details for kitchen nirvana (aka: magnetic spice rack)

Level of difficulty: easy peasy

Posts explaining the process:

1. prepping for a little corner of kitchen nirvana
2. spice tin solution
3. spice door wrap-up
   

Pros:

1. spices are easy to pull, which saves time and effort;
2. encourages creation of more interesting dishes (spices inspire);
3. spices are more likely to be used (less waste);
4. easy to see when you're running low on an item by a row-by-row scan of the tins;
5. easy to add or remove a spice -- just shift tins around;
6. results in a clean, colorful, uniform look; and
   
7. it's just cool. We open the door and guests gasp. Kid you not.
   

Cons:

1. takes a little time to pull all the materials together
2. not the cheapest project ever
   

Cost:

• magnetic sheets: $94 (two 30" x 24" sheets, including shipping)
• plexiglass: $35
• screws: $2
• tins: $65 (seventy 4 oz clear-top tins, including shipping)
• labels: $5 (for a pack of 25 sheets, 2000 labels total -- which turned out to be perfect for canning labels later)

total financial hit*: $201

* note this doesn't include the cost of the spices themselves, which was tough to estimate since we already had most of them

Recycling Ideas(or "what to do with leftover materials"):

1. clean and re-use store-bought spice jars (we make an awesome herbs d' Provence mix and give it away as presents)
2. make your own magnets by cutting leftover strips to the size of the object. Just peel and stick.

Spice List:

Allspice - berries

Allspice - ground

Basil

Bay Leaves

Caraway - seeds

Cardamom - ground

Cardamom - whole

Cayenne - powder

Cayenne - whole

Celery Seed

Chili Pepper - flakes

Chili powder

Cilantro

Cinnamon - ground

Cinnamon - stick

Cloves - ground

Cloves - whole

Coriander - seeds

Coriander - ground

Cream of Tartar

Cumin - ground

Cumin - seeds

Curry Powder

Dill Weed

Dill Seed

Fennel Seed

Garam Masala

Ginger - crystalized

Ginger - ground

Herbs d'Provence

Lavender

Lemon Verbena

Mace

Marjoram

Mustard - ground

Mustard - seeds

Nutmeg - ground

Nutmeg - whole

Onion flakes

Oregano

Paprika

Parsley

Pepper - ground

Pepper - white

Peppercorns

Peppermint

Poppyseed

Rosemary

Saffron

Sage

Savory

Sesame - black

Sesame - white

Star Anise

Thyme

Turmeric

Vanilla Bean

Wasabi

My FY 2009 Moxielist

It's that time of year again, and I think this birthday might be along the same lines of my 29th. Not pretty. There were way too many store-bought cakes with preservative-filled icing and far too few people telling me how great my 30s were going to be.

Therefore, to distract myself, I've come up with a list of 5 items to accomplish by my next birthday (hence, the Fiscal Year label in this post title). What can I say? I'm a goal-oriented girl. I tried to include a mix of things -- stuff I've been putting off, acquisition of new skills, silly but significant wishes, practical and much-needed improvements. It suits me, though it may not make sense if you don't know me well.

So, in no particular order (because I plan to get them all done), my FY 2009 Moxielist is:

1. hand-piece the rest of my scrap flying geese quilt top. I was supposed to finish this around the same time my Grandma K finished hers. That was at least 10 years ago. And she's made an amazing 9-patch quilt for my wedding since then, in spite of worsening arthritis in her hands. If I can pull this off, the FY 2010 Moxielist will include an item for quilting it. By. Hand. Good thing it's probably going to end up a standard size instead of a queen.


2. take pottery lessons. I'm probably the only woman I know who thinks the pottery scenes in Ghost weren't sexy. They were just plain dirty, and not in a good way. It's not a Patrick Swayze fetish, and I'm not sure I'm all that keen to kick a wheel for several hours. However, one of the first things I remember making when I was a kid was a small clay owl from some dirt in our garden. It didn't hold together after a few days of drying out, but while it was still whole, I knew it was a good shape. It felt right when I looked at it, and I loved holding it in my palm. I'm hoping to create a similarly pleasing utensil holder to sit on the counter next to the stove and if that goes well, flour and sugar canisters.


3. keep rhubarb alive. I love this plant, but it's one of the few I consistently kill -- no matter how much manure, sunshine, and love I give it. I'm asking the Moxie 'rents to bring me another chunk of it from The Home Place and a bucket of dried horse poo the next time they visit.


4. come up with a good eggless cookie recipe. I'm a pretty decent baker, and many of my best cookies call for eggs, which means the Boy Scout can't indulge. I'd like to make him something at least as good as my Damn Yankee Brownies. Egg replacer alone just ain't cuttin' it.


5. make built-in bookshelves for our house. We own more books than everyone we know except the local library, and one of the perks (curses?) of my relatively-recent job change is an endless supply of really good, totally free books. I do manage to return the ones that I know I won't read again, but I'm bringing home about 5 new tomes for every one I finish. You can see where this is going. We're hoping to add several tall, shallow shelving units to our media room since it has the greatest expanse of unused, unbroken wall space. This also means we'll get one of our rooms back; the aptly-named "misc room" is currently filled with boxes of books and comics and we're not sure what else.

Happy birthday to me, and why don't you consider starting your own moxielist?

spice door wrap-up

Step 3 of the spice rack extravaganza involved just 1 short hour of work. I pre-drilled small holes for 3/8" flathead screws (size #6 or #8 -- I forget). Moxie Dad recommended drilling at least 1" from the edge to avoid splits, so I measured carefully twice and put holes in each corner and in the middle of each side for a total of 8 per panel. Moxiecat Roz supervised closely. The Boy Scout held the panels in place while I screwed them onto the door.

A quick alphabetizing of all the spices, and we started sticking tins to the door. As you'll see in the final shot, we arranged them in an open diamond pattern. This is not an accident or merely decorative (though it does pack a visual punch that Brits have employed for years in their black and white marble-floored foyers). Nope, we actually remembered to leave enough space for our fingers so we could pull the tins off the door without needing to move a whole row first.

We were a little worried that the weight of the panels plus the spices would be too much for the door, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, we have 4 hinges and have seen no sagging. The added heft also turned out to be a bonus; everyone who used that pantry before the spice rack tended to accidentally fling the door open and slam it shut, including the Boy Scout and me.

The Conclusion: project details and the "done" photo

spice tin solution

Part 2 of kitchen nirvana was finding some containers. The Web site where I scored the adhesive magnetic sheets was out of square tins and that's what we wanted. They are 4 oz. each, which sounds huge, but it turned out that the contents of most commercial spice jars maps best to this size.

It's always a gamble to order online, and though these tins were dirt cheap @ $0.72 each, we purchased 70 of them from this site. I promised the Boy Scout that if they weren't the right metal composition to stick to the magnetic sheets , I'd use them to hold "crafts." Mind you, I had no idea what the practical application of that concept was, but I would've figured it out eventually. Beads. Buttons. Seeds. Little tiny cookies, maybe. Anyway, it didn't matter, because they stuck like glue and they were sturdy, well-made, and aesthetically pleasing. The cats got to watch me sing and dance in the kitchen, where I unpacked to the made-up-on-the-spot tune "I Love My Spice Tins, O Yes I Do."

A quick trip to Staples for their store-brand equivalent of Avery #5667/8667 clear address laser labels (.5" x 1.75"), a Word mail merge to produce the spice list, a half hour of carefully sticking the labels on the clear-windowed lids, and we were good to go.

Now came the fun part: filling the tins. First, we cleaned house. Culling was actually kind of fun, in a Tetris-playing, clear-the-decks sort of way. We sacrificed 2 jars of wasabi powder, for example. Hey, they had expiration dates, and we had 4 jars of the stuff -- it wasn't all going to fit in that 4 oz tin, buddy, and how often does one really use wasabi powder, anyway? We also got to spend a couple days at the local health food store's bulk section stocking up on spices we'd coveted but didn't buy because up until then we weren't even able to find what we already had on hand, let alone the exotics. (Mace, anyone? And yes, I did use that recently -- I'll post the recipe eventually).

The final step was to put the whole thing together, with crucial help from Moxiecat Roz and the Boy Scout.

prepping for a little corner of kitchen nirvana

So way back in March, I hinted that we finally found a solution for something that drove me nuts for years. It was my bustin-at-the-seams spice collection, and it only got worse after I met the Boy Scout. We ended up with a 12-jar rack, a 16-jar carousel, a shelf of miscellaneous-sized items, and a paper sack full of the remainder. Every time we'd cook or bake, it was a 10-minute treasure hunt to find what we needed, and we always ended up with at least 1 too many jars of a spice because we thought we had run out. At one point, it was cardamom. I love cardamom, but we had 3 whole jars of it. I made a lot of frosting and ice cream to burn through those suckers, let me tell you what.

I found a couple web sites touting magnetic spice racks, which were intriguing, but lacked capacity. We counted what we had, figured out what we were still missing, and came up with a list of about 55 herbs and spices. A measely 20-tin rack wasn't gonna cut it.

I finally found this site, which offered some materials for a DIY version and some good, real-world examples. We have a pantry door with 1/4" inset panels and 4 sturdy hinges, so I measured and sent off for a couple rolls of industrial-glue-backed magnetic sheets and headed to my local hardware store (more about them in future posts, I'm sure, because I spent a lot of time there and even own their t-shirt.) I had them cut down their thinnest plexiglass to 2 rectangles just a little smaller than the size of the panels -- about 19" x 25" -- and waited for the magnetic sheets to arrive. It turned out the sheets ship in a tube, so I had to flatten them under several pounds of books for a few weeks (days would've been adequate, but I got side-tracked).

I then sanded down the edges of the plexiglass, peeled the backing off the magnetic sheets, and used my heavy-duty marble rolling pin to ensure the adhesive stuck. A few bubbles, but since no one would see it after it was covered with spices, who cared? Fi (snooping in the bags in the picture) certainly didn't.

Next up...tins and spice shopping.