7/13/21 Changing Of The Spice Guard?

     I know Wife won't like it, but I just went through and threw away about half of the crap that we had in our spice shelves.  We had so many different spices in the three level cabinet that the stuff we actually use doesn't fit in there and we just end up keeping the salt, pepper, Salt Lick rub and a couple others on the counter all the time.  I made an executive decision and got rid of all the stuff I considered old and/or we hadn't used in years.

    I know the minute I did that, it will turn out that she was just about to cook something that required those bay leaves we bought in 1999 which she has been letting air out in their container.  Or she was about to cook a special batch of brownies that was going to need the cinnamon that is all hardened and more brown than orange colored, but I needed the room.

    I don't want to sound like an ass, but lately I have been doing more of the cooking and for the most part, we are eating more than half our meals from food we make on the grill.  All this being mostly meat, we generally just spice it up with salt and pepper, if you leave it up to me, but of course that is too bland for my people, so we also use a lot of the Salt Lick rub when doing briskets, or most any beef or pork.  Lately, we started using Uncle Chris's Gourmet Steak Seasoning and once Wife gets on a kick, we kind of have to use it every time or it just doesn't taste right.

    I kept the two varieties of Slap Ya Mama spice which I like to use on steaks, the Tony Chachere's spices when I want to change it up a bit, about 3-4 different pepper grinders, all the little McCormick's spices that are used around Thanksgiving to make pies.  Boy has a weird obsession with buying special 1 time use spices, like the bay leaves, Thyme, and about ten different concentrated flavors for making cakes and cookies.  We also had about 4-5 bottles of chili that we put on fruit, it's a Mexican thing, I think.

    Mostly, I got rid of a lot of containers that had a dust of product left in them, I did throw away old spices that have been around since we moved, probably, and anything that was weirdly hardened or the color just didn't look normal.  I just got tired of not having space to put my spices in the cabinets and seeing them all the time on the counter.