Consolidate Your Grocery Bags!

I just made this handy dandy grocery bag holder and I am quite pleased with it. I used to have all my grocery bags stuffed on a bottom kitchen cupboard shelf which was fine but they took up the entire shelf. So, I took one of those plastic Cascade Capsule boxes that you get at Sam’s, Costco or BJs., turned it upside down and cut a hole in it. I taped around the hole so the jagged edge from my not-so-smooth cutting did not rip the bags as I pulled them out. Then I filled the box with my grocery bags using the little door on top where you get your capsules out. Check it out. It holds plenty of bags and takes up minimal space. I also just happen to like anything square in shape. Round containers waste so much space. Ahh, it’s nice to live a simple life where the little things can make you so happy.

This could also be done using a plastic coffee can or a coffee can with a plastic lid or an oatmeal container or, well, just about anything. First consider the shelf space that you want your bag container to fit and then start thinking of your recyclables that would work in that space.

Kitchen Corners

Unlike my husband, (who gets so frustrated at trying to find things every time I move them), I am always open to storing things in a different way or rearranging things to improve efficiency, workability and storage. Today my poor husband is sick so I probably should have spared him but I got the bug to reorganize a few kitchen cupboards and went to work on them.

Kitchen corners have often been a source of frustration for me. It seems that things just disappear in the back of a corner especially if you are 5’3” or under with regard to those upper corner cupboards. I have found that if I put the right things in a trouble corner cupboard then I don’t get so frustrated with the corner space. I had been putting large cereal boxes on my top corner shelf but that wasn’t working well, (despite my neat label on the shelf that read “CEREAL”). The box that I wanted would often get pushed to the back and I would play the “Get it From the Back Game” by grabbing a pair of high heels, scooting a chair over to stand on or trying to grab the box with salad tongs. I pulled a muscle once playing the Get it From the Back Game. The box won. I’m sure I will miss that game but I think that storing my large bags of flour and sugar will work better. I will only need to get to the bags when my canisters are running low.

My kitchen is like most kitchens in that the bottom corner cupboard has a large two shelf lazy susan in it which is supposed to be a storage solution to the Get it From the Back Game. I tried putting baking supplies on the lazy susan but I often still lost things in the back. We have all done it. When you have a heavy load on a corner lazy susan and you get a good spin going, off pops all your little things like muffin liners, vanilla, etc. I think the use of lazy susans is limited. However, I moved the canned items, including a couple of bulk canned items that I leave in boxes from Sam’s Club, to my corner lazy susan and it is working better already. So the answer for corners I think is to store the least-used items there and those larger items. If you are vertically challenged as I am only put rarely used large items in that top corner shelf unless you want to play the Get if From the Back Game. Wish my husband good luck when he looks for his canned soup that (which he shouldn’t be eating anyway), has been moved.

Organizing the Spices of Life

Professional organizers will always cushion their advice with, "different organizational systems work for different people so you just have to find the one that is right for you." I will buy that nicety for SOME things but in some instances there are systems of keeping order that are superior to others. For instance, how DO you find your seasonings and spices if they are not in alphabetical order? This is one area in which friends enjoy poking fun at me but, really, HOW do you find your spices if they are not in order? I like mine stored on a lazy susan in alpha order. I have seen the various spice organizational mechanisms like the little shelves or the SPINEY counter-top things. Neither seems to be better than my simple lazy susan alpha system. If you put your spices on those little stair-like shelves you can see only the labels on the jars in the very front row and in the process of removing one to use it is nearly impossible to not knock down others. I don't get those shelves at all. The spice spinners that come with their own jars could work if they had space for ALL the spices but I have yet to see one that does. Whenever I pass anew spice spinner in a store I always stop to debunk it's usefulness by thinking of spices that are missing and/or would not have a place on it. (Yes, it's an obsession this organizing thing. It's what I do.) If you use only the spices that come with the spinners and you are not an adventurous cook and you know that you will never branch out to try a new spice such as tumeric, (which is almost never on one of those spinners), then I suppose it could work, but limiting your seasoning to 12 jars just sounds depressing to me. I had hope for those drawer spice organizers when they first came out but the most spice jars they can hold is 24 and you need to have a huge drawer for all 24 jars to fit. My kitchen does happen to have a gigantic drawer but if I used it for spices I would have to find somewhere else to put my knives and cooking utensils or silverware and even then my spice collection is 39 right now. So, even those drawer organizers would be limiting at some point. The 11” lazy susan fits in standard upper cupboards and will easily accommodate 13 spice jars side-by-side and if you have those little rectangle tins, more will fit. You can also stack the little short ones and store the refills in the middle of the circle. Wiggle room can be made by zig-zagging the jars, increasing the space for more than 13 jars on a susan making it expandable to grow as your culinary skills grow. It is clearly superior!

Extraordinary Uses for Binders

Binders can organize so many things. If you have some shelf real estate to plop them on they are so accessible and have so much potential. Of course there are obvious uses for binders. I use several for recipes. I have one binder labeled “Culinary Experiments” (recipes I have not yet tried but intend to), another “Culinary Collections” (the tried and true recipes), and one for “Desserts and Breads.” I don’t get bogged down with details like cutting and pasting recipes. I just slide cardstock in clear protector sheets and put the cut out recipes on top so they are easier to read. I don’t paste or anything, that way if my Culinary Experiment recipe is a success I can easily slide it out and move it to the Culinary Collections binder.

I used to enjoy browsing through home magazines (who has time for that now with three kids?) and I would always tear out a picture of something that I really liked. I have a “Home Ideas” binder that includes several categories of my magazine tear outs. The tabs include “Architecture,” “Gardening,” “Decorating Projects,” and “Gift Ideas.” The binder came in very handy when we moved into our untouched 1970s house that was in terrible need of a new kitchen. I had collected pictures of kitchens that I liked for years and even though I didn’t know exactly why I liked the pictures, it gave the cabinet makers a place to start when trying to figure out what we wanted.

The best housewarming gift ever given to us was a binder labeled Menus. Several years ago we moved from the east coast to the Midwest when I was 8 months pregnant. A friend of ours drove around our new town before we arrived and gathered take out menus. Not only did she put the menus in clear protector sheets in a binder that was cleverly decorated in old photos but she even categorized the menus by food type: Italian, Chinese, Sandwich Places, etc. This binder is a permanent fixture in our house.

My most recent binder creation of a couple years ago is labeled “Greeting Cards.” In the front I have a sheet that lists everyone’s birthdays by month and I included greeting card holidays like mother’s day and father’s day by month. Behind that sheet I have 17 clear protector pocket sheets. Each clear pocket is labeled with my handy dandy label maker at the top right hand corner. The first twelve are labeled the months of the year, then there are clear pockets for blank cards, generic birthday cards (those that aren’t for anyone specific), get well cars, sympathy cards and thank you cards. So, you know how sometimes you will be looking for a birthday card for Amy and as you are reading them you come across the perfect card for Jim? Well now I can get the perfect card that I found for Jim even though his birthday isn’t for another 10 months because I have somewhere to put it that I know I will find it again. I’ll put it in my October pocket. For some reason card shopping is one of the most challenging things to shop for with my kids. They have no patience for me to pick out the perfect card and if they aren’t restrained in a shopping cart they love to run down the card isle and pull them out and destroy any card organization the store has in place.

I use binders when we go home to the east coast to visit family. I print out the phone numbers to our friends and family out east as well as favorite restaurants that we want to visit and phone numbers of our neighbors in case we would need to check up on something back home. I include maps, activities for kids and the hours of the various establishments we hope to visit and I keep our receipts in one of the clear protector sheets with a tally sheet so we can stay within our vacation budget.

I know there are many more ways to use a simple binder with clear protector sheets to organize various things. I have several empty binders waiting to be filled.

Extraordinary Uses for Bread Tabs!

While I am putting off completing my December menu I thought I would tell you about the extraordinary uses of bread tabs. Yep, those little plastic things that you find on the end of your store bought loaf of bread. They are actually quite useful and I don’t mean for bag cinching. Just yesterday I used a bread tab to help scrub my sink and to scrape three cookie sheets clean of chocolate chip cookie crusts. They are great at getting hard to get globs of who-knows-what that is stuck to nearly anything without scratching the surface and drastically cutting down on scrub time. Bread tabs are much like those plastic scrapers that you receive from Pampered Chef with their stoneware. I only have one of those Pampered Chef scrapers but I keep several bread tabs in my sponge pullout sink drawer thingy (whatever it’s called). The bread tabs aren’t sturdy enough to last years but you come by so many of them that they are easily replaceable. You can also use them to scrape out bar soap gook from your soap dish in the bathroom.

My All Time Favorite Kitchen Tool

Actually, I am not sure that it could be considered an actual “kitchen tool” but it certainly is a tool in my kitchen. I bet my sister-in-law had no idea how valuable this simple Christmas gift of years past would be to me. Ever since I opened up the gift package several years ago it has sat on my kitchen counter and I probably look at it twenty + times a day. It’s a simple recipe holder with a glass front and oak base which matches the oak floors in my kitchen. I believe the sturdy materials add to its value since I have seen many recipe holders made of plastic. I’m not certain a plastic recipe holder could hold the heavy hard-backed books that I sometimes put in mine and the plastic may not clean up as well as the glass in mine. I put my menu in the recipe holder and reference it throughout the day. I also put to-do lists behind the glass as well as any recipe that I am currently fixing and there are adjustments on it for thick stacks so I can pull all my recipes for the month and stack them neatly behind the front menu. Not only is it handy but it keeps everything neat looking and for someone like myself who does not like kitchen clutter of any kind on my counters it is a perfect fit.