One of those Whatever Are They Thinking articles in a 1950s women’s magazines suggested cleaning out one or two kitchen cabinets a week, in addition to wiping down the fronts, etc. Actually, it sounded pretty reasonable. We are playing “Let’s Pretend We’re Moving” with a bit more vigor lately, so I decided to hit the three-door cabinet over the mixing counter.
Well, now.
I pulled everything off one shelf at a time, wiped off, tossed out, consolidated, and wondered “Where on earth did that come from?” more than once. I swear, a fair amount of the stuff in the cabinet had belonged to either my mum or my grandmother! I discovered three – three! – half jars of oregano, several different types of ginger, and two jars of fennel seeds. Weird stuff. AllRecipes.com doesn’t have a single suggestion for cracked ginger, and only one recipe for the crystalized stuff. Fennel tea is supposed to be good for an upset stomach; I can only figure there had been an epidemic at some time. Two bottles of rose water – the unopened one will go to a Indian lady at church, and I’ll keep the other. Three bags of chocolate chips – two opened and one not. They filled a quart container.
I went to the Dollar Tree and got two different sizes of plastic baskets; the long narrow kind to corral all of my extracts, and the larger ones to get all of my “sprinkles” in one place. I think my next job will be to clean out the cabinet where I store all of my cake decorating supplies, and see what’s still fit to use.
Two trips to the compost heap, a second trash bag, and the recycling bin is overflowing, but oh, my it looks nice in there.
thisendoftheswamp 
Back when I was making my own pizza with dough balls bought at a pizza shop, I was adding my own fat free ingredients. I was avoiding the fat and cholesterol in pepperoni and other sausages, but a friend told me to add fennel seeds to the pie as they added a flavor sound in sausage. She was right, and now I often throw some in when I am cooking mushrooms to add to an Italian style casserole.
Adding fennel to pizza sauce sounds good. We don’t eat much meat, so pepperoni and sausage are out of the question. The fennel might “fool the tongue” so to speak. I’ll have to try it!