Kitchen Pantry & Spice Organization

Posted on November 11, 2020

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It’s month two of my home organization series with The Container Store (see my October post here) and I am taking on the most used space in the entire house…the kitchen. Kitchen Pantry & Spice Organization has to be one of the most daunting, but also one of the most anticipated projects that I will take on. We actually have a fair amount of space in our kitchen for storage and organization, but all that really means is that we end up accumulating extra stuff, which leads to clutter.

Each year, we host Thanksgiving, which means that my family graciously brings ingredients to make all of those delicious Thanksgiving goodies, resulting in a lot of excess. My first project was going through all of our baking supplies and consolidating everything into it’s respective container. Next, we discarded anything that was expired or almost empty. Finally, we went through our spice rack and edited everything down to what we truly use!

Check out the details of my Kitchen Pantry & Spice Organization below!

SPICE ORGANIZATION

As I mentioned, we host Thanksgiving, so that is usually when extra ingredients and spices end up at my house, don’t get fully used and then accumulate. Our families usually come for an extended period of time, usually about a week. That means that not only are we cooking Thanksgiving dinner, but we are also menu planning for 5-7 days. As a family, we have a running list of ingredients and spices we will need for each meal. To be on the safe side, extra ingredients usually find their way here, even if we don’t need them. This year, I went through my entire spice rack, consolidated the spices we had duplicates of and put each spice into a specifically labelled container for easy access. Who really needs 5 jars of cinnamon…which is exactly how many I had. Now, I have all of my spices, both for baking and for cooking, organized, and anything I had extra went into a less used area as “back stock”.

BAKING SUPPLIES

While I don’t bake on a regular basis, during Thanksgiving, we pull out all of the stops. My mother-in-law pretty much makes everything from scratch, including Pumpkin Pie and Apple Crisp! Extra flour, sugar, and spices inevitably end up on the list and make their way to my house just to be safe. A lot of the reason for the extra ingredients was because I usually couldn’t give an accurate account of what I had because my pantry was such a mess. Now, I have clearly labelled bins that show me exactly how much I have of each ingredient. I can be sure that my ingredients are fresh and I can also easily see when I need to re-stock. I even have bins for pancake and waffle mix. Have you ever tried to measure waffle mix poured directly from the plastic bag within the box? I have…and it usually means I will have a mess all over my countertop. Now, I can just reach my measuring cup into my bin and then level off the mix with the leveler that is attached to the lid of my bin, which has literally been life changing!