Posted on: Wednesday, January 8, 2003

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Cupboard is clean, but far from bare

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

I'm just a little bit behind this year, so the big year-end cleaning you're supposed to do before New Year's is just getting started around my house. First stop, the kitchen cupboard.

Oh, my.

A crowded pantry is an occupational hazard for a food writer; we're always having to buy oddball ingredients to test recipes. I tell myself I'll use the leftovers. But conventional wisdom says that most of us keep the same 25 recipes in rotation year in and year out and, when I'm not testing recipes, I'm pretty conventional.

So the half-package of kanten finds its way to the third shelf, where I can't reach it; I tend to use gelatin and forget that kanten works just as well. The dried fava beans I was so excited to find are turning an odd brown; they turned out to be rather more bitter and less interesting than I had hoped. The hideously expensive saffron threads bounce around on the spice racks and never get used because I just don't care for that musky flavor.

Even after I had made a box for the food bank and tossed out anything that looked spoiled, my cupboards were stacked. Then came the spice rack. The other day I read an interview with Mario Batali, the TV chef of "Molto Mario" fame, who said his best advice to home cooks is to throw away everything in their spice cabinets. Most of what's there, he said, is long past its usefulness. It won't kill you, but it won't taste like anything, either.

I have no doubt he's right. But I've opened the cupboard several times to follow his advice and found myself unable to get much beyond the stuff that is a) riddled with insects (everything in the red pepper family seems to attract awful burrowing bugs; store them in the freezer to avoid infestation) or b) so dried up that you can't tell what it is even when you unscrew the cap.

But I know I have to steel myself. Some years ago, I had an extremely fastidious cleaning lady who went through my entire spice shelf and alphabetized it and taped a diagram on the inside of the cupboard showing all the duplicated spices — a not-so-subtle reproof. I don't have a cleaning lady anymore, but that diagram is there, and so are some spices.

Hmmm, I wonder if she'd come back and just throw all this stuff out when I'm not looking?