Food Storage

Efficient food storage is a lifetime quest for me. Well, maybe not my whole lifetime. But certainly half my life I've struggled with the best way to keep my pantry from looking like an avalanche waiting to happen.

Because we have a large family, our needs may be different than most. We go through a gallon of milk a day when all the kids are home and triple most recipes. We buy very little prepared food, so we use a lot of the bulk basics like flour and sugar. But, since we don't have good counter space for fancy canisters, these have sat on the pantry shelves with the tops of the 5 lbs bags rolled down, waiting to be spilled. We laugh at those little 16.5 oz boxes of cereal, and get, instead, the big 33 oz bags, which end up spilling all over the place because the children invariably open them wrong, ripping the plastic. So, you see, lots of spillage. Very inefficient.

Until we found these ~ or a facsimile there-of. My camera has disappeared, so I can't take a picture of the ones we actually have. But, they look like this, except they have lines of measurement on the sides. They hold two gallons and have a tight fitting lid. They fit side by side on my pantry shelves, without the wasted space of rounded or oddly shaped containers. We got ours at Sams ~ I believe they were about $16 for two, but you can also get them online at Storables, in all different stackable sizes. Heritage Mint also has a great selection, in packages of varying sizes, at pretty good prices.

I haven't finished converting everything over yet ~ our cereal is still spilling out of bags in the bottom of our pantry, but our flour and sugar are in quality, see-through, hard-to-spill containers now, and life is good. As time goes by, I hope to get all our cereal, rice, beans, and noodles in like containers. Could life get much better than that?

For lots of ideas on kitchen organization this week, run on over to Shannon's at Rocks in My Dryer.