Welcome to my Spice World!

If you wanna be my luvah
You gotta get with my friends!
Make it last forevah
Friendship never eeeeeeeeeeeeends!

Oh....sorry... I got a little carried away with my Spice Girls tribute.

Lani got me checking in with A Bowl Full of Lemons' Getting Organized Challenge, and on Day 12, she hit up the spice cabinet. This is probably THE most important (and my favorite) cabinet in my whole kitchen. Sometime last year, in one of our regular purges of the pantry, Hubby had the brilliant idea to move the spices to the cabinet right next to the range. Cue the angels singing and the ray of sunshine... I cannot begin to tell you how nice it has been cook with all of the goods right there, within arm's reach.

Well, a year or so later, and it's gotten a little chaotic. There's major overflow since I have gotten new seasonings, and who knows how long I've had that store brand giganto container of paprika that I never use because the smoked paprika I have is delicious... So this challenge was right up my alley.

Before... I just realized this looks like an ad for Old Bay seasoning... Right smack dab in the middle. It's not....or is it?

I had picked up this little Rationell Variera shelf at Ikea for $4.99 a few days prior thinking I'd just keep the spices in this same cabinet and make life a little easier by adding the shelf. ...and then! I had a stroke of genius!

Here is the cabinet perpendicular to my spice cabinet:

That's my baking stuff, cookbooks, and some holiday sprinkles all smashed into whatever space I could find. It's a mess. I am constantly knocking things over when I pull out a cookbook or the flour to make a rue. It's really obnoxious.

Another angle of chaos.

So... While cleaning poop off my hands for the 3rd time this week (see my adventures in Potty Training over here), I realized HELLO! The small cabinet where the spices are is probably the perfect size for all my cookbooks - or at least for the ones that I use most often.

Time to get to work:

While my little poop monster was napping, I took everything out of both cabinets and wiped the shelves down really well.

Ta-Da! I love it when I'm right! I did have to take out one cookbook and put it away, but I never use it... These are my go-to's. The red one on the right that's kind of tucked in the frame of the cabinet is America's Test Kitchen. A great resource for fail-safe recipes of all kinds (pizza dough? peanut butter cookies? How long to roast chicken breasts in the oven?), but especially for the basics. If you don't have one, GET ONE!

Cue those angels and ray of sunshine again. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Organization! And I only tossed 5 spices. They were either duplicates or expired. Apparently I thought I needed 2 giant cans of crushed red pepper... That's a lot of spicy spice!

Check out the other spice rack makeovers and all of A Bowl Full of Lemons' organizing tips!