I enjoy having control over my environment. There is something incredibly satisfying about keeping things neat and tidy and ordered.

This being said, I’m NOT neatest or tidiest person. But I think there are many reasons to strive to be so. One of those reasons being that neat and tidy environments are usually nice places to work.

My kitchen is probably the most under utilised rooms in my house precisely because it lacks a sense of order.  I think if it was a bit more ordered, I’d use it more and I’d save myself a lot of money.

So, with this in mind, last Saturday I completed a food audit – much to the amusement of my room mate –

So here’s my step by misstep guide on how I cleaned my Kitchen – Let me preface this by saying – this is not one of those I’m a cleaning organising guru blog things. If you want real advice on how to do this… you may need to read something else. Any way here’s what I did.

STEP 1

Take all my food out and sort it into sweet and savoury. I think I did this because I wanted to see which ingredients went together and maybe it would jog my brain into thinking of stuff I could make. I didn’t mind this strategy, I thought it helped me realise what I could put together from what I had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STEP 2

Chuck out expired products. Self explanatory and reduces the amount of stuff that you have to deal with.

STEP 3

Pair up doubles. I had a lot of spices that needed to go into spice containers – I’ve decided that i would like another spice rack thingy, something a lot easier to clean, maybe less ‘spinny’ (I have one of those rotating spice racks). I also realised I have a lot of nuts, like pecans and walnuts and pine nuts and 3 kinds of almonds. Also I have rice wine…. I don’t even know what to use rice wine for…

STEP 4

I planned what to do with things that were about to expire and things that I had an abundance of. So guess who had pecans for snacks everyday this week!  By the way did you know that nuts have really high fat content?? I’m sure it’s good fat, but far out! It’s a lot higher than I thought especially in pecans.

Isn’t my lunchbox AWESOME! I really don’t use it as much as I should!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also made a plan for how to use a whole bunch of other stuff that was in my pantry; Then I spent Monday night cooking up a storm and made myself some broccoli pasta and protein cookies.

So now I have fewer almonds, fewer pine nuts, my Chobani and pears won’t go to waste and I’m eating a morning AND  afternoon snack which should make my personal trainer happy because she keeps banging on abut how I should be planning my snacks.

The last thing I did before I put everything away was to write everything I had down on an excel spreadsheet along with quantities I had. Then I pretty much put every thing back in the cupboard.

Storing food is such a massive pain in the arse. You want everything to be visible and seen so it gets used up, but then I realised I’ve accumulated so much stuff there just isn’t the space to do that! So in the end everything is back in the cupboard more or less where it was last time.

But I’ve learned a few things –

• It’s easier to be neat and tidy if you have LESS STUFF – so now that I know what food I have,  the plan is to COOK IT then EAT IT and make sure I only BUY when I have to.
• I should plan my shopping based on what I already have in the cupboard.
• I should review/audit my food regularly to maintain tidiness
• I have to buy some sort of container to to keep my sugar and flour together because using micropore tape that I steal from Jeremy’s house to close up the packaging is not a permanent solution.

Anyway, it may not sound (or look) like much, but to me it’s personal growth!