My phone is recharged so photos taken I'm continuing my tour of the kitchen with these two drawers, which are opposite to my pantry. I feel relatively OK about the top one, but somewhat guilty about the bottom one.
They and the pantry are the two reasons I wasn't too bothered about food shortages during COVID. Well when it came to food that wasn't fresh anyway, although the freezer covered that just a bit.
Although the pantry - in it's darker corners - does indeed contain some things that should be used or thrown out, on the whole the stuff in the pantry is used on a continual basis. Therein are the flours, the sugars, the tins of tomatoes, the nuts, the dried fruit, etc. etc. The things that a well-stocked pantry should hold, so that we can throw a meal together at a moment's notice.
The two drawers are theoretically to store items to replace the items I use all the time when they run out. To prevent the awful surprise of not having any flour when you are halfway through making a cake - well something like that anyway. It also enables you to buy such things when they are on a special in the supermarket. And my top drawer here more or less fulfills that purpose.
Here are bags of flour, sugar, nuts of various kinds, polenta and so on. However, hidden amongst them is a bag of cocoa powder which is probably decades old and really should be thrown out, but I just can't bring myself to do it. There are things I bought on a whim - turtle beans, yellow split peas, black rice... - and which I shall likely never use. There is also pasta - far too much pasta. For some reason I can't resist buying pasta even if I don't need it. I would like to be able to say that it's things like exotic new shapes that attract me, but honestly I think a strange urge just comes over me to buy a new pasta every now and then. And just to demonstrate this I have found that occasionally I did not have more of essential linguine or spaghetti, because my pasta buying is completely random.
For example currently there is a lot of lasagne in there - well we have friends for lunch tomorrow and at one point I thought of making Ottolenghi's - well actually Verena Lochmuller's Courgette and fennel lasagne and so I bought some classier Barilla lasagne - well it was on a special. However, in the end I decided in favour of Jamie Oliver's Crispy roasted fish cakes wrapped in smoked streaky bacon. The 'official' recipe is not online but one blogger Food Lust People Love had tried it out - with lots of photographs of the process. She didn't comment on it, but I reason that she wouldn't have posted it if it had been awful. However, I do now have a lot of lasagne, so I shall be making a fair bit of that in the near future. Maybe even Verena's which is pictured here, with Jamie's fishcakes.
But I digress from my drawers. I suppose the top drawer could just about be described as good household management, with a few exceptions, but the bottom drawer is rather guiltier. Some of the bottles in there are reserves of the things I use all the time - white wine vinegar, HP sauce - you can't eat sausages without that - balsamic vinegar. However, every now and then even for staples such as those and mustard I forget that I already have reserves, and so I have far too many jars of mustard, sun-dried tomatoes and olives.
Also somewhat weirdly there are three bottles of sherry vinegar, which I only ever use for one of my all-time favourite Delia dishes - Chicken with sherry vinegar and tarragon sauce. Why I have three I have no idea.
The next guilt trip is because of the things, such as little plastic containers of various dried mushrooms and jars of truffles that Aldi has from time to time. They are luxury items so when they appear at a relatively bargain price - and only once or twice a year I buy a few. And then they languish in the drawer.
The really, really guilty thing about this drawer however are the few things that I have been gifted and never used - panforte, jars of caramelised onions - no I made a concerted effort to use them relatively recently - and no again - I just found another jar. Then there are chocolate covered nuts, fancy biscuits ... I do hope that these are not from any of you my special readers. And writing this has made me more determined to use them up in the near future. One a week perhaps?
I think with those gifted items, part of the reason I have not used them is that they are 'special' and there never seems to be a special enough occasion on which to use them. So I think I should just begin to treat every day as special. After all there are a decreasing number of them - days that is - left.
These two drawers really represent the dichotomy between affluence and poverty, frugality and excess. If I was poor, there would be no such drawer - let alone two of them. I would have no need of storage space at all as everything I bought would be immediately consumed. If I was a little better off than abject poverty then I would also not have the space to store extra, reserves. My kitchen would be much smaller. If I was super rich on the other hand it just wouldn't be my problem. Somebody else, who I paid, would be organising it all.
I, like many of my generation, grew up in a time of scarce resources, and lack of choice and little money. Over time the resources have increased exponentially and my own ability to dive into those resources has increased, but that early frugality sticks and presents itself in the form of buying things when they are cheap, even though they are not needed, together with a sneaking fear of running out of food. It also presents itself in the form of a reluctance to use things that must have cost somebody a fair amount of money, although that is rather more difficult to either explain or justify.
I wonder if I can shake myself up and actually empty one drawer at least. One of the real 'extras' per week perhaps. Though I think I shall continue to have a reserve drawer to prevent bad surprises running out of things like baking powder that you can see in the top drawer.
YEARS GONE BY
March 21 - my younger son turns 50 today. A real milestone in his and my life too. Happy birthday D.
2024 - Tajín - a quickie
2023 - Middle-Eastern then and now
2022 - The menu
2021 - Nothing
2020 - Deleted
2019 - Lucky dip - kedgeree
The content of endless kitchen drawers reveal a lifetime dedicated to the task of beautiful cooking!