Spices, spices, more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and MORE SPICES!

People have mentioned to me that I have quite a few spices. Well, my name is Katherine and I come from a long line of spice-aholics (I also come from a long line of German bowlers and Potter Heads----Harry Potter that is, but that’s for another blog entry).

[ALL intone at the Spice-aholics Anonymous (SAA) meeting] “Hello Katherine.”

Yes, hi. Hi there.

My mom’s spice cabinet is always overflowing into other cabinets in the kitchen. But when I moved away to college, it didn’t really catch on. I had your traditional salt, pepper, onion/garlic powder, and chili powder. However, I started collecting more when I had to remove all gluten, corn, milk, yeast, grapes (a lot of which I’ve added back).

Why is that?

Well, just think about a meal stereotypically eaten by non-allergy prone, but well balanced dieters, John and Jane Doe. John and Jane like to fix some regular dinner rolls, fried chicken, and a salad with some carrots and celery. Let’s just say this stuff is all homemade so that they can choose not to deep-fry stuff or work with filler ingredients. What would John and Jane do once they’ve finished cooking and are ready to sit down and eat?

They break out the stick of margarine, maybe go for some gravy, add a little ketchup for John Jr. (yup, they’ve got a kid), and top off the salad with some thousand island dressing.

Holy cow! We’ve got a lot of ingredients here. Even if I replace the bread with a gluten-free recipe, try to batter the chicken with coconut flour (I’ve done it and it’s really good tasting!), and try alternate recipes for ketchup and salad dressing, the meal isn’t quite the same. It’s tasty, but it just doesn’t have that zing to it that comes with a tasty store-bought butter, dressing, etc. So basically, when John, Jane, and John Jr. cook up zucchini like my husband and I often do, they probably either fry it or steam it with butter, salt, and pepper. These simple ingredients have a lot of flavor and there’s really no need for anything else. But when I can’t have the butter, ketchup, gravy, etc . I turn to SPICES!!!

Here’s a look in my two spice racks. One picture is kind of deceiving because I’ve got the spices stacked up on two big turn-tables, so there are several rows not pictured.

I’ve also added a recipe below that’s heavy on the spice and quite tasty. This one’s a seafood salad modified from a recipe that my mom likes to use (which normally calls for mayonnaise and mustard). We like to double, triple, or quadruple the recipe depending on how much leftovers we want and the price of shrimp.

Seafood Salad
1 c shrimp
2 chopped hard boiled eggs
1/2 c of chopped celery
1/4 c chopped onion
1/2 c chopped cucumbers
1 chopped red bell pepper (or jar of pimientos)
1/4 c of your choice of oil (I like sunflower)
1 tbsp of your choice of vinegar (wine for me please, but no cheese…)
1/8 c dried parsley
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp of powdered mustard

Rinse your shrimp (very important! don’t want E. coli). Combine all of the wet ingredients with the chopped veggies and shrimp. Then add the spices and mix. Serve on a bed of lettuce.