The Dreaded Pantry Cupboard

Linking up with Jules at Pancakes and French Fries as part of the William Morris Project.  Check out her blog for lots of great links!

This house has one of those "pantry cupboards" in the kitchen.  The cupboard is as big as a refrigerator, and has four roll-out type shelves.  I know that people love these cupboards, but I really don't.  All the hardware necessary to make the shelves roll takes up a lot of room, not to mention that the shelf is actually a shallow drawer, meaning that there is even less space for pantry items.  And it is really hard to organize!

Case in point:

Things are just thrown in, with no real rhyme or reason.  Except for the all the plasticware being on the bottom shelf.  A closer look?  Sure.  Here we go, from top to bottom.

Ugh.  What a dump!  But after a little bit of time, some rearranging of foodstuffs, and some vacuuming (I shake my fist at you, onions and potatoes!), I now know what is in here.

The plasticware has all been sorted and nested.  We are moving slowly to glass storage containers, which are kept in a different cupboard (where they won't roll around when I pull out the "shelf"), but I'm not willing to just throw away all the plastic.

This shelf probably had the most dramatic turn around.  I put most of the dried beans into wide mouth quart mason jars and found a couple of baskets for potatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger.  Hopefully the baskets mean that I won't have to drag my vacuum to the cupboard again.  I like the mason jar idea, but eventually I would like something a bit bigger.  A one pound bag of beans does not quite fit into a quart jar.  I've labelled them with masking tape since I think I will want something else eventually, but these were here and they function so much better than the pile of bags that I had going on before.

Mainly jars on one side, mainly bags of stuff on the other.  I suppose this would be the condiment/breakfast/dried fruit shelf.

And then the tea.  More than half this shelf is tea.  The mason jars on the left are the large tea bags I use for iced tea.  (I had a lot of mason jars around.)  After seeing this, I think I should probably hold off on buying tea for awhile.  Especially since there is also this in the kitchen:

Yup. More tea.  The pretty containers make it out of the cupboard.  Fourteen (!) more tea varieties.  Geez, I hope tea doesn't go bad.  Habit or vice?  At this point, I'm not sure.

Anyone else have any "healthy vices"?

The Spice of Life, or at least my cooking

Joining Jules at Pancakes and French Fries for The William Morris Project.

Continuing with the kitchen, I give you the two cabinets I worked through this week.  The first is the cupboard above the microwave.  Doesn't this one become the stash cupboard in everyone's kitchen?  Even in my childhood kitchen, that cupboard was where my mother stuffed things that didn't really have another place.  (Only that cupboard, of course, wasn't above the microwave--since we didn't have one--but above the stove.  The Harvest Gold stove.)

As you can probably guess, my mother also kept medication above the stove.  I guess that was so it was out of reach of little people.  Those fluffy white things above the magazines?  Those are mosquito tents.  And behind the boxes of zipper bags are some cookbooks.

I cleaned out the medicines, sorted what was expired and what was worth keeping.  I got the expired medications ready to take to the sheriff.  No flushing meds here!  (Is there anyone who still does that?  Don't.  Just don't.  It ends up in the water supply.  The local police department can tell you where to bring your expired and unwanted medicines.)

I moved the stack of Vegetarian Times from the last cupboard into this cupboard.  I'm trying to corral all the cooking magazines to one area.  After that, I need to find some way to manage them.  But that's a project for another day.  I left the headache medicine and the burn cream, but moved all the other medicines to the bedroom closet.

The other cupboard is the spice cupboard.  I try to organize this one about once a year, but I can't figure out a way to keep it looking nice and neat.

It actually isn't too bad.  It really just needed some straightening.  I also try to keep a list of what spices I have taped to the door, and I know that it wasn't accurate (as evidenced by finding three jars of pumpkin pie spice).  

The three clementine boxes on the middle shelf are labeled Spice Mixes, Baking Supplies, and Misc.  They hold all the stuff that gets pushed around, like birthday candles, onion soup mix, and cheesecloth.  It won't stay this neat.  At least the lower shelf won't.  But at least I know what I have now.

And since The William Morris Project is about beauty and not just utility, I give you the big reveal of my holiday present.

I just got it back from the framer's.  I love it so much.  That wall has been empty for four years, and now that we are moving I have finally put something up there.  I was just waiting for the right something.  I found it at this shop on Etsy.  

The tree represented here is the white pine, which is Michigan's state tree.  Amy Ruppel, the artist, has a series of states depicted with native foliage.  Her interpretation of California uses redwoods, Wisconsin is sugar maples.  They are lovely.  We actually thought about getting one for every state we've lived in together, but decided we like the simplicity of this one print.  It really makes a statement on that wall. 

Tackling Kitchen Clutter

Today I'm joining Jules over at Pancakes and French Fries and participating in The William Morris Project.  This is my first link-up of any kind, and (obviously) my first foray into The William Morris Project.  Starting in the kitchen...

Mike and I are going to be moving this spring.  He has received orders to go to Beaufort, SC.  We think (and I stress only think, not know) he will be headed down there sometime in May.  School will not be finished for me yet, so I will be sticking around here for a bit.  However, we would like to put our house on the rental market in time for the summer renters.  What this means is that we will schedule our pack up with TMO for sometime in early May, which means it will get to where ever it is we land sometime in early June.

Since in June I will be in an entirely new clinical rotation and not anywhere near Beaufort, Mike will be tasked with the unpacking.  In an effort to move only what we love, and also to make unpacking an entire house a manageable task for one, I am making a serious effort to, for lack of a better expression, separate the wheat from the chaff, stuff-wise.  Last time we moved, they packed catalogs.  Well, they pack everything, truly.  A full service move is a wonderful thing, but it means that when you unpack you really are faced with the fact that you had two years of Eddie Bauer catalogs in the living room end table (which you know because you removed them from a box marked "living room end table.")

So I started in the most formidable room (to me).  The kitchen.

The Canned Goods Cupboard, Before.  Who would mistake this for an "after" though, really?

This cupboard has sort of become the "if we aren't sure where it goes, let's put it in here" cupboard.  We have: tea lights, a dead candle, actual tea, vitamins, dog medicine, a recipe tin (further examination here revealed an empty recipe tin), Vegetarian Times magazines, Everyday Food magazines, a calendar, owner's manuals for kitchen appliances, and a few spiral bound cookbooks (I don't like displaying the spiral bound cookbooks; they aren't "pretty" to me).

The highly organized After

So I removed the medicines and vitamins (which will make a reappearance on this blog, because they just went into the next cupboard, but that is where a third of our medicines are, so there you go), put the tea with the other tea, moved the Vegetarian Times out, organized the Everyday Food (is anyone else going to miss this magazine?), and put the like goods with their family (i.e. tomatoes with other tomato products, soup with soup).  If you have a keen eye, you might notice that the Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips are open in the second picture, and they were not in the first.  Hmmmm......

The pockets on the cupboard doors stay, and despite the fact that they don't look organized, they really are. The right hand side holds recipes for things I am going to make in the next couple of weeks, according to what we have on hand or in the freezer.  The two pockets on the left hold receipts.  Last year we started using Mint to track our expenses and needed somewhere to corral all the receipts.  The bottom pocket is the current month.  The top pocket is last month, which I will hopefully get through this weekend.

I also cleaned the candle.  I love the candles from Bath and Body Works and the jars make such nice Stuff Holders once the candle is gone.  I used to just chip away at the wax with a knife and hope that I wouldn't end up in the ED.  Not anymore.  The best way I've found to remove all that wax from the bottom of the candle jar is with boiling water.

Pour boiling water to the top of the candle jar.
You can see the layer of melted wax on top of the candle on the right.

Then you let that cool.  And by let cool, I mean get cold.  You have to let it sit for a couple of hours. But while you wait, you can enjoy the scent one last time.  (The boiling water re-heats the wax, throwing the scent.)  The wax will harden into a disk.

Wax now on top of the jar, floating on the water.

Pop the wax off the water.  It will come off really easily.  I was surprised at this. I thought the wax would cling to the sides of the jar, but nope.  I just sort of floats there.

Then clean your candle jars, which aren't really candle jars anymore.  They can be whatever you want them to be.

Clean and ready for their new job!

The bottle on the left is an old fashioned milk bottle, so that one will go in the cupboard (not the new clean one!) to await the next time I have someone over for coffee and need something more classy than a plastic two gallon jug to bring milk to the table.  (Which, honestly, has never happened.  My coffee-swilling friends go right to the fridge and grab their own milk.)  The BBW jar will probably hold buttons.

Now I'm off to make dinner, which will involve some soup that I didn't know we had and a sandwich.  Easy, cheap, and gets one more thing out of the cupboard.  Score for me!