Organizing Your Kitchen and Food Part 2

Organizing your kitchen will make your cooking experience more enjoyable. Now that you have your cabinets and drawers order, it is the time to tackle your food.

As I said in Organizing a Kitchen Part 1, if you have food on your floor pantry you have too much and need to either start eating more, entertaining more, stop buying as much, or give some away to your local food pantry! We as a nation tend to purchase more than we can ever consume, like really, what are those people doing with all that food on that Extreme Couponing show anyway?!!?

Organizing the pantry:

First, start pulling everything out of your pantry and look at the expiration dates of your food, anything that has expired goes in the trash. As you are pulling out your food group the packages like a grocery store does, by “like items” all soup together, all cereals together, all pasta together, all… you get the idea. Then edit. I do have to say that those staged selves with multiple of the same thing are beautiful to look at, but really who has that much of the same thing? Edit your items, make sure what you have in your pantry is fresh.

When placing items back group like things; oatmeal with cereal and Poptarts for example on the same shelf so your family knows where to locate these items, and better yet, knows what shelf to put them back on. This is also helpful because it will make your shopping list easier to compile when you need to. If you cannot remember what you need to purchase you can open up the cabinet door and voila you can immediately see what you are getting low on.

Organizing the refrigerator:

Next, move onto your refrigerator, and edit and organize what lurks behind those doors.  Once a week I strongly suggest go through and check all those mysterious packages that have accumulated throughout the week. Many things that have been in your refrigerator cannot be stored indefinably as some might believe. The foodsaftey.gov site outlines safe time limits in an easy to read chart that could be good to print and put on the fridge if you tend to leave food stored for a while.

Now that you have organized cabinets, drawers, pantry, and refrigerator you are well on your way to a well-organized kitchen. Having problems feeling like you can accomplish this? Contact me, I will be happy to help.

Other good reads:

Organizing a Kitchen Part 1

Organizing | Systems to Use