Reducing the pantry

I finally bit the bullet and starting paring down and organizing our pantry over the weekend. I knew I needed to reduce so I've been planning our meals with an eye to using up the backlog. When we moved I basically just tossed stuff in cupboards and figured I'd deal with it later. I pulled it all out and evaluated.

{this is not all of it}

I used to keep a pretty decent stockpile of food in the house. Not anything near survivalist levels, but I could cook pretty easily without a trip to the grocery store and we probably could have lived for a month without purchasing anything new. It was nice, but there just isn't space anymore and I'll need to be more thoughtful about it (i.e. I will no longer have 10 kinds of beans and five kinds of flour on hand at all times).

Things I will continue to keep: general baking supplies, grains and legumes that we use regularly (rice, couscous, red and black lentils), canned tomatoes, small supplies of just a few kinds of nuts, etc. For the most part I'll try to buy on a smaller scale and just get what we need. It means more frequent shopping, but I can live with that.

The large pantry now looks like this...

The spices aren't going to live on that bottom shelf forever. I'm on a hunt for a spice rack that will fit the dimensions of our narrow broom closet so I can store them more efficiently (and make them easier to access). A few of the dry goods are temporary too, in that I'm not planning to replace them once they are used up. The cupboard is deep, so a lot of the containers are stacked two deep. I went with the easiest, cheapest solution and just wrote down what is in the back (non-visible) layer on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the shelf below. At least we don't have to pull everything out to check to see what we have. That empty space on the second shelf is where I've been putting dry goods that I've purchased specifically for meals in the coming week. It makes them easy to access and there's no point putting something away if I'm going to pull it out and use it within a day or two.

And the smaller cupboard is right above our coffee/tea area, so it has mostly the stuff we use in the morning.

I have one small pantry above the fridge as well, but I would have had to risk life and limb standing on the stove trying to get a photo of it. I keep our lesser used baking supplies in there.

There are still some empty spaces because I'm trying to figure out how best to use the space and we aren't fully stocked with some of our usual things right now.

I have to say it feels like a relief, not having to keep up with an inventory. And not feeling guilt over the jars of split peas that would languish there for ages because we were never in the mood for them.

I'm sure some of you are shocked by how much I still intend to keep on hand, but I promise, it's a huge reduction. For reference, here is my large cupboard in my old place, which is literally twice the size of my largest cupboard now (and I had four medium sized ones to boot!).