Small, disorganised and evil

We have reached peak storage capacity here in the caravan after two years of occupation. We are officially full.

The tiny kitchen has very limited cupboardage and what there is is highly inaccessible. Things get stuffed into every available crevice, causing carnage whilst cooking and frustration in searching for ingredients that I’m sure that I have, but can’t find.

As the day started with torrential rain and it was definitely one for indoor entertainment I took a deep breath and decided to make a start on sorting out the cupboards.

It won’t be long until we move things into the kitchen and pantry in the house and I figured that a bit of work now wouldn’t be time wasted.

It’s the small cupboard that holds what I call “miscellaneous cooking stuff”. Basically an overspill of everything else. Tubs of spices, bags of sea salt, containers of currants, pine nuts and ground almonds. That sort of miscellaneous. It’s small, disorganised and evil. Impossible to extract anything without a landslide.

Over the last two years things have got buried, packets opened and not properly resealed, and I had no idea what lurked beneath the first two rows of stuff.

In I went.

There were mysteries in there, dear reader.

Three tubs of custard powder, all opened and about a third empty. The remnants of winter trifles, I could only imagine.

Several bags of sea salt. I vaguely remember buying lots for pickling and clearly not using as much as I thought I’d need.

More pink peppercorns than I could feasibly use in a lifetime.

A tub of smoked paprika that I’d lost a year ago.

A bag of currants so old that it had shrivelled into something that looked like mice droppings. Hmm.

I’m feeling triumphant, even if it is only one small cupboard. A good use of an hour of my time.

I need a labelling machine.