Spice Girl

I brought some soup to a friend who asked me for the recipe. When I gave it to her she called me after she had made it, “My soup tastes nothing like yours.” Now I am not a perfect recipe writer because I am not a cook who measures as I cook so I am guessing at amounts when I write after the cooking and tasting are done.  
I was concerned that I might had been so off in my writing so I quizzed my friend. “Did you add this? Or that?” I asked. “Did you cook it long enough?” “Did you add lemon juice or vinegar at the end?” I got satisfactory answers to all those things. I looked back at the recipe which was my Senegalese Stew. It has a lot of spices in it. Then it dawned on my why it might not have tasted anything like mine. 
“How old are your curry powder, coriander and cumin?” I asked.
“Old? I have no idea I’ve had them in my pantry forever.”  
Ding, ding, ding. This is the problem with so many people’s cooking. Spices get old much faster than most people use them up. I bet only one in one hundred of the people who read this blog throw away a spice bottle that has anything still in the bottle, let alone date your bottles so you know when it first was opened.
Spices may seem expensive, but consider how expensive it is to ruin perfectly good food by using old spices. They lose their potency so if you are really opposed to throwing away a jar of paprika that is five years old you have to make up for it by using much more than the recipe calls for. But it is not a one for one trade that for each year over the spoil date you have to double the amount. Some spices just get an “off” taste, especially if they have gotten warm by being in sunlight or by the oven.
I hate to have to write on every recipe “make sure you are using fresh spices,” but I feel like I should. Today I went to the Penzeys spice store in Raleigh and bought a bunch of my favorite and most used herbs and spices since day light savings time brings on the savory cooking and spicy baking season. I tend to stay away from spice blends and rather buy basics that I can mix together as needed. It is much cheaper to buy the bags and put them in my own jars, but if you don’t cook that much just buy the smallest jar available and use it all up quickly.
An investment in $4 worth of spices is money well spent when you consider you might spend $20 on the meat and $15 on the vegetables that go into a recipe.  
If you are somewhat of a spice virgin these are my go to favorites in the order of most use at our house; salt, black pepper, cumin, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, coriander, curry, basil, rosemary, dry mustard, white pepper, tarragon and marjoram. I have many, many others, but they get used at a much less frequent rate. If you have the ones I listed you will be covered for the majority of recipes you might find. Of course if you want to make dill potato salad you need dill, or some stewed German pork you might need caraway seed, but things like that can be purchased at time of use.  
The best thing you can do is make a dish based around a spice you already own. Search the Internet by the spice and you will get a list of things where it is in the ingredient list. It will expand your cooking repertoire dramatically and not waste your good spices. The best thing you can do this weekend is open your spice jars and take a big sniff. If the smell is not very strong it is probably time to replace it. If it is something you only used once then you don’t need to buy it again. Just don’t ruin perfectly good meet and vegetables, or an apple pie by using the old spices.