food storage

What to do on a snowy weekend? Reorganize the pantry! Also known as thrilling adventures in discovering how much pasta you actually have! Ha-ha. Yeah, I know, not exactly.

Right now we have two places to store extra foodstuffs. We have a pantry in the kitchen, and in the little “studio” room off the kitchen, we’ve added a large wire shelf for extra storage. Starting about nine months ago, we decided to start a stockpile (loosely) based on the extreme coupon clipping shows. I really wanted to get into couponing to save as much money as possible, but soon found that it drove me a little bonkers. It was too much for me to handle to clip coupons, check all the circulars, and go through a dozen websites finding out what that week’s deals were. I was spending too much time doing something that didn’t save me enough money to compensate for the loss of sanity. So, after a little trial and error I found my happy medium was just clipping coupons in the paper, and checking them against the circular. I don’t go out and buy out the store either- I only get one paper, and leave it at that. I get frustrated when I’m at the store looking for a particular item with a coupon, and I see the shelf has been emptied. I am sure I could be saving lots more money, but that’s just not how I’d like to spend my time, and I think it’s rude to “clear out” a store. We do buy things in bulk at BJ’s when I feel it’s warranted.

Food Shelf Before

Here it is a jumbled mess. In the kitchen, I have a large cabinet that we call the pantry.

Pantry Before

It was becoming difficult to tell what we needed, or what we already had. Now, I know some people have really beautiful pantries, where things are stored in nice containers and are labelled. I’m not doing that….yet. Maybe someday, but really, I just need to see everything. I really wish we had pull out shelves for the pantry, but that might be a project for the future. When we first moved in, there were no shelves. We had to go out and buy melanine, had it cut to size, and then I added the stripping to finish the edges. Thankfully the cabinet already had the pre-drilled holes for shelving standards, so we were able to just pop them in place.

Pantry After

Here is the pantry after. It might not look hugely different, but it is much better organized. My first objective was to organize everything so all the like-items were together. Pasta came out, spices went in.

Food Shelf After

Ahhh, much better. First, I got rid of the trash- extra plastic and empty boxes. Then, I used a few extra gatorade boxes (from BJs) to store some like items. All the pasta in one box, crackers and snacks in another, and “Beth town” in a third. In our household, Beth town is reserved snacks just for me. I can be a picky eater, and I like to snack. So in order to keep a supply of snacks in the house for me at any time, we needed to designate my own area of things not to be touched so they wouldn’t disappear so quickly. Generally, they are higher-calorie food items, and aren’t really good for Mr. Lucky to eat. Having Cystic Fibrosis, I tend to burn through calories more quickly.

And for your viewing pleasure, here they are side-by-side for comparison.