Time for a pantry sort-out!

Whether you’re working from home now, you are self-isolating because you have symptoms or because you are in a high-risk category health-wise, or you are practising social distancing and spending more time at home, there are ways to put all this extra time to good use. By keeping busy and finding practical and useful things to do around the house, we can all keep our spirits up and find things to be positive about.

In these troubling times, maintaining our emotional wellbeing and mental health is perhaps just as much of a challenge as preventing the spread of the coronavirus. In today’s blog post, we’re going to look at tackling one of those long-overdue kitchen chores - organising your pantry.

It might sound flippant at first, but getting your store cupboards organised could be a valuable exercise right now, enabling you to see exactly what food supplies you have and reducing the possibility of food waste at the same time. And the added bonus is the satisfaction of a job well done, at the end of it. Let’s get started…

Using Kilner jars for an organised pantry

We’ve all seen the news over the last week telling us of supermarket shortages on basic goods such as pasta, rice and cereal. Now, more than ever before, it’s vital that we don’t waste what dried food we do have to hand in our pantries. If you store your pasta and rice in the plastic packaging it comes in, then at some stage or another, you’re likely to have experienced a spill in your cupboards. Whenever that happens, it means that pasta or rice ends up in the bin - wasted.

Now is the perfect time to put in place a better system where you transfer those dried goods into clip top jars when you come back from the supermarket. Kilner jars are ideal for this task and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, to cover everything from rice to spaghetti. The benefits of using clip top jars are multiple; you can see exactly how much of each item you have to hand, you reduce the chances of spilling any, and you keep everything in a sealed, airtight container, ensuring it stays fresh and safe to eat for much longer.

Adopt a system to stay organised

Once you’ve switched to storing your staples in clip top jars, the next step is to organise the contents of your pantry, so that it is always easy to find exactly what you are looking for, and so that you can see at a glance what you need to replace when you go shopping. If shopping trips are to become limited, it will be incredibly frustrating to get back from a supermarket trip to find that you should have bought something or other, but you didn’t realise you needed it. Likewise, it makes no sense to buy items if you already have plenty of stock at home. The only way to avoid these two scenarios is to get organised.

Start by taking everything out of your pantry or cupboards and cleaning the shelves, ready to put everything back in order. Whilst all of your food items are out on the kitchen table, check through everything to identify any items that are close to their use-by date and mark these in some way for use over the coming week. Again, this is one way to reduce the chances of food waste at a time when we all need to start thinking about only buying what we truly need at the supermarket.

Next, group together similar items. Staples such as pasta and rice should go together on one shelf, items for home baking should be grouped together, and so on. It sounds arcane, but getting organised like this really will make your everyday life easier and will help to give you a sense of calm when you are preparing meals or baking sweet treats for the family.

If you think back to your Grandma’s kitchen, you can bet your bottom dollar it looked something like we’re describing here, and that system worked for Grandma pretty well. There was no food wastage, no cluttered shelves and no chaos and confusion in Grandma’s kitchen. And by and large, most of our Grandma’s had a schedule for what food they planned to cook for family dinners and a list of exactly what they needed to buy each week - that’s the approach we all need to consider now.

Have you taken steps over the last two weeks to get organised, ready for potential disruption to our daily lives? Are you planning meals more carefully, and looking to make things go further? We’d love to hear all of your tips and hints for how to make the most of things in this unprecedented time. Please send us your tips and photos, for us to share on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.