Clean Your Pantry! Pantry Makeover Challenge

This Mama Cooks is having a great contest to clean and organize your pantry. I decided to take the challenge. My pantry is so small and I can never find anything because it gets jammed up and then things go to the back and forget finding stuff because it gets lost in the back. I am sure a lot of people understand that.

I decided to look in the pantry at least twice a month and look what I have and inventory it. I take out things I have and don't want and donate it a local charity. We have two in town that I like because I think they do good work. I also got a cool gadget called a Cansolidator. It actually holds tons of cans and you can rotate them so you use the older ones first.

Besides that I tried to put the same type of food together. I put pastas on one shelf with tomato sauce. I put veggies in one place as well. I also added shelves in the back that I can place cans on top so I can see what's behind there. I also added baskets on one shelf to hold loose items like gravy mixes, popcorn, chips and snacks. It makes it much easier to find because they are in the basket. I am also trying to make sure I only buy foods that I will use. I like to keep extra food in the pantry so I decided to have one shelf of canned goods for emergencies. I don't touch that until I know that they are a few months old and then I restock it.


Here is my pantry before. Look at the willy-nillynes:

This is my pantry now. Look how nice it looks!

Thanks to This Mama Cooks and the Canned Food Alliance who runs Mealtime.org for motivating me to clean my pantry. I also found some food that I am donating to the Community Table this week. I hope to have more to donate next month as well.