What is a Pantry?

A pantry is a room or cupboard where beverages, food, (sometimes) dishes, household cleaning products, linens, or provisions are stored within a home or office. Food and beverage pantries serve in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen.

What is Pantry Prep?

I’ve talked about Meal Prep and Recipe Prep. To my mind, that just leaves Pantry Prep. What is Pantry Prep? Pantry Prep, to me, is going through the items currently found in your pantry and making sure you have what you need to make your family’s favorite meals.

The Importance of Your Pantry

Stop right now and think about your pantry. Do you know what is in your pantry? If you had to, could you grab what you needed from your pantry to make a satisfying meal? If you had unexpected guests drop by close to mealtime, could you extend your planned meal to cover these guests? Maybe it’s time to organize and restock your pantry!

Organizing Your Pantry

There are dozens of shelf organizers that you can use to make your pantry easier to work with. Start with defining how much space you have to work with. In my cabinets, I discovered that my spices are the hardest to keep organized.

Large Items

To show you what I mean, recently I put my groceries away only to find that I now had 3 bottles of Ketchup, 2 bottles of Balsamic Vinegar, and 2 bottles of Molasses!

If I’d had any kind of organization, I could have avoided that. Since then, I have tried to rotate things on my pantry shelves, putting the newest items in the back and the older items in the front. If you have the room, try to separate things into zones. Keep your staples like sugar, flour, etc., all together.

If you notice in the After Photo, you can see labels on several of the containers. That’s an easy way to keep track of what’s in the container exactly. Bread Flour and All-Purpose Flour look the same but are not interchangeable! Also, on the various containers of pasta, I labeled the container with how much a serving was. Using containers for the pasta, instead of the original box made it much easier to see if I needed more.

Stocking Your Pantry

Most cookbooks that are for beginners tend to have a section on what the author recommends for the pantry. In searching Pinterest, I found several pantry checklists. I’ve started a board of Pantry ideas where I’m collecting these ideas and others.

Make a list!

The format you use is completely up to you. I can’t tell you what will work best for you. Here are a couple of ideas and where I found them.

I do have a few thoughts about this subject to pass along to you.

1. Make sure you can access the checklist easily whether you’re at home or out shopping. It doesn’t do you any good if it’s at home while you’re out shopping!
2. Make it a habit to update your checklist regularly. Not doing this led to the aforementioned multiple bottles of ketchup, vinegar, and molasses.
3. If you download one of the ones that I pinned on my Pinterest board, be sure to adapt it to your needs. (I’ve currently got a bottle of Fish Sauce in my pantry that I don’t remember why I added it!)

Take a moment to follow me on Pinterest. My next post in this series will focus on why we’re doing this. I promise you, there’s definitely a reason!