No, that is not a signal that this is about to be a racy post. Quite frankly, that’s not your business. Instead, it piggy backs on living a more natural life.
We have four spice barrels just outside our door. One contains basil, easily summer’s most perfect herb. Competing with the basil for top honors is dill, which invokes images of sunshine and slow summer days, and cilantro, which just invites you to taste summer on a well-made turkey sandwich with a little tomato. Oregano and thyme are too laid back to try to compete. They just sort of sit back and say, “Call me in October when you want to make a nice marinara sauce or in November when you’re roasting the Thanksgiving turkey.” They get it. They don’t have to compete. They have their own little market niche.
Spices have particular significance in our house, especially when you marry a “skinny little Cajun kid from New Orleans”, as I once heard my husband describe himself. Plus, that skinny kid likes to cook and makes the best gumbo I’ve ever tasted… more on that later!
So, when we designed our kitchen, we designed a spice drawer into the custom cabinet that also houses the cutting board countertop. It’s a 39-inch cabinet and the pull-out drawer has an insert where you can line the spices up so they’re easily readable. My detail-oriented husband has all of our spices placed alphabetically and gets a little twitchy if they get out of order. (I am not admitting to anything, but it is a bit of a kick to mix things up every now and then.) In this spice nirvana, we put in a combination of purchased spices and our own home grown, particularly basil, dill and oregano. As we have gotten better with preserving our own, the spice drawer has been augmented with another spice shelf on the lazy Susan to its right. Additionally, we are starting to make up some of our blends – either those taken from cookbooks or from the internet with just a little twist to make it more uniquely our own. There is the bronzed shrimp spices, which now hold their own space in the alphabetized spice rack. Further down the line there is the extra hot Jamaica jerk spices for chicken. And while it’s still made from scratch each time, the spice drawer continues to contain all of the materials needed for taco seasoning.
The taco seasoning is probably one of our best discoveries when it comes to spice alchemy. You see, we decided one day to make tacos and I was making the quick list of what I needed from the grocery. I mentioned taco seasoning and my husband queried if we could just make our own. Interesting, I told him and added, “I bet we could.” A quick search later revealed a blog – Rachel Cooks – and in it contained the absolute best taco seasoning I have ever had. Hat’s off to Rachel, as well. Normally, there’s a “tweak” in there somewhere as I can’t seem to leave a recipe alone. With this taco seasoning, I don’t change a thing.
So, last night was taco night and getting out the mise en place bowls I got my husband a couple of years ago for Christmas, I pulled out the drawer and set about adding each spice. A mere half-hour later, we sat down to perfectly seasoned tacos.
There are many things I love about making up my own seasonings. The first is the alchemy of it. A little bit of this, a little bit of that and voila, I’ve made something taste really well. I also like the flexibility. When I see a recipe for a spice mix that I think we will like, I’ll do a quick rundown of the ingredients. Yep, we got that. Uh-huh, got that, too. Hmmm, let me check, but I think so. Uh, we don’t have that, but I could substitute this and that sounds pretty good. But by far, the thing I love the most about making my own seasonings is that I know exactly what’s in them. I don’t have to add an “anti-caking agent” (is that even food?) to my taco seasoning. There is no color additive to the bronzing recipe. And my jerk chicken spices are just fine without a citrus flavoring… I use fresh lemons, thank you very much.
As we kick things into gear this summer, I want to drill down on our own produced spices even more. We grow our own garlic and onions, but there are times when we need garlic powder or granulated onion. I never knew until I married that skinny little Cajun kid that paprika was really ground up red sweet peppers. We certainly grow plenty of them and while we have too many stored in the freezer, my husband plans on planting more to keep the seed thread alive. A little homemade paprika may make good use of those Jimmy Nardellos.
So, I’m cruising the internet again this morning. Checking out food dehydrators and if there are any recipes out there to grind up your own dried onions or pulverize some cloves of garlic. If I can make this happen, it becomes another tool in my toolshed for living naturally. Creating my own spices from what we dig out of our own backyard is incredibly liberating, if currently somewhat limited. But I’ve got plans to fix that and access to the internet. I’ve also got a NutriBullet gathering dust in my buffet cabinet that’s just looking for a project like this.
The more I can do on my own, the more healthy and simply we will live. I’m pretty excited about this prospect of spicing up my life a bit. Once I get the hang of it, the possibilities are endless.
The Yuppie Homesteader 