It was easy to identify the most annoying thing in the kitchen. There was a perfect spot in the cabinet above the stove for the flour, but no room anywhere for the sugar. Every time I needed even a teaspoon of sugar, I had to go to the Ivar shelving unit in the dining room and grab it. Of course, I could have used a sugar bowl, but I didn’t know where to store that, either, and wouldn’t have been able to decide on the threshold past which I’d have to reach for the large container. (Could I measure 1/2 cup out of the bowl? Would that be wrong?)

Enter Modular Mates.

Modular Mates are a long-running Tupperware item. They’re long, rounded-rectangular containers with tight-fitting lids, available in about a dozen sizes. I measured my cupboard and ordered two of the largest, which would barely fit. One holds five pounds of flour, the other around 7½ pounds of sugar.

They’re not a perfect solution: it’s a little harder to scoop the ingredients out because the container opening is narrower, and the sugar is pretty heavy. Probably I should have bought a shorter container for the sugar. And they weren’t cheap–the two pieces cost me about $30 on eBay and would have been more like $40 from tupperware.com.

But it’s all worth it to have sugar in the kitchen.

The real problem is that now some other issue is going to bubble to the top and become my number one kitchen annoyance. It might be the fact that all the spices (other than pepper) are also on the Ivar. Has anyone tried one of those horizontal magnetic spice racks? I saw them at Bed Bath and Beyond and am wondering whether I should put cumin on the side of the fridge, or whether it would end up spilled on a daily basis.

Actually, my number one kitchen annoyance right this second is that the power is out, presumably due to last night’s windstorm. So Iris and I will be having a raw-food breakfast. By which I mean Life cereal.

I wasn’t sure about buckwheat pancakes. But I was making pancakes for dinner, and I was out of frozen wild blueberries for our usual blueberry pancakes. There was some Bob’s Red Mill buckwheat flour in the freezer, so I decided to give it a shot, substituting half buckwheat flour for all-purpose. I made some sausage patties to go with them, and the sausage and pancakes came out exactly the same shade of brown.

Buckwheat pancakes are great, it turns out, with a meaty undertone that would go nicely with something savory. Or, since anything served on top of a pancake would probably turn it to mush, buckwheat waffles would probably be an even better foundation.

The pancakes were enough of a hit that when I wanted to make cornmeal-cranberry pancakes the other day, Iris insisted on “brown pancakes” instead. Now I’m thinking about trying a buckwheat gnocchi recipe from Biba Caggiano. And I’m not actually going to try this, but sausage and buckwheat were such nice partners that someone should really make a corn dog with a buckwheat-based coating.

Bad news from Trader Joe’s. The cornmeal pizza dough, the star of the second post ever on R&G, has been discontinued. This dough was the basis for one of the most delicious pizzas I know: bacon and pickled jalapeño. We ate it at least twice a month during the cornmeal dough’s brief life.

Now I’m going to have to develop my own cornmeal pizza dough. Anyone have a recipe to recommend, or a ratio of cornmeal to flour I should start with?

New York banned trans fats. I was telling my friend [Dan](http://www.dfan.org/) that I thought this was cool. He said, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who said that when someone is in favor of banning something, it always turns out that he is secretly doing that thing himself?” Presumably I said this as the Foley scandal was breaking.

I said something like, “Yeah, but that only applies to other people.”

Tonight while I was making dinner, the large tub of Kroger vegetable shortening on top of the fridge seemed to be staring at me.