Hello again! I hope you've had a lovely couple of weeks? I caught up on quite a bit, if not everything, and finally had time to create a new cooking setup:
I know, the innovation! A spice rack. But it's an exciting change all the same. And not only because I love this shelf a ton and haven't had it in circulation for years, being wrongly convinced that it wouldn't fit under our cabinets.
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Today's story begins unhappily, about two months ago when I noticed bugs lying dead on the counter I reserve for baking, or else staggering around on it. This was perplexing because there were a lot of them. When more appeared the next day, I realized they'd fallen from the cupboard above.
Turns out I'd had the dumb luck of buying a bag of wheat berries infested with said bugs via a tiny hole I'd unknowingly positioned within about an inch of a can of cherry pie filling I hadn't gotten around to using, which in turn had a leak positioned in the direction of the tiny hole.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you that if a can of anything leaks, it's very possibly because of a pressure buildup from botulism. In this case I would slide that scale to 'almost certainly'. Despite having a multi-year lifespan, these bugs were dying young after gorging themselves on the runoff.
So much for the yucky backstory: the result was, I had to decontaminate *every*thing in the cupboard and on the counter, leaving me heartbroken and procrastinating (for the aforementioned two months, during which I basically had caution tape around the whole area) until I realized that addressing the problem would give me a blank canvas for rebuilding the way I store things in the kitchen.
Lemonade from lemons, is there anything better?
Plus, just in time for fall! Not to mention Canadian Thanksgiving, a foodfest that's happening next weekend already.
Over the summer, when I was mostly making salads, I'd started keeping a few staples like shallots and tiny tomatoes in a glass loaf pan on the cooking side of the counter, but I was still walking to the baking side to get any herbs and spices I wanted to throw in there, because I had no other place to stow them.
Not any more! Having been forced to rebuild my supplies, I found my old red shelf could accommodate everything while going vertical. That's freed up the now-empty cupboards over the baking counter to accommodate some of the baking stuff I was crowding into the drawer below it.
And if all this news isn't exciting enough for you: brace yourself.
Our coffee making is dying, and our kettle has decided it will only work if I hold my thumb on the power switch till it's finished boiling.
So I'm gonna be totally overhauling the coffee and tea station as well.
Today.
But probably after a nap because all this change is a lot to take in.
In other news, I still have not finished the socks I started in spring and have to gift *next month.* but I did finish polishing the manuscript I started around the same time, so I might actually get them wrapped more than ten minutes before delivery. More on that next week, I hope.
Hope you have a lovely Saturday and thank you as always for dropping by, especially after a two-week break in the ol' routine!
