Time to organize your kitchen for fall!
The cozy season is so close you can smell the pumpkin spice! For many Canadians the cooler weather means a return to comfort cooking. Soups, stews and chilies bubbles away on the stove, bread baking in the oven and fragrant warm drinks.
Before you exchange barbecuing for bread baking, it’s a good idea to give your kitchen a fall glow up. After all, if you’ll be spending more time in your kitchen, it may as well look its very best. Right? Plus, decluttering and reorganizing your spice cupboard, pantry, and refrigerator, will make it easier to work around the kitchen.
Here are a few ways to get your kitchen ready for the cozy cooking season!
Prep Your Pantry
Whether you’re a bread baker, a soup maker, or the parent of school age kids, prepping your pantry for fall will make you feel much better once things start getting busy.
The secret to maintaining a tidy pantry is to decant as much as you can into stackable, labelled canisters, containers and baskets. This keeps items within sight and easy to access. Bagged items like beans, oatmeal and rice, cannot be stacked, tend to get lost on your shelves, and are more likely to spill their contents. Meanwhile, boxed products often take up more room than they need to, because the items inside are much smaller than the box itself. For example, think about a typical box of granola bars. You can decant two boxes of granola bars into a small basket and still take up less room in the pantry.
Once you’ve decanted your pantry items, be sure to label everything! It could prevent a terrible kitchen tragedy, like accidentally dusting your freshly baked pumpkin spice donuts with cornstarch instead of powdered sugar!
Stylish Spice Labels
Dried herbs and spices are another big mess maker in the kitchen, especially when purchased in bulk or in resealable plastic bags. Make it easier to add a pinch of this, a dash or that, and a good hearty shake of your favourite flavourings by storing spices in jars best suited to your cooking style. If you tend to shake most spices into your cooking sparingly, jars with standard shaker tops will probably work well for you. However, if you prefer to measure spices, you’ll want a spice jar with either an open top, or a flip top that allows you to use a shaker or measured amount.
Pro Tip: Be sure to add labels with large enough text that you can tell the difference between your basil, oregano and cilantro, or cumin, coriander and garam masala at a glance!
Designated Crisper Drawers
Make it easier to find the produce you need, while also extending its freshness, by tidying your refrigerator crisper drawers. Place fruit in one and veggies in the other, and be sure to set the correct humidity level for each. Then, to ensure that the right produce goes into the proper drawer (and to add a pop of style), add durable labels to each drawer, to clearly indicate what should be inside.
Keep Printed or Written Recipes Neatly Nearby
Printed recipes are still commonly used by a lot of people, even in these days of pin boards and digital recipe sites. Whether you tend to print the recipes you find online, or simply enjoy the homespun aesthetic of handwritten recipe cards, it’s important to keep paper recipes organized, but close at hand.
Use a combination of binders and sheet protectors to house printed recipes and handwritten cards in one convenient place. Sheet protectors will keep both your full size print outs and smaller recipes cards organized and protected from spills. Use full sizes sheet protectors to house printed recipes and Photo Pages to store recipe cards. Don’t forget to add dividers to your binder to keep everything organized and easy to find!
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