Goodbye Spice Rack

After the completion of this blog post, I will be saying goodbye to an old culinary companion: my college spice rack

 

When I was in college, a friend of mine asked for some help carrying things out of her sister's house who was moving. As is always the case, people accumulate way more than they realize, and the act of needing to lug everything to a new location brings to light how much a person doesn't need. So she was in the process of reprioritizing her needs, and one of the things she decided to cut loose was her spice rack.

When she offered it to me, a buddy of mine who was also helping, burst out laughing. From his perspect, apparently my eyes lit up and I fell to my knees, laying my hands at the sides of the rack. I was mesmerized by it.

I don't remember it quite being like that, but I can believe it. As I gazed at those bottles, a whole new world of spice was opening up to me.

For context, by the time I got to college, despite having done Katimavik and having had food prep responsibilities during my rounds as House Manager, I still didn't have many life skills. Back then, my most reliable skill was bread baking, likely because baking generally comes with more guidance than cooking does. I would also always have someone helping me, even if they were similarly inexperienced.

During my college stint, I wasn't beholden to a schedule, |I was relieved of the pressure of providing for a household, and had to balance health and finances with the school workload. It wasn't a conducive environment to best utilize my culinary skills.

But I was trying. I had reverse-engineered the college cafeteria stirfries, eventually swapped out the noodles for rice when I found that was cheaper, and eventually started cracking eggs into it, making it a sort of fried rice. My newfound ability to make large batches of relatively healthy, cheap, and not-disgusting homemade food established me as the house chef among my similarly-inexperienced roommates. I could make fried rice and homemade bread, I was king.

But I still had no access point to the mysterious world of spices. When I laid eyes on this spice rack, a whole new reality opened up before me.

The two spices that were most unfamiliar to me at the time were tarragon and coriander. I would go out of my way to find both of these, because even though I didn't know how to use them and I had a limited budget, the investment was worth it to complete my collection.

We would do stupid things with spices. One of the most easiest and most affordable foods as students was frozen prierogies. You could get them for $2 per kilogram. This was amazing at the time, and if you can believe it, during the present-day crazy grocery inflation, those prices remain true at the time of this posting!

Anyway, we would fry up some prierogies and mindlessly experiment by throwing spices on them. We would have spice competitions with prierogies as the canvas.

When I moved the first time, the entire rack made it to the new location intact. But as someone who was helping us carried it to the new kitchen counter, one of the bottles fell out. I was upstairs and heard a crash. When I asked what broke, the person simply said "spice". Jokingly, I said "It better not be tarragon" because that was the one I felt most useless as well as costly. It was tarragon.

In the second move, corriander was lost. Somehow, the two spices I found most unfamiliar were the ones that didn't make it all the way.

Despite the fact that they were my least utilized, I still complained incessantly about it. I think this isn't even my first blog post about it. My family would make fun of me, but when I showed them the jars with their personalized, engraved leaves, they understood. My grandparents tried to offer advice on rebottling, but it proved impossible. As a consolation, they gave me some of their spice bottles, which I still have and have no plans of losing.

I would move only once more. Initially the tradition of losing a piece of the rack per move would not be repeated. However, it now appears that this move will be the end of it in its entirety.

You see, I have become far more versed in the world of spice than I had been when I first met my spice rack. It was becoming apparent that my new needs exceeded the limits of what it could offer. Even coriander was not a stranger to me, although I could only ever find like, one recipe for tarragon and I think I only made it once.

I would default to scrounging through shelves of bagged spices more often than I could turn to the support of my rack. Through lifestyle changes, being responsible for regular cooking for my then-girlfriend now wife, and my increasing proficiency due in part to my food blog, I had evolved and had witness to this development. My increasing need for a more efficient system was reported to my now-mother-in-law, and one Christmas I was gifted with a more extensive rack.

From six spices to 24. Even at its hayday of eight spices, the old rack simply cannot compete. Also, the new one is from McCormick, a popular brand with glass bottles at every grocery. So if one breaks it can easily be replaced, and if there is a more desired spice, it can be swapped out. The versatility is immeasurably better.

And with limited kitchen space in our basement apartment, I was eventually confronted with the fact that the old rack is just too bulky for its utility. I'll miss the engraved leaves, the unique, irreplaceable nature of it, and the memories that it evokes of my rooky days as a home cook. But sentimentality alone does not justify its continued existed on our now-crowded kitchen counter.

So farewell, old spice rack. You guided me to the world of spice, inspired me to experiment and research. You fulfilled your purpose in bringing me to this point, and I won't soon forget you.