Kitchen Organization for Healthy Eating
I’m so excited about Guest Post Thursday going on here this summer. Today I am thrilled to have Laura from Heavenly Homemakers visiting. I love Laura’s blog because when I’m reading her posts it always feels like I’m sitting right there in her kitchen with her chatting away with a cup of tea. Her post here today is no exception. I’ve learned so much about homemaking from reading Laura’s blog and her inspiration is a huge factor in why I’ve been able to step out of my fearful box and try some new things in the kitchen lately, like pie crust from scratch and canning. Thanks Laura!
Oh, and if I do say so myself…our homemade-from-scratch food tastes really, really delicious. (Judging by the incredible amount my husband and four boys can put away…I think they like my cooking.)
Here are some questions I often get from my blog readers:
Are you in the kitchen ALL the time? How do you get all of this done? How do you keep up with all the dishes?
I am in the kitchen a lot…but I don’t live in there. (See, like right now I’m on the computer in the living room instead. :) ) Cooking from scratch does take time…but here are some things I do to make my work simpler:
I plan our menus!!! I can not be efficient in the kitchen without a plan for the week. Menu plans are a must for me. Yay for Org Junkie’s Menu Plan Monday!
I cook simple meals…simple foods. I rarely cook anything that requires complicated steps or hard-to-work-with ingredients. Meat, potatoes, rice, beans, veggies, fruits, grains, eggs, milk…it’s all just basic food put together into different yummy meals.
I wash dishes as I go. I really do dirty up a lot of dishes in a day…but I try (try) to keep up with them by washing them as I cook. I have a dishwasher. I have boys old enough to help. I have ten minutes here and there to knock more out of the pile. I love having clean countertops.
I think ahead, plan ahead, cook ahead. This is one of my biggest cooking helps. I look at my menu plan and know what I’ll need for the upcoming week. If I can, I spend time on Friday night and Saturday cooking and baking for the week ahead. I’ll make up a double batch of tortillas, cook chicken for broth, bake four loaves of bread, brown several pounds of hamburger meat, cook rice, put together burritoes for the freezer, or any other foods that will make the week ahead run more smoothly. THEN, during the week…it’s like having convenience foods in the fridge or freezer!
and here’s one of my favorite ways to stay organized and ahead in the kitchen:
I make tomorrow’s breakfast while I’m cooking tonight’s dinner. This doesn’t always work (like, I’m not going to scramble tomorrow’s eggs at 6:00 tonight…yuck), but if we’re having muffins for breakfast, I’ll mix them up and bake them while I’m in the kitchen cooking dinner. In the morning, I’ll re-warm them in the oven for a few minutes, or just serve them as is. Or, if I’m making biscuits tomorrow morning, I’ll mix the flour and buttermilk so they can soak overnight…and then just finish them up the next morning. I often make a double batch of waffles, let them cool, then freeze them. Then we have convenient, toaster waffles whenever we need them. LOVE it.
Those are some of the things I do to keep myself organized and sane during the busy weeks of school work, computer work, laundry, and you know…Chutes and Ladders.
What are some of your best ways of staying organized while you’re cooking? Do you feel like you spend hours in your kitchen?
Organizing Triple Play ~ The Junk Drawer
What happens when you take three different organizers and ask them the same organizing question? We’re not sure, but we’re about to find out. Join Mandi from Organizing Your Way, Tanna from Complete Organizing Solutions and me as we take your organizing questions and provide you with three possibly different answers on each of our own blogs. We aren’t going to discuss our answers ahead of time, so it will be interesting to see if they differ.
What we can agree on for sure, though, is that there is no right or wrong way to organize and that there are many different ways of doing so. Through this little experiment of ours, we hope to showcase what works best for each of us in various organizing scenarios. The question is, will we be the same or different? Let’s find out together.
It’s time for Organizing Triple Play!
Today’s question:
How do you organize your kitchen junk drawer?
Well first of all I have to say that I think it’s perfectly acceptable to have a junk drawer in your kitchen. Often there are just odds and sodds that need a home and a junk drawer provides a perfect space for them. However I also believe it’s possible to have an organized junk drawer. How do I manage that?
With baskets of course! Gosh bet you didn’t see that one coming did you :)
Baskets are ideal for establishing some much needed limits and boundaries in your drawer so you can see what you have without it being one big jumbled mess. I last posted about my kitchen junk drawer in August of 2007 and I just checked the picture and am amazed that almost two years later it is still organized exactly the same way. It’s definitely working for me!
Check out my post on Organizing a Junk Drawer where I take you through the process of how I select just the right baskets to give me just the right configuration. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being organized enough.
And that’s how I organize my junk drawer :)
To find out what Mandi and Tanna have to say about organizing a junk drawer, be sure to visit them at Organizing Your Way and Complete Organizing Solutions. If you have a question you’d like us to tackle next time, leave a comment with your suggestion!
Kitchen Cupboard Organization ~ Part Two
Great guesses everyone made on my last post and a couple of you were even bang on with your answers!
In this particular situation I was organizing a kitchen cabinet for my girlfriend so we needed to consider how she uses her space and organize accordingly. We all use our kitchens differently and it’s important that you set it up for what works best for you and not some ideal of what you think you have to live up to.
This is my girlfriend’s cabinet before:
It is her tea/beverage/baking/spices cabinet. Keep in mind she has a very small kitchen with limited cabinet space so she really needed to make the most of every inch possible.
We started by taking absolutely everything out of the cabinet. When we could see everything in front of us it was quick and easy to sort “like with like” and when I say that I mean all the tea together, all the spices together and all the baking supplies together. We needed to get a feel for exactly what we were dealing with. It was during this process that I found the basket gone bad way back there in the corner.
Those are just my friend’s overstock spices. To save money she buys the bags of spices and refills her jars as needed. In other words she doesn’t use these bags regularly and yet there they were taking up prime real estate on the first shelf. We went through and consolidated any duplicates but for the most part she just has a lot of spices….and she uses them all…I totally grilled her on it :) So considering that, I suggested we move up to a bigger container so she would no longer have spices spilling out everywhere. My other suggestion was to relocate the extra spices to a higher shelf and just leave the jars of spices that she does use regularly on the bottom shelf.
Next we worked with all the tea boxes. Boxes take up a lot of additional space so we got rid of the boxes and combined all the packaged tea bags into a shallow container. Now when she wants to find a tea to drink she only needs to pull out the one container to look through (this is very similar to my tea station). As my girlfriend drinks quite a bit of tea throughout the day it made sense to create her a beverage station, where it was easily accessible, on the bottom shelf on the left hand side.
I then added a wire shelf on the middle shelf to give us some much needed “extra” space. I love these wire racks. They just make so much sense in kitchen cabinets. You can literally double your storage space. I use them in my own kitchen cupboard for my dishes.
My girlfriend had all the small baking type stuff (food coloring, sprinkles, muffin liners, icing tubes, extracts, etc) scattered throughout the three shelves. We corralled all of these things into one basket to make it totally efficient for her to just pull out the basket when she’s baking and have everything right there at her fingertips. So great!
As a reminder here is what it looked like before:
And here is what her cabinet looked like when we were finished:
All of the baskets I used were just the inexpensive dollar store variety. I love how many shapes and sizes they come in making them super versatile for a project such as this.
So there you have it, a wonderfully fun way to spend a Saturday night :)
Don’t forget I’ll be putting up Mr. Linky, for Org Junkie’s Monthly Round-Up ~ Filing Cabinet Edition, tomorrow. Are you ready with your before and after pictures?
Related posts:
Organizing kitchen cabinets in only a couple of hours
Dealing with corner kitchen cabinets
Kitchen Round-Up ~ Top 12!
Update: If you don’t see your link below please feel free to add your link in the comments.
Kitchens everywhere are being organized and it really is inspiring. I hope you think so too. Thank you to all the lovely ladies that entered. To tell you the truth it was hard for me to narrow it down and chose only 10. I have no idea why I thought I’d be able to do that. I think from now on I’ll just put up a Mr. Linky and allow you to link up on your own at the end up each month. What do you think, I’m open to suggestions? For this month though I’ll stick to my original rules…except I’m making it the top 12 :)
I’ve got a few things in the works to be able to offer a prize to one lucky participant after every two months. For instance, at the end of March I will combine all the participants from February and March and then select one lucky winner via random generator to win a prize. Does that make sense? You’ll have to wait a little longer though to find out what our first prize is going to be.
So on with the show. Please visit these fabulous ladies and congratulate them on a job well done!
Stephanie’s Mommy Brain ~ loved how she worked through the PROCESS! Also you’ve got to check out her awesome donate pile.
To Have And To Hold ~ Kim was busy with her kitchen drawers ~ what a difference baskets make.
Boys Rule My Life ~ check out the very clever way Becky organized her spices, very impressive indeed.
Kisses of Sunshine ~ Gibee found all sorts of extra space after she did some purging of expired baby food. Woohoo, new found space!!
Bringing Good Home ~ Proverbs 31 was a busy, busy girl. She worked on her entire kitchen over the month and did a great job. She had her work cut out for her just busting the clutter on top of her fridge, but she did it.
Yes, they are all mine ~ check out her great storage solution for her pots and pans.
I’m a Drama Mama ~ Thea spent $45 to re-organize her kitchen to make a space that better suits her needs. Spending some time creating a plan beforehand really pays off.
Yes, and So Is My Heart ~ this mama also organized her spice cabinet and used some baskets to create some boundaries, awesome.
Creative Triplet Mom ~ this mama did a fantastic job giving her Tupperware cabinet a makeover.
It’s Finally Recess ~ Stephanie organized many of her cabinets and I love how she used wire shelving to create plenty of additional space. She also moved things around to make it easier for her daughter to help mommy out.
Simple Beauty ~ check out how Bonnie organized her pantry and in this post she also did her drawers, very cool!
With An Angel On My Shoulder ~ Ter did some space planning on her counters to make the space work better for her.
Thanks again ladies! I hope you find organizing an area a month helpful.
I’m looking foward to moving on to the dining room!
February Kitchen Round-Up ~ last chance to enter
Thank you to all of you who have already emailed me the link to your organized kitchens. So fantastic! For those of you still holding out on me, you aren’t off the hook yet. You still have time because I’m feeling generous :) Deadline to email me your link is Sunday night at 7:00 pst.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work you go!
I’ll be posting results next week some time.
Don’t forget March is dining room month!
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