Spring cleaning: The pantry

[I wrote this post back in early April. Totally forgot to finish it. As well as many of the projects I'd planned. It was going to be a once-a-week month-long series. Hah. Did you know it kept snowing until early May?! It totally did. I just about lost my s*&^. I did start menu planning, though, after the snow melted!]

So I decided to start some "spring cleaning" projects to help get things organized around the house. The first one I tackled was cleaning out my pantry, which is basically just a big wooden closet in my kitchen. Six shelves, the tallest one too high for me to reach without a stool. I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here are the "after" shots. Just imagine that before, I was afraid things would fall out on me when I opened the doors. Not so, now:

The only two shelves that are remotely full now are the top shelf (spices, seasonings, oils, and general baking and grilling supplies) and the bottom shelf (pastas, rice, condiments, and some overflow for sugar and flour. I threw out two huge black bags of stale or expired food. My knee-jerk reaction seeing the semi-empty shelves was "I need to refill this pantry!" After hauling the trash downstairs, though, I am feeling that if I do that, I'll just be back doing this same thing six months or a year from now, because if I can't see the food because there is too much in there, I don't use it up in time. I have a bad habit of buying too much staple food when it's on a good sale because "it keeps for such a long time." No, it actually doesn't, if you never use it! So. My new goal is to not buy any staples unless we've run out of them. No new soups, no new barbecue sauces, no more pastas, unless we're all out. And I'm hoping to get back into dinner menu planning, because I always do much better with cooking at home when I have a written plan.