This is the second day of my 31 Days of Living Well & Spending Zero challenge. To read all the posts in order, start with Day One or visit the Overview Page.
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I should probably warn you from the start: we are going to be doing a lot of cleaning, organizing, & inventory-ing this month! (I never said it was going to be easy!) One of our main goals for the month is to get into the habit of using what we have, rather than buying more. Another goal is to realize and appreciate all that we DO have, which is easier to do when our things are cleaned, organized, & inventoried. Sometimes all you need is a fresh look.
We will be starting off our challenge for the next few days by planning our food strategy. I don’t know about you, but the second I start to think about trying to cook with only the food in my pantry & freezer for a whole month, I start to panic. My brain shuts down and although my cupboards may in fact be brimming, all I see is “NOTHING TO EAT.” Worse, I have found that it is when I am hungry that I make my worst financial decisions. I am willing to spend more when I just want to get food in my belly as quickly as possible!
Today we are going to start by taking stock of exactly what we have on hand. If you are a coupon user or stockpiler, you probably have more than a few forgotten packages back in the nether-regions of your shelves. It’s time to take control.
Organizing your pantry and freezer always sounds much worse than it actually is. Even if you have a huge, stockpile of stuff it shouldn’t take too long to get it under control. Here is what to do:
- Clear your kitchen counters and table before you begin so you have plenty of space to work with
- Take out all the food from your pantry cupboard(s). As you remove it, put like items together. Be sure to put all OPEN items in a separate section. As you go, toss any items are no longer edible.
- Wipe down cleared shelves.
- Use this pantry inventory worksheet to write down everything you have, going section by section though the different types of items. Place items neatly back in pantry once you’ve inventoried that section. Be sure to put open items that you are currently using in a separate cupboard or on a separate shelf. Make a rule to not open a new package until the old one is finished!
{Get pantry inventory worksheets here}
Repeat this process for your freezer.
{Get your freezer inventory worksheet here}
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When was the last time you cleaned out your pantry? Were you surprised by how much food you did or didn’t have? In what way?
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TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR HOME LIFE
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is there some where to print all the print outs at once?
I organized my pantry and freezer and planned meals all in the same day since all the ingredients were fresh in my mind. I was surprised how many meals I had with such little amounts of food. Granted, my chicken spaghetti and fried rice weren’t quite like my usual recipes, but they were still good. Gonna try Princess and trouble’s everything cookies today. Hope my kids love them as much as yours do!
I do have alot of stuff but I know about all of it. My cupboards are pretty organized. But I need to start eating them or they will go bad. One of the problems I have is that I figured I shouldn’t eat gluten or much of starchy foods at all so there is plenty of that stuff still there which will only be used slowly since of the limited amount I can eat. I really want it to be gone so I can only have stuff I can actually eat on a regular basis.
Since I do live in Switzerland where food and cleaning items etc are really expensive I need to have a huge stock which I buy on my monthly trips to Germany (so much cheaper) so I’ll never be that girl with only one bottle of bodylotion in her cupboard.