Saturday Sort

Hesitantly, I am introducing a new feature to this blog.  It is called the Saturday Sort and is devoted to organization in the kitchen (and elsewhere, if I ever get past the kitchen).  I worked hard this week to get my out-of-CON-trol pantry in order.  I moved on to the refrigerator/freezer.  The hard thing about this is the need to show you the before and the after picture.  I LOVE the after pictures, but I am not so fond of the before pictures.  But in the interest of full disclosure, I feel I must let you know that I am, in fact, human and life gets away from me sometimes...the result is the following....AHHH!

  The Before (how embarrassing!)

Although, I did not read this article from Real Simple regarding cleaning out your pantry, I did use the following tips for cleaning out the pantry:

1. Assess the contents - sort out and throw away what you will never use.  I did this by putting like things with one another in one area of my kitchen as I took everything out of the pantry.

2.  Store foods systematically - in my kitchen this means things are sorted by baking, cooking, grains, snacks, cereals, drinks, and condiments. 

This may seem overly simplified, but it really is easy to do these things.  My general rule of thumb is to be zealous for ridding myself of things I will not use.  When in doubt, throw it away (or donate it, if possible).  It is very helpful to start with a clean slate and the only way to do that is to remove everything from the pantry and start from square one.  With a bare pantry, it is easier to think about how you cook and store food and go from there.  I forgot to take a picture of my empty pantry, but if you can't use your imagination to picture it, well...

So using those two (incredibly over-simplified) rules-of-thumb, here is the result. 

 Ahhh...doesn't that feel much better?