Organizing In The Kitchen

Finding room in my kitchen is always a challenge. Adjoining our kitchen is a small dining room, which at one time used to be my sewing and craft area, but alas, priorities have taken over! Now it stores some of my craft items, but also contains the portable dishwasher, an upright freezer, grain storage buckets, some of my sewing and knitting stash and adjacent to my refrigerator, a 6 foot tall bookcase.

My friend Susan from church has challenged me to find ways to organize from a sitting position while I recover from my knee injury. So, today I took a comfortable folding camp chair and sat down in front of the book case and sorted things out.

First of all I weeded through my many cookbooks. I love cookbooks and have a hard time saying no to them! :o) The top short shelf is used to store all my smaller cookbooks like the Sue Gregg series and then I placed ones I am more likely to use at eye level and worked my way down, grouping things in like categories. Amazingly I even pulled a few out that I won't use anymore and many are relegated to the bottom shelf. I am pleased to announce that the few baking and sweets books that I kept are down there on the bottom!

Another problem in the kitchen was spice storage. Not only is my kitchen small but the space is poorly planned. By the way, did you know that the most common places that people store their spices - in over the stove cupboards or in custom drawers next to their stoves or ovens - are the worst places to keep them? Yes, the heat diminishes their potency and can make certain items go rancid. It's a good idea to go through your spices and sort through them. If it is long past a sell by date (because they usually give several years for spices and herbs) or it doesn't have a date and you don't recall buying it or worse yet, it looks "vintage", it's probably a good idea to toss it.

Over the last year we have been replacing the herbs and spices with organic counterparts. I have been purchasing the Simply Organic brand and plan to later refill with bulk spices. That brand has nice jars! :o) They are sorted by type - Italian, Mexican, General, Baking etc. I have also read that they should not be exposed to light. Do you think that I should tack a little calico curtain across their to protect them?

On the shelf next to the herbs and spices, is room for my recipe box, an old recipe box of my Grandma Hopkins' and my Kitchen notebook which I am working on filling. Grandma always used to say "Cleaning Is Creating Beauty" and today it felt good to get a little organizing done and to me, it is a beautiful little corner in my home!

Beet Bread

Look what I did today! This feels so good to have a bread success, especially when you don't know really what you are doing! I had been looking for a recipe for years, for beet bread, which my Grandma Hopkins always made. Then last year my Aunt found it in the Ten Talents Cookbook, which is a Seventh Day Adventist cookbook. This is my first chance to make it. I remember helping Grandma grind the wheat and put the dough into all kinds of containers...baskets, tin cans and occasionally real bread pans! :o) She was always inventive about things like that, the ultimate frugal queen!

She made batches and batches of this and always gave it away. It had the loveliest raspberry colored dough and I always liked it, though many others were afraid to try it when they heard what was in it. Grandma was always making "experiments" and some family members and friends were quite cautious when she offered her goods! LOL

I ground the wheat in my Vita-Mix, so had fresh flour. It called for 5 cups wheat and 5 cups white. I used King Arthur unbleached bread flour and followed the recipe except for the 1/2 cup of soy flour, because we don't use soy. As I suspected Grandma didn't follow the recipe! :o)

You can't tell by the pictures but this is a king size loaf. My bread knife was in the dishwasher and the dishwasher was running so it didn't cut well, but I ate two slices with a little butter and a little wild, raw honey! Hmmm...DELICIOUS! It is tender and moist with a texture that a storebought bread eater would tolerate. That must be the white flour. I believe my Grandma used more beets because hers was really raspberry colored and used all whole wheat flour. Hers was a fairly dense bread. I would like to work on using less or no white flour but still need a texture that my picky family will tolerate. Would it work to use some oat flour or barley flour to replace some of the white?

This is a blurry picture, but I feel blessed to have Grandma's original cookbook and she does have notes. I misread her notes...that's why I have two king size loaves instead of 3 or more normal ones. Still, overall this was a bread success. My goal is find a bread my family will enjoy eating on a regular basis so that we can quite buying store bread!