Organize Your Pantry for Quick Dinner Meals

September 19, 2012

A useful Pantry is a useful friend!

A full pantry isn’t always your best friend, but a useful pantry full of the foods you ACTUALLY eat is!

Have as many of the ingredients on hand as possible for your “I have no time dinners.”

By taking a look at what you have in your pantry, fridge and freezer lets you identify the foods that either support your efforts to get healthy, or sabotage your efforts.   Chances are you can easily rattle off the support or sabotage foods I’m talking about without opening the doors!

If the pantry is your kitchen’s blindspot, and making your life difficult when it comes to cooking, follow these tips to get your pantry decluttered and organised so you can get healthy eating back on track!

  • Take all the food out! As you go:
    • Toss anything past its use by date
    • As you go through the foods in your pantry – really take a look – are they foods you actually eat or just good ideas at the time foods?
    • Group foods into categories – use the floor or shopping bags and label them as you go.  e.g. canned foods; oils and sauces; baking stuff; spreads, grains; snacks; etc
  • Now that everything is out work out your new homes for your groups of food based on how often you use the items!
    • Most often  = easy to access places
    • Less often  = at the top
    • Heavy items  (e.g. appliances you don’t use often) = on the bottom shelves.
    • Look to use any space you have available  = try expandable shelf shelves, under shelf baskets, lazy susans.
  • Put everything back in the pantry in the new categories you’ve created.
  • To help your family work it out too, grab your labeler and create labels for the categories you created, (e.g. Breaky Central for breakfast cereals;  Snack Central for snacks, The Lunch Box for your lunch supplies etc).

If the pantry is making your life difficult when it comes to cooking, follow these tips to get you on your way to quick and healthy meals.

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