleaner, healthier, and happier.

It’s a little like learning to breath again in slow even breaths.

It’s good to be home.








*My idea of what a home should feel like and how it should function. This is obviously very personal.

**Throat spray that tastes like melted band aids.