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.