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Pantry Clean Up

November 29th, 2009 at 02:26 am

A friend recently moved and when she was packing up her pantry she ended up throwing away 2 full garbage bags of food that was expired. I like to think that I am pretty good at keeping my pantry and other cupboards well organized and try not to let anything expire, but after hearing about how much she had to throw away I decided that I better go through and reorganize to make sure we are not wasting money by letting food go bad. I had 3 main areas to go through, lazy susan, baking cupboard, and pantry. We are big fans of stock piling, so we do have a lot of items stocked up. I have a magnetic marker board on the side of my fridge, so as I went threw each cupbaord I would write the header on the marker board, and underneath the header I wrote the names of items we need to use up sooner then later so that they don't expire. The lazy susan I had a box of pasta salad and a box if augratin potatoes that needed to be used up. Then I did the baking cupboard. We don't bake a ton, but have a lot of mixes, spices, frosting etc. I wrote down all the mixes we have had for over a year. We even made some Lemon Poppy seed muffins today to start using them up. We also put a Jello mold from that cupboard into the rummage sale box and put all of the sugar (brown, powdered and regular) into the chest freezer. Then I did the pantry, had to throw away one bottle of marinade dressing that was too old. And had one can of fruit cocktail and one can of beans that need to be used up soon so they went on the list. We also have a large supply of ranch, kethup, marinades and salsas (bought bulk when it was on good sale) so I put all of those in order in the pantry of which needs to be used first. So all in all I actually only had to throw one item away, and I have sooooo much more room in my cupboards now since everything was taken out and put back in a more organized way. The whole project only took about 30 minutes.

4 Responses to “Pantry Clean Up”

  1. HouseHopeful Says:
    1259463607

    Thats a great project. I treat my pantry like a store. When I buy new items of a product, I put them at the back of the pantry and move the items in the back towards the front. So that way, I see the older stuff first & hopefully use it up Smile

  2. JackofAllDealz Says:
    1259479429

    I think cleaning the pantry is a great idea. I just had to go through mine because I am moving next week and it's amazing what I found in there. Let's just say that I have a lot of canned black beans to eat Wink

  3. homebody Says:
    1259501253

    If she has not thrown it out, call the local soup kitchen. We took our expired food to them, they said they could use most of it, when I told them what it was....especially canned things.

  4. Banker Gurl Says:
    1259510705

    The only thing I had to throw was one marinade salad dressing and it was "Best by 2006".....yuck, so no food pantry for that one! I am usually pretty leniant with "best by" dates, so most things that were best by sometime in 2009 were what went on the list to use soon, and most of those items were dry, like cake mix or dried pasta etc.

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