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.
Pantry Clean Up
November 29th, 2009 at 02:26 am
November 29th, 2009 at 03:00 am 1259463607
November 29th, 2009 at 07:23 am 1259479429
November 29th, 2009 at 01:27 pm 1259501253
November 29th, 2009 at 04:05 pm 1259510705