All These Pantries Are Yours…

Well, with the weekend garage sale being a non-wash-out wash-out (forecast calls for sunny skies this coming weekend, fingers crossed), I found myself with some extra time.

Actually, I wasn’t planning on doing much, it’d been a long week and my energy was low. Then I popped the fridge open and noticed that the smell…well it wasn’t pleasant. So I grabbed some trash bags, heated up a bit of water, and went to work. All leftovers got tossed, anything without a discernible date (or hadn’t been used for more than a few weeks) got tossed, each bin (veggie, meat, cheeses) got gutted and scrubbed down with the aforementioned warm water before being put back. Then I attacked the freezer, which didn’t resemble a usable freezer inasmuch as a frozen strata consisting of peas, pasta sauce, ice cream, and bananas (oh, the bananas). Tossed everything within reason (new packages of stuff and the sauce stayed, nothing else survived).

I reached into the pantry for an extra trash bag and, after pushing aside five half-full bags of flour and sugar, realized that I wasn’t done yet with the kitchen, not by a long shot.

I pulled everything out of the pantry (not a large one, mind you, about as big as a coat closet). It took an hour and consumed every bit of counter and floor space in the kitchen. The same bloodthirsty philosophy from the fridge was in effect (but with a bit more nibbling to ascertain freshness…it was nearly lunchtime by this point). Where, with the fridge and freezer, I couldn’t leave the door open a bunch (the poor girl doesn’t have much life left and I don’t need to overtax the compressor), the pantry afforded me a much more contemplative opportunity.

Y’see, this is probably my third pantry tear-down in the past six months. And, inevitably, all progress is erased by one trip to the store. So I tried to visualize how we access our food. Some things were obvious – move the good cereals and nutritious(ish) snacks to the middle shelf where the kids could easily access them. My oldest was happily wandering through the house with a plastic baggie of Goldfish not 20 minutes after I completed the clean-out, something that would have required a “Daaa-aaaaaad!” request earlier in the day. Other ideas weren’t quite as intuitive: we always keep our container of salt with the spices because, well, it’s a spice. But the only time I use it is when I’m salting water for pasta…guess where that big container ended up?

Oh! And the spices! They had been relegated to the bottom-most corner of the pantry, where I’d have to park myself down and dig through the rows, trying to figure out what was there, what wasn’t, while my legs went numb from squatting. Lucky for me, I came across another great Lifehacker article: The Geek’s Guide to Rebooting Your Kitchen. I cribbed the spice organization idea and liberated my spices, putting them in a drawer, so that I’d be able to access them more readily. Wanting to stay away from the oven, I gutted the troublesome “Phone Book drawer” by the dishwasher. 99.9% of the drawer contents were thrown out or recycled without even looking at them. The result was all my spices, within easy reach of my food-prep area, mostly label-up so that I don’t have to waste time hunting. Plus, yay!, clean drawer!

After filling a yard trash bag with stale/unusable/remainder items, the rest of the pantry came together. Baking items and teas went towards the bottom, since they’re used less frequently (and are in larger containers that don’t play nicely with shelves). Unhealthy treats went on the top-most shelf, with canned items and sauces/oils finding homes where they’d fit.

One Publix trip later and I can still see everything and the slush pile of tipped over spices and half-used bags of dry goods hasn’t yet reclaimed the bottom of the pantry (I don’t even have to use my shoulder to close the door anymore!). Fingers crossed, this will last till at least the end of the month!