Taking Stock - What's In Your Pantry?

When creating menus I tend to get on certain tracks and get lost on them. Things happen and sometimes a couple of meals a week get changed. All this often creates an overstock in my pantry. That's why occasionally I take stock of what is in the pantry and create meals directly from there.

Cleaning and organizing your pantry is important to do whether you do it monthly, quarterly or just annually. If you are buying in bulk it's even more important to do.

Where is your pantry?  Your pantry could be in your cupboards, your freezer, a seperate room on shelves or even in containers stacked in a corner or under your bed.  Your pantry(ies) is/are where ever you store your food in the living space you reside in. 

Great care should be taken to understand the proper ways to store your food and the conditions needed to preserve it so that it is not wasted. A person is prudent to understand what containers are best to use in the storage of your food.  If you are a person who has a great understanding of the nutritional content of your foods and choose to purchase the most nutrient dense foods possible this is even more important.  It's a shame to spend the extra money to purchase nutrient dense and/or organic foods and then store them in containers that will contaminate them in some other way, i.e. plastics.

As you place items on your pantry shelf be sure that you write the date that you placed them there.  This will help you to use the oldest items first.  This week when I go through the shelves, take things, down, wipe and shelves and put them back I'll also write down on a master list just what I have on those shelves, how much and the date the items went on the shelf.

Because it is 'cleaning and organizing' week for the pantries I'll take my master list and create my weekly menu from what is already available there.  I will continue to make my meal plans for the week from these master lists until I have used up any and all items that I've had on the shelf for more than three months.  Then I can start over!

I hope this idea has been a blessing to you!