teaspoon spices

Eat your (Summer) Vegetables

Summer vegetables

 

As you know, Sara and I have made a commitment to eating locally as much as possible this summer.  We are members of a CSA at One Straw Farm, and frequent our local farmers markets as much as possible.    I have been buying a lot of locally made yogurt and as much local, grass-fed beef, lamb and chicken as possible.  The difference between local grass-fed beef and the supermarket variety is really extraordinary!

 

The issue with all CSA shares is the abundance of ingredients that are suddenly demanding to be eaten. 

 

This weekend, I realized that I had a bunch of ingredients –all local--on hand that had to be eaten and cooked pretty much right away.  I had yellow squash and green patty-pans, I had green onions, I had garlic and I had 2 really ripe tomatoes.

 

I sliced the squash into thin slices, chopped up the shallots, garlic and green onions and coarsely chopped the tomatoes.

 

I heated up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and grape-seed oil, and put in the onions and shallots.  After they were a bit softened, I threw the squash in and sprinkled the whole thing with 2 teaspoons of Smart Spice Italian Seasoning.

 

After the squash had softened, I added the chopped tomato, and seasoned it all with salt and pepper.

 

Yummy!  (I served this with lime-allspice shrimp.)

 

(Joan has Smart Spice available at her One Straw Farm stall, and you can find Smart Spice locally in Baltimore at Atwater’s in Belvedere Square and at Graul’s Markets in Ruxton, May’s Chapel and Hereford.  It is also available on line at Alice.com and Amazon.com)

 

Katie

Smart packaging

You may not have seen Smart Spice in your grocery yet -- but we hope you soon will. It's a brand designed to bring you top-quality organic spices that taste fresh to the very last teaspoon. Until then, you can order it online at alice.com, amazon.com, or our own website, smart-spice.com.

There's another thing we like about our airtight, one-teaspoon packets: The packaging is much easier on the environment than typical bottles and jars. In fact, Smart Spice, with a cardboard carton and four packets of spice has a total packaging weight of 7.5 grams -- half the weight of a small (1 oz.) plastic spice bottle. We think that's smart packaging. 

Here's Katie explaining our environmental advantage.

And here's a chart that spells it out in numbers:

 

The big clean-out

My big chore yesterday was to reorganize my kitchen. I knew this would mean cleaning out the cabinets, but I didn’t know I was in for some nasty surprises.

Katie and I have been urging people to throw out old spices and to give up the “super-size-it” mentality that makes us think we’re getting a bargain when we buy more than we need. We would never buy milk in vats — there’s no way to use it before it spoils. So why do we do that with spices by buying more than we can use before they go stale?

The good news is the cabinets are now clean and more orderly. The bad news is that I discovered I wasn’t always following my own advice.

Exhibit 1: Hiding in the back of the cabinet was a “fish-food”-sized bottle of rosemary I had somehow overlooked. It wasn’t more than a couple of years old, but it was certainly old enough for some buggy little critters to decide it was a great place to build a nest.


Enough said. No more old spice for me.

Exhibit 2: Not one, but two super-sized 2-quart bottles of teriyaki sauce were pried out of deep cover in the back of a bottom cabinet. I have nothing against teriyaki, but these bottles were several years old, and we had used maybe 1 inch worth of one bottle — which was then placed back in the cabinet even though the label carried clear instructions to refrigerate after opening.

I don’t recall the specific trip to the warehouse store that yielded this “bargain.” I do know that evicting these big bottles freed up some useful space — and reminded me that, next time around,  a normal-sized or — whoa! — even a small bottle of teriyaki will be just fine.

–Sara

Throw it out!

Phil Lempert, the “supermarket guru,” is an enterprising fellow who reviews new products for consumers. He recently posted some thoughts about food freshness, along with guidelines about how to store items and when to throw them out.

This is what he wrote about storing spices and herbs:

“To preserve freshness and nutrients store both ground and whole spices in tightly sealed, glass containers, in a cool, dark and dry place. Not above your stove, or next to your oven! Ground spices and herbs will keep for about 6 months. Whole spices and herbs will stay fresh for about one year if stored the same way….”

The guru was correct to suggest storing spices in tightly sealed containers that protect against light and moisture. He was also correct not to endorse using plastic for storage. I do not know that plastic containers would affect the flavor of stored spices, but I do know that plastic is worse for the environment than other packaging.

Here at The Seasoned Palate, our mission and passion is to provide a better solution for storing spices.
Smart Spice packages spices in the amounts that cooks actually use, and with more efficient use of packaging. A carton of Smart Spice contains four servings of spice, but only 7 grams of packaging – only 1.7 grams of packaging per serving. The packaging is paper and foil, all recyclable.

In contrast, a typical plastic bottle of spice represents 21 grams of packaging, and only 20% of plastic bottles are recycled. Glass jars of spice are recyclable, but they weigh 116 grams. That’s 16 times more packaging than Smart Spice.

Those numbers don’t count the money you waste by buying more spice than you can use before it goes stale.

That dilemma was our inspiration for Smart Spice. Our lives are too short and our earth is too precious to waste valuable resources, whether it’s spice or money or packaging material.