Where to keep your kitchen spices

Spices and dried herbs need to be stored cool, dark and dry to keep their best flavor, especially if you don't use them up very quickly. An open shelf over the range doesn't meet these needs at all, even though you often see it in magazine pictures. Maybe the people in those kitchens use up their matched sets of herbs really fast - or maybe they don't use them at all and the bottles never get opened!

So, what to do in real kitchens?

First, where do you use your herbs and spices? I use mine in more than one place - at the range, at the prep area, and when I'm baking. So ideally I'd want storage at all those places. Not necessarily duplicating everything in each place, but making sure that the ones I use in each place are there to use.

Next, how much do you use them? If you're a frequent user and you use them up fast, then having the most-used jars out and readily to hand makes sense, and you'll use them up quickly enough that they won't lose their potency. Otherwise, you'll want to have them put away but easy to reach when you need them. Some of the best choices for achieving this are:

A drawer - you can store the jars upright if you label the tops, or use sloping supports that tip them back so you can read the labels on the fronts.

A spice rack inside a cabinet door beside the range keeps them dark and dry though possibly a bit warm. Two out of three ain't bad.

A narrow pantry-style pullout can fit in a small space that would otherwise be wasted, and provides a lot of storage for different sized jars and bottles. Usually there will be space for oils and vinegars too, which is a bonus.

Got other ideas? Tell us how you store herbs and spices in your own kitchen!

Curmudgeonly about Kitchens

You may well wonder why I feel curmudgeonly about kitchens.

Not all kitchens, of course. Lots of kitchens are convenient to work in, easy to keep clean, and fit their owners.

No, it's the shelter-magazine trendy fashion-fad kitchens - or certain aspects of them - I get curmudgeonly about. One of the current trends, for example, is colored appliances. Burgundy, mint green, fire-engine red, robins-egg blue... mmmm yummy! And some of them really are. But... remember the Avocado Green and Harvest Gold appliances of the 1970's? How quickly they went out of style and became an absolute fashion no-no? At the time the fashion leaders were just as ga-ga about those colors as they now are about the current colors.

My take is: if you want fashion colors in your kitchen, paint the walls, change the curtains or shades, buy new accessories, even repaint the cabinets or put in new vinyl flooring - but don't commit yourself to a wild color on something that costs thousands of dollars and will last 20 years.