I’ve got a particularly individualized spice system in the new house. It’s not like the last one had great digs for my cooking/baking ingredients – I’d arranged them in a lazy susan corner cabinet that had the exceedingly annoying habit of being far too wobbly for comfort. Granted, it only collapsed once, but one episode of painstakingly pulling out sixty-odd spices along with several dozen tupperware will make a girl jaded.

We moved into the new kitchen and lo and behold, no corner cabinet. No love lost there, but it did mean I needed to find a new home for the spices. I finally settled on an overhead cabinet beside the stove. It has a shelf, though, making it unworkable for one of those tall rotating towers that holds a zillion spices so I had to make due with two separate shelving units.

Thus the particularly individualized spice system.

It’s alphabetized because I wasn’t raised by wolves, but I found myself in a bit of a jam moving forward from there. Logic dictates As kick off the top shelf unit with Zs finishing up the bottom one. Except – as BrightSide would say – I’m a bit of a Shorty McShortster and didn’t feel like hauling out the step stool every time I need something on the upper level. Which meant I needed my most used spices on the bottom shelf, and they’d need to be alphabetized (because I wasn’t raised by wolves), so I’d have to make peace with the sets overall being out of order alphabet-wise.

There was some existential angst.

Garlic powder and garlic salt? Definitely on the bottom shelf. Ground cumin goes in salsa so that makes the cut, too. Ground cloves? I’m not even sure what those are for so top shelf. I’m pretty sure star anise and ground star anise are equally random so they’ll be right at home up top. The system makes perfect sense to me but no doubt would seem rather random to an outsider. Is it an ideal solution? Maybe not, but the food gets seasoned just the same.

Linda hosts Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt is “ground.” Use it as a noun or a verb in any tense (i.e. grind). Have fun!