Spring Clean Your Spice Cabinet by Making Blends

It's the least painful cleaning you'll do all season, and it comes with a bonus: Flavor!

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Come spring cleaning, ambitious home cooks like me have a lot to answer for. Namely, we're haunted by single-use spices—those jars we bought with such good intentions, only to let languish in the depths of pantry purgatory.

What to do with these jars? Throwing them out is exceedingly wasteful (and what kind of cook throws out their larder?). Besides, they probably aren't dead—yet. (Though here's a newsflash: Spices do die, especially those that spent time on grocery store shelves before you bought them. Their aroma will give them away—if the spices smell like nothing, they'll taste like nothing.)

The answer: Grab the jars of spices that are just taking up space, break out the spice grinder and start combining. Some people will call this creating spice mixes. I call it creating life.

Clutter Creator: Poppy Seeds // Clean-Up Blend: Everything Bagel Spice

You bought poppy seeds for lemon muffins, but guess what? Lemon season is pretty much over. Combine 2 ½ teaspoons poppy seeds with 2 ½ teaspoons of sesame seeds and a teaspoon of salt. Mix in 2 teaspoons each dried minced garlic and onion powder, and you have all the savory crunch of an everything bagel’s topping mix. Use it to make an oil like this one for lamb and yogurt. Or heck, you made those muffins—maybe you should stick to baking and make bagels.

Clutter Creator: Winter Baking Spices // Clean-Up Blend: Ras-el-Hanout

When winter struck you delirious, whole baking spices seemed smart. What better way to battle a cold night than with the woozy warmness of wine mulled with allspice, cloves and nutmeg? But now you’re about to have a garden of berries, and mulled wine is just a frigid memory. The solution for those winter spices: Ras-el-Hanout. The name means “top of the shelf” in Arabic, but you can find its components just about anywhere in a spice pantry. Ginger should be the dominant spice here; complement it with other baking spices—allspice and nutmeg are great—and more savory spices like coriander and cumin. Use the blend in North African dishes like these grilled lamb shanks, lamb pizza or on top of charred zucchini.

Clutter Creator: Duplicate Bottles // Clean-Up Blend: Cajun Seasoning

Okay, so maybe you didn’t buy anything crazy (I'm looking at you, mace and gentiana) this winter. All the same, it’s good to get organized, and you should consolidate some of that half-finished paprika into something better. Enter cajun seasoning. This blend of cayenne, paprika, and onion powder belongs in your Southern cooking spice holster. Stir some into your grits or give fish filets a once-over rub of cajun seasoning. When grilling, the spices will char, and bam, you’ve got a blackened catfish, once a trendy dish of New Orleans, now making a comeback in your kitchen.

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Chelsea Kyle and Tommy Werner

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Clutter Creator: You Just Bought Too Much Everything // Clean-Up Blend: Curry Powder

Curry. It's the master of all spice blends—and the greatest cabinet cleaner of them all. If you do have to toss one thing from the spice cabinet, make it commercially packaged curry powder. The awesome thing about the homemade stuff (other than its heat and world of ways to use it): as long as you keep proportions in line, you can put pretty much add anything to it. Turmeric, allspice, mustard seeds, chili flakes, cardamom pods—all are fair game.

Clutter Creator: Too Many “C” Spices // Clean-Up Blend: Baharat

Baharat, a Middle Eastern spice popular in Turkey and Iran, came about on the Arabic spice route, where traders used cardamom, coriander seeds, cassia, and cloves in blends. Some varieties get a dark color from black cardamom and black pepper. You can easily make one at home using dried spearmint tea and coriander. Throw it into stews like koshari, the national dish of Egypt; stir some into your next batch of eggplant babaghanou; or mix some with lime juice and oil for a roasting marinade meant for lamb.

Clutter Creator: Cinnamon Sticks // Clean-Up Blend: Jamaican Jerk Seasoning

Your hot apple ciders had a spicy garnish thanks to a big bag of cinnamon, but now you have enough sticks to build a log cabin. Adam Dorenburg and Karen Page, authors of The Flavor Bible, love cinnamon sticks for use in spice blends. They’ll grind the sticks in a blend with allspice (in case your Ras-el-Hanout didn’t kill your supply), pepper, and thyme for a Jamaican “jerk” seasoning. Spread some on salmon before grilling or throw some into a brown-sugar marinade for chicken.