Kitchen Upkeep!

How things change! Since my last update, my husband has landed a job and I have quit mine. I am now a full-time mother and homemaker proper! It didn't take long for me to launch headlong into long-neglected housework and today is no exception.

How often you need to do this really depends on how you run your kitchen. Since I've been quite lackadaisical, this badly needed to be done. I basically took all of my non-refrigerated goods out this morning and put back only what was still good. Come to think of it, everyone probably could stand to do this maybe yearly. Even the best housekeeper may end up with a three-year-old box of brownie mix in the depths of her cupboard.

My house is a bi-level, and the kitchen is pretty small as kitchens go. I don't have a lot of cupboard space. There are two shelved closets in the hallway, and one of them is my pantry. There I keep dry goods, cans, etc. In my kitchen, I keep baking goods (from rice to vinegar to baking soda to cane sugar) and the simplest common things I have more often, like my trusty jar of Ovaltine. Down in the cellar, I have a shelf on which I keep things like extra boxes of cereal that I bought on sale and the cases of ramen that my husband persists in buying periodically for himself. I cleaned up the kitchen this morning, getting everything off the floor for once and giving it a good scrub, so I had plenty of room in which to pull everything out of the cupboards and pantry and go through it all. Wow. I ended up dumping easily half my inventory.

I hate putting so much stuff into the garbage. I live on a four acre lot, and I have designated a small area for compost. You don't even need to have four acres to maintain a compost bin. You can do it on two, even one acre, depending on what you compost. Meat is not recommended as it attracts carnivores. Most dry cereals, pastas, and vegetable leftovers can be composted. I filled a container with old potato flakes, ancient bread crumbs, aged pastas and similar, and my young son carried it out to the compost and emptied it out for me.

Hopefully this will help me keep from buying things that we already have, that I just plain couldn't find!