The pantry door swung open on Tuesday morning and a bag of rice slid off the second shelf, bounced off my foot and split across the floor. Pepper was there before I could bend down. Lila, eating cereal at the counter, said, "That happens a lot," in the flat voice of a six-year-old stating a known fact. She wasn't wrong. It was the third thing to fall out of that cabinet in a week.
Our pantry is not a walk-in. It's a single tall cabinet beside the refrigerator, original to the 1958 kitchen, with five fixed wooden shelves about sixteen inches deep. It's a lovely old piece of carpentry. It is also deep enough that things disappear in the back for months. So during the slow middle of summer, with Lila on break and the afternoons too hot to do much outside, I took everything out and started over.
First, I sorted by how we actually cook
I used to organize the pantry by type of food: cans together, boxes together. It looked tidy for a day. But we don't cook by category, we cook by meal, and I was opening three shelves to make one dinner.
Now each shelf has a job:
- Top shelf: backstock and things we rarely use. Extra canned tomatoes from the Costco run, the big bag of sugar, holiday baking supplies.
- Second shelf: baking. Flour, sugar, oats, baking soda, chocolate chips, vanilla.
- Third shelf, eye level: weeknight dinners. Pasta, rice, beans, broth, canned tomatoes, a jar of peanut butter.
- Fourth shelf: breakfast and snacks. Cereal, crackers, granola bars, and a basket Lila can reach.
- Bottom shelf: potatoes and onions in separate open baskets, plus Pepper's food in a lidded bin.
Bins that pull out like drawers
Deep shelves need bins. I bought eight clear plastic bins with handles that fit the depth of the shelves. Now nothing gets lost at the back, because the back is just the back of a bin, and the whole bin slides forward. One bin holds all the open snack bags. Another holds packets: taco seasoning, gravy mix, yeast. The canned goods stand in two long, narrow bins so I can see every label from above.
The bins were about $48 altogether. That was the only real purchase.
Jars only where they earn their keep
I don't decant everything. I tried that once, and spent a whole Saturday pouring things into matching containers, only to find I couldn't remember what kind of flour was in which jar or when it expired.
Now I only use airtight jars for things that need protection, and in a South Carolina July that's a real concern. Humidity turns brown sugar into a brick and crackers soft in a day, and once, two summers ago, we had pantry moths in an open bag of cornmeal. So these live in jars:
- Flour, cornmeal and grits
- Brown sugar, with a small clay disk tucked in
- Oats and rice
- Whatever crackers are open
I cut the cooking directions and the expiration date off the bag and tape them to the back of the jar. That small habit has saved me a lot of guessing.
Keeping it neat, mostly
The "mostly" in the title is not modesty. The pantry looks great on Sunday and slightly worse every day after. A few things keep it from sliding all the way back to chaos:
- New in back, old in front. When groceries come home from Food Lion or the farmers market, the older box moves forward. This is the single most useful rule.
- A list on the inside of the door. A small notepad hangs on a hook, and when someone uses the last of something, they write it down. Ben is surprisingly good at this. Lila adds "marshmallows" to it whether or not we're out.
- A five-minute reset on Sunday evening. Push the bins back, toss empty boxes, wipe up crumbs. I do it while the kettle heats.
- A "use this first" bin. Anything close to its date or already open goes in a small bin at eye level, which shapes what we eat that week.
The Costco problem
Our Costco trip to Columbia every couple of months is where the system usually breaks. Three jars of peanut butter, a twelve-pack of canned tomatoes and a giant box of granola bars do not fit in one cabinet. I've stopped trying. Bulk backstock now goes into a lidded bin in the hall closet, and only one of each item lives in the pantry at a time. When it's used up, the next one comes in from the closet and goes on the list.
It's been three weeks now. On Tuesday the pantry door opened and nothing fell out, and Lila, without looking up from her cereal, said, "Huh." I'll take that as a review.
