Spice it up

Or down….because we downsized our spice jars this month.



You see, way back in the way back, our 1940s kitchen was fully furnished with a breakfast nook and shallow shelves built in above each bench seat. (I'm assuming the breakfast nook had bench seating because, really, nothing else would fit and because I've seen 1940s breakfast nooks intact.)

Our nook, alas, was emptied of table and seating sometime prior to our home ownership and was refitted with cabinetry. It's a wiser use of the space, I think, especially since the house already has a dining room right off the kitchen.

Anyway, the shelves on the facing walls remained untouched, and they are a perfect place for storing spices. Except, they are out in the open, and THOMY and I were kinda fed up with cramming spice jars of various sizes and makers on each shelf. We started buying spices we already had because we couldn't find them on the shelf. And then it just looked cluttered.

I know. It's a rough life. And I don't have photographic proof of how bad it was, so you'll just have to take my word that it sucked to be us when it came to spices.

But now it doesn't.



We bought the acrylic, bale jars at Target. Unfortunately, Target's website doesn't have these jars listed. In the store, they come in packs of three and are located in the same aisle as larger canister sets. When we found them, the canisters were half price; normally, they're $5 a set.



Instead of labeling each jar with a pretty font, like I'd wanted originally, I dug out our P-touch labelmaker for efficiency's sake. On most of the jars, I printed the spice name in the smallest typeface to make the label tape stretch. But a few large letters snuck out when I wasn't paying attention. I used them anyway.

Oh, and what are we doing with the excess spices that don't all fit into these tiny jars? We're storing them in the cabinet above the fridge, practicing a kind of salt shaker principle. Not all the salt in the canister goes into the salt shaker from the get-go.