Search Results for: blog organizing your spices

Kitchen Organizing for the Holidays

The fall is a great time to start thinking about the holidays, which are really just around the corner. I promise you, they will be here before you know it. So why not take some time this month to start prepping your kitchen? By cleaning and organizing it now, you will have a head start and prevent future stress. It’s actually a great time to organize your cabinets. Focus on one or two each weekend. But while you are doing that, you should also start keeping an inventory of what you have and what you need. For instance, if you … Continue reading →

Organizing a Smaller Kitchen

My husband recently started cleaning out a storage room in our basement, in which he found china and crystal. It was hard to recognize what the pieces were at first because they were covered in sawdust. Yes, they had been kept on a shelf in the same room my husband did some of his sawing in. While I wanted to wash and clean the pieces, I remembered that that we don’t have enough space in our kitchen to store it. That was the whole reason for these beautiful pieces to be stashed away for the past several years. And it’s … Continue reading →

Organizing Your Non-Perishables

How is your pantry looking? I don’t have one but no matter where you store your cans and boxes, you might be looking at nothing more than a hot mess. The other day I blogged about organizing your spices so they are easily accessible. I mentioned how I had duplicates and sometimes several containers of the same spice. Well the same thing can happen with your non-perishables if you don’t have a good organizational system in place. You may be wasting money on items that you already have. Let’s start with your cans. It’s best to organize them by category. … Continue reading →

Organizing Your Spices

I used to keep all my spices stacked in a cabinet. Needless to say it was difficult to find what I needed. Then one day I decided to clean out that cabinet and discovered I had purchased sometimes six of the same spice, simply because I didn’t know I already had it. There were lots of duplicates and some spices I didn’t realize I had. So my next strategy was to move the spices to a lower cabinet, which has a lazy Susan. I figured swiveling my spices around would make them easier to locate. But once again, I decided … Continue reading →

Managing Your Stockpile 2

Do you have a well-organized stockpile? It doesn’t take too much effort to maintain a stockpile if you know a few tips. Yesterday, I started talking about how to manage your stockpile and avoid waste. Now, let us continue with the tips, including some recipe secrets. When you have a stockpile, it is important to be flexible enough to adapt when there are dietary or taste changes. For example, my husband used to take lunch meat as his lunch to work almost every day. Now he prefers soup. So, I have a couple of jars of mayo and salad dressing … Continue reading →

Organizing the Pantry? Mission Possible?

While the old mission impossible might have been the name of a famous television show, one of the new mission impossibles, if you are anything like me that is, concerns the organization of the kitchen pantry! What do I mean by this, those of you organized people out there in blogger land might ask? Well, the question deserves an answer and hold your nose because here goes. Let’s talk about spices first. Are you alphabetical or random? If you are not sure, consider how you organize your address book. If for example, you list your cat’s vet as “Fluffy’s Friend” … Continue reading →

Winter Meal Planning

It feels like I am constantly running to the grocery store. If I’m lucky, I only go a couple of times during the week. But more often it ends up being three or four times that I visit. Now that it’s gotten colder and I am thinking ahead to the winter months, my goal is to eliminate unnecessary trips to the store. The only way I can really do that is to improve my meal planning skills. Last year I had this great idea of trying three new recipes every week. I was tired of cooking the same things over … Continue reading →

Cleaning while Cooking

This week my 15-year-old daughter made an entire meal by herself. It was meat loaf and fried potatoes. I wasn’t home to help her, so she was entirely on her own. When I did come home, it was to a huge mess. I had done a really good job teaching her how to make one of our favorite meals but I had apparently not taught her the art of keeping the kitchen clean while you cook. It drives me crazy when I see someone cooking or baking and there is a mess everywhere. That’s probably why I especially enjoy the … Continue reading →

Dirty or Clean?

Do you own a dishwasher? Do you find that others in your household can’t seem to figure out when the dishes are clean and when they are dirty? I can’t tell you the number of times the dishwasher has been stocked with clean dishes but I open it up to see someone has placed a knife caked with peanut butter inside. They couldn’t tell the dishes were clean. Or when the dishwasher is filled with dirty dishes, yet everyone keeps putting cups, bowls and utensils into the kitchen sink instead of the dishwasher. In my eyes, all you have to … Continue reading →

Cleaning Kitchen Cabinets

One area of the kitchen that you may not think about much when it comes to cleaning is your cabinets. But you can keep them looking good for a longer time with some care. Ideally, wiping the outside of your cabinets on a daily basis will help in maintaining the look. This is especially true for those cabinets that are located near your stove. You would be surprised at how much grime and grease ends up on the outside of your cabinets after you have been cooking. But if a daily wiping down sounds like too much, then try to … Continue reading →