Hand-Me-Down Spices / Gewürze aus zweiter Hand

When we moved into the apartment, along with all the other things left behind, was a rack mounted to the wall in the kitchen full of spices. Some had been there so long that they were solid. Those I threw away. The rest were of questionable origin, but if the bottles were mostly full I kept them. I've bought new chili powder and new curry powder along the way, but the other ten or so bottles of paprika and pepper and oregano and the like are all hand-me-down spices.

Nikolas loves the book Stone Soup. Not yet old enough to realize that the stone is a trick, he loves the idea of a stone making all the difference in the pot of soup. Tonight after dinner he set about to "wash the dishes" but got distracted by a dirty pot in the sink which quickly turned into a game of Stone Soup (with an imaginary stone). After stirring the water around in it for a while, he asked for some salt. He stirred some more. After a while, he asked for some pepper. He stirred some more. "Would you like to taste it?" he asked. I declined.

"It needs something more," he said, looking up at the spice rack. Salt and pepper is the extent of his spice/herb repertoire, and so he started pointing. "May I have that one? The green one?" I handed over the almost full bottle of unknown origin of garlic powder. He shook a healthy dose of garlic powder in the pot and stirred some more. You could see him looking up at that spice rack and back to his pot, thinking about what he would like to add (and wondering if he was pushing his luck, I'm sure!). "And how about the red one?" he asked. I handed over the Kümmel, which translates as cumin but is not cumin as I know it. He shook and he shook.

He started working his way through each bottle on the rack, and it was when he dumped half the bottle of marjoram in the pot that it struck me as funny that I was letting him use all of our spices, some in great quantities, to flavor his pretend soup. Never in a million years would he be throwing in paprika (sweet and sharp) and white pepper and thyme and so on if I had bought them all or had a long-term interest in using them all. Hand-me-down spices aren't something I feel a need to preserve for the next person, and if they are all gone, used up in dish water soup, come July, the next Resident Director will never know what he/she is missing. There's a certain freedom in living in a place that isn't yours and doesn't have your things in it!