Five Jars of Stem Ginger and a Tin of Asparagus

I knew I had a bag of orzo. I’d bought four for a function, used three, and the fourth was definitely somewhere. I looked. I looked again the following week, gave up, and bought another one. It turned up this morning, tucked at the back of the larder behind something else I’d forgotten about.

That’s a small thing and it wasn’t going to change the colour of my day, but it bothered me enough that I went through the entire larder and wrote down what was in there — not just what, but why. Six reasons came out of it, and none of them are carelessness. Every single item was bought for a proper reason by two people who have spent most of their working lives around food. That’s the uncomfortable part: buying food you already have has almost nothing to do with being disorganised.

Here’s what I found.

THE JAR IS NOT THE STOCK

Jars sit on a bamboo trolley in my kitchen, and I rather like the whole trolley thing.. Nuts, seeds, grains, rice, popping corn. The bags they get refilled from live in a nearby cupboard, pegged shut, out of sight — and that is where my whole “organisation” falls apart.

Because when a jar goes empty, the jar is what we see. Empty jar, therefore we’ve run out, therefore it goes on the list. Nobody opens the cupboard one door away where three partial bags of popping corn are sitting with pegs on them.                                                                       

The orzo is the same failure without the jars, and worse, because I knew it was there. So was the citric acid — knew we had a bag, couldn’t find it, bought another, and the lost one surfaced two days later- Murphys Law.  Same with the baking powder sachets, which are a special case: we’re used to buying baking powder in a tub, and here in France where we live, it comes in little paper sachets that vanish among everything else. Same with extracts. Nothing wrong with the system. The problem is that the container in front of you starts standing in for the stock, and only one of those two things ever gets looked at.

BOUGHT BECAUSE IT WAS THERE

I was testing tahini sauces and could not reliably find tahini in this corner of France, so when I found it, I bought it — and then kept looking, and bought it again the next time I saw it. Two jars, and the shortage was over.  But just today, we threw the opened jar in the bin because it had been in the fridge too long..

That behaviour turns out to run through half the larder. Dried tomatoes from a producers’ market up the road, two of them, bought a couple of years ago in case we liked them and never saw the producer again. Never opened, so we still don’t know whether we like them. Peanut relish, same market, same reasoning. A creamy dressing spotted in a shop in Toulouse, because bottled dressings here are either vinaigrette or taste like mayonnaise, which I loathe — I bought two, opened one, and it tasted like mayonnaise. And a bag of something rice-shaped but made from chickpeas, picked up in a Turkish food shop in London whilst I was in there looking for something else entirely.

None of that was about price. It was about availability — the thing was in front of me and might not be again, so the decision got made for me. The pinnacle of this is two jars of roast pepper purée bought in a speciality shop to experiment with, which are still sitting there because my stomach disagrees with peppers and I don’t eat them [there really is no self justification for that one at all].

STILL SHOPPING LIKE A CATERER

Molasses, twice. Date syrup, three in the larder and a fourth in the fridge. Five jars of stem ginger, which arrived by accident, allegedly.

This one is a hangover. When you have spent years buying in volume, one of something feels wrong — you buy multiples because multiples are how stock works in a commercial kitchen, and a case is cheaper than a jar. At home you use a tablespoon of stem ginger about twice a year. It keeps beautifully, which is the trap: nothing ever goes off, so nothing ever announces the mistake.

THE RECIPE THAT NEVER GOT MADE

Miso paste, bought for one recipe. Tamarind paste, bought for one recipe. Both still in the fridge door. Cooking tamarind and pistachio paste, ordered from Amazon after I saw two recipes I fancied — and then it got too hot to bake, and the moment passed. Milk powder, unopened, which went on the list because of a speciality bread that hasn’t materialised. A bag of glutinous rice flour that neither of us can account for, bought as a thickener, still sealed.

Every one of those is an idea that got as far as the shop and no further. And the jar is unopened, which is what makes it a confession rather than a leftover. The enthusiasm was completely real. It just had a window, and the window shut.

BOUGHT THE IDEA, NOT THE INGREDIENT

Coloured pasta in shapes, in a nice cellophane bag with a ribbon, at roughly twice what pasta costs. Four or five part-used boxes of muffin cases, because I saw a pattern I liked and thought it would photograph well. Cornichons, bought for a client who might want cornichons.

And the worst one: a jar of asparagus, bought out of season because I wanted a picture for a recipe. Which I could then never bring myself to use, because it’s jarred asparagus.

Not one of those was bought to eat. They were bought because I liked the idea of them.

TRIED ONCE, NEVER AGAIN

The salad dressing from Toulouse went in the bin after one taste. A jar of olives bought for martinis turned out to be ghastly, and they live in the fridge rather than the bin, which is a separate problem for another day. Buckwheat bulgur, cooked once, turned to mush — my fault rather than the bulgur’s, and I still like the idea enough that I need to spend ten minutes finding out how it’s properly done. Decorative marshmallows from a cookie recipe I tested, decided I didn’t much like, and never made again.

This is the smallest group in the audit, which surprised me. Actually cooking something is the one reliable way to find out whether it deserves to be there.

THE FOOD YOU ALREADY HAVE

What struck me going through all of it is that there was no bad decision anywhere. Every item had a reason and most of the reasons were good ones. The tahini was scarce. The market really was two years ago and whilst the idea was good at the time, the recipe testing never happened with that product. And, it really was too hot to bake, and at the time of writing still is.

What was missing was much simpler, and it isn’t organisation — the larder, the pantry whatever you want to call it,  is organised. It’s that at the moment of writing the list, none of us actually knows what’s in all the cupboards. We know what we can see. And the food you already have is nearly always the food you can’t readily see.

And, of course, the orzo was there the whole time.