Elizabeth Ann's Recipe Box: How to Organize Your Pantry

Happy Sunday!

Today, I wanted to share a couple of tips to help you organize your pantry and some examples of how I organized ours!

1. Put items where you can see them. By using clear bins and containers, it is easy to see where everything is located.

2. Organize shelves or sections by baking/cooking, snack foods, etc. I have each shelf organized into baking, spices, flour/sugar, breakfast, snacks, etc.

3. Use bins or trays to help keep a lot of little things in the same organized place (like sprinkles or food coloring)

4. Tiered shelving is a huge help when organizing spices!

And here is how I put the above suggestions into action:

Early in our marriage, the cabinets that hold all of my cooking supplies were completely disorganized. I would go buy walnuts at the store and realize later that I already had a bag of them behind M&Ms, morsels, and almonds.

At one point I got frustrated and totally re-organized the cabinets.

The most helpful organizing tool at that point was the tiered shelf that I put my spices on. I have a beautiful rotating spice rack but it only holds 30 spices and I need plenty more than that to cook in my kitchen. . .

So I bought a tiered shelf and put my spices in alphabetical order.

This alphabetical system has made my life so much easier when cooking and baking or determining when I need to buy more spices. (At some point, I'll buy spice jars that all look the same but until then, this system works perfectly for me)

In that same organizing session, I put all of my decorating supplies on the top shelf, flour and sugar on one shelf, vinegar and baking supplies on one shelf, etc.

But two years later, I decided it was time to take it up a notch!

So after a couple of trips to the Container Store. . .

I feel pretty good about how our pantry is organized now!! :-)

I bought little bins to hold candy that I bake with, store bought icing, and food coloring and sprinkles.

This shelf holds all of my different baking supplies and different types of vinegar and oils.

These jars are wonderful to keep nuts and morsels in and I just put a label on the top of each with a description of what is inside!

This is our drink shelf with a few extra spices that won't fit on our spice shelf. The clear plastic tea bag holder is a wonderful way to see all of the different teas that I have! And these clear baskets hold all of our K-cups (yes, I do also have the K-Cup carousel but clearly, I can't stop buying different K-cups at the store. . . even when we don't have room for them!)

The next shelf holds all of the different flours, grits, cornmeal, etc. I have pretty white canisters that I keep on the counter from William Sonoma with my flour, sugar, coffee, and tea but obviously when you bake a lot there are many different types of flour you need to have in stock!