What to Do With All the Spices That Have Piled Up in Your Kitchen

Most American New Year’s resolutions focus on how to eat less food. Mine are trained on ways to consume more.

More dinner parties! More tackling of recipes that have been sitting in a manila folder since before my now college-age child was born! More late-to-the-party Instant Pot cooking! More fear-facing: I will master bone broth!

Before embarking on new cooking odysseys, one must reckon with the spice drawer. It is hard to face faded dried herbs and spices, especially those you may have picked up during, say, a trip to Mexico, ones you wrapped in several pounds of dirty clothes with the hope of tricking the customs dog, which actually was not remotely interested in your oregano.

Dead spices, unlike spoiled yogurt or moldy cheese, somehow feel like failures, a reminder of big culinary dreams that you failed to fulfill in the prior year. But sniff, accept and toss you must. Then you can reorganize, and assess what you have left.

I suggest pouring all of your remaining spices into uniformly sized containers and creating labels for them with painter’s tape and a Sharpie. Cabinet organization is the courtship portion of your New Year’s relationship with your kitchen, the hopeful and exciting discovery process, the sultry dance with dried porcini powder before the prosaic reality of day-to-day life sets in.

Now it’s time to start cooking up the still-fragrant but perhaps too-abundant spices that made the cut, before they too lose their vibrancy and join your lemon rinds and eggshells in the compost grave. For me, those included garam masala, caraway seeds, sumac and herbes de Provence.

After poring over some of the more exciting cookbooks published in recent years in search of simple ways to use my spices, I found several oddly healthful options that were profoundly delicious.

If you too are long on garam masala — and coriander and cumin — might I turn you toward the cauliflower, cashew, pea and coconut curry from Meera Sodha’s lovely cookbook “Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen”? This is quite frankly one of the best vegan recipes I have ever eaten, and weeknight-friendly to boot, especially if, like me, you are inclined to press others to cut up the cauliflower, perhaps by noting that you have folded the last 11 loads of laundry.

I substituted chile powder with a good squirt of hot sauce, with favorable results. The cashews round this dish out, and the flavors, culled from your now-clean spice cabinet, are layered and deeply satisfying.

Instead, I reduced the amount of olive oil used to sauté the garlic, as I would have no pie crust to brush with it, and cooked the eggplant and tomatoes as directed but tossed in a can of chickpeas to give the dish a protein component. I finished it off with another thing I am constantly left with: the bottom of a bottle of pomegranate molasses.

While this is all meant to go into a slab pie, mine went straight to a serving bowl as a side dish, though it’s also delicious as a main course over rice with yogurt and chopped herbs, and is even better the next day. Slab pies without pie crust forever! (Also, another hit for the vegan friends, if you leave off the yogurt, though I swear all this healthy living is largely inadvertent.)

Now what to do with all the herbes de Provence, which I am reasonably sure I never purchased to begin with? Fade to memory of a cousin cooking brussels sprouts last summer in a manner I have never repeated. Maybe.

First, I treated myself to “Let’s Eat France!” by François-Régis Gaudry, which is really less a cookbook in any traditional sense and more a large-scale celebration of all things pertaining to buying, preparing and eating French food. This book led me to ignore my entire family as well as the needy cockapoo — “Can anyone in this house walk the dog besides me?” — as I spent a significant portion of a Saturday afternoon staring at a full-page display of the knives of France’s historical provinces, and another on the history of cornichons.

In the end, I baked the book’s mi-cuit chocolate cake, but found no use for my herbes de Provence.

I decided to revisit my own go-to weeknight recipe for boneless, skinless chicken breasts. The recipe — which is about as thrown together as your end-of-the-week refrigerator drawers can yield — makes ample use of the herbs that grew prolifically on my porch this summer, perhaps the result of record levels of rain. With little left back there beyond stubborn rosemary and a trying-hard-not-to-look-depressed bit of sage, my spice drawer had to step in.

After salting and peppering the breasts, I tossed them into a plastic bag with some white wine, olive oil, a few garlic cloves and a ton of the herbes de Provence, and left it all day before cooking them on the stove for a fast after-work supper.