Drawers: they’re not just for silverware anymore

A couple of weeks ago a much-loved inspirator issued a challenge: organize something in your house. Well, slap my rear and call me Suzy, that was right up my alley! Better yet, I had already begun the arduous task of rearranging my kitchen cabinets.

I started with the glassware cabinet. I won’t bore you with the “befores” and “afters,” but I think it’s kind of humorous to see all of the “durings;” we have some pretty funky stuff up there (comes with the territory when your husband was a bartender for 18 years).

 

The Smirnoff glasses have little baseball cut-outs in the bottoms - cute!

 

But the transformation I’m most proud of is what I did with the main cabinet where I kept the spices. I took ALL of the silverware out of the drawer right below it (and we’re working with 25 + year old, builder-grade cabinets, and this drawer was extra long… loaded down with cutlery these three plus years, I felt like the fool thing was going to collapse every time I opened it!) and transferred my spices there!

  

Now they don’t get lost in the cabinet, where there is “dead” space you can’t really see into (and boy do tiny little bottles like to get lost in there). I can’t tell you how many duplicates I found.

Then, I took a couple of those polka-dotted glasses and some coffee mugs that don’t go with our color scheme any more, and I used them to store the forks and spoons in the cabinet! Genius, I tell you, pure genius.

Ode on a Grecian Canning Jar

Well maybe not a Grecian canning jar… but man-o-man do I love a good canning jar – so many uses. For instance, you can use them to cook and store your own beans. Cook up a one-pound bag of beans – black, pinto, kidney, garbanzo, you name it – and it’ll yield you three pint jars of salt-free, protein-packed beanage you can (should!) keep in the freezer. That’s about the same volume you’d get if you bought three cans of beans at the grocery store. It takes a while to soak and cook the beans, but the cost difference and health benefits alone (we’re a sodium-watching household) make it worth our while.

Or, the next time you make pancakes, make extra batches of the dry ingredients and store them in pint jars. Again, freezer is best, just because you don’t know how well the different ingredients might play together; after all, there are no preservatives in my favorite pancake recipe.

“I like coffee with my pancakes,” you might say. No problem! A pint jar is perfect for storing coffee beans in an airtight container, right inside your decorative Cafe canister.

“I don’t have time for pancakes and coffee! I have a pantload of tomatoes from my garden that I have to figure out what to do with.” Well look no further. Make up a big batch of tomato sauce and store it in canning jars!

I bet you Keats didn’t love his Grecian urn half as much as I love my jars.