Monday, November 8, 2010

categorized kitchen


Husband recently asked me if there's anything I'd like to have for my birthday. I happened to be browsing my stacks of cookbooks at the time, so my immediate response was: The Food Network. I love to cook and watch other people cook, so I told him he could pay for the TV package required for us to get that channel.

Then, just last night, I was browsing through the guide and for some weird reason, I clicked on a Food Network show and guess what?! We already HAVE the Food Network. I checked with Husband and he hadn't subscribed already for my birthday, so it turns out we've had this channel since moving here in May! Do you know how many wonderful shows I've missed? My DVR is now scheduled to record approximately 8 million shows in the upcoming weeks.

This brings me to one of my favourite chefs — Michael Smith of Chef at Home. His MO is cooking without a recipe and he helps teach viewers how to combine flavours in the best ways, so of course he has a fantastically stocked pantry of every herb, spice, grain, pasta, fruit and veggie you can think of.


I love that everything is organized in a jar with a label. It helps keep everything fresh, not to mention perfectly categorized and easy to find.

So I want to do this in my own kitchen, but I don't want to go out and spend the money on tons of jars, so I'm starting to wash out pasta sauce jars of different sizes and shapes for this project.

While I work on this, tell me, what's your favourite way to organize?

8 comments:

  1. We use old mason jars for all of our small cooking supplies, and an old crock for our flour that sits on the counter.

    PS, check out Fresh with Anna Olson, that's one of my favorites.

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  2. And I forgot to mention, does Chef at Home remind you of Aidan from Sex & the City too?!

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  3. I love this idea. I use canisters for flour and white and brown sugar, but everything else stays in its original packaging - spices, pasta, rice, etc. I would love to have nice glass jars for everything. When we got married we did our centrepieces in glass mason jars, and gave them all away. Now I wish I'd kept them for this very reason! Adding to Christmas list - JARS!

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  4. For spices, etc. I use all products from Epicure Selections (www.epicureselections.com) so everything is already neatly organized. In fact, I threw out at least 5 spice jars this weekend alone, and had I known someone was looking for them, I would have gladly given them away!

    We have quite a lot of cupboard space in our kitchen but our place is up for sale so my requirement for our next house is that I have as much (or more) space for my spices as we currently do, and a pantry large enough that I can organize all our "extras" into glass jars as well.

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  5. We also use old Mason Jars, and pasta jars. I love Chef At Home's kitchen!! Also, since you've got a little one, once he's on solids, if you plan on using store bought foods like Gerber, save those too. They're great for ground spices.

    PS - Don't cross The Food Network off your wishlist just yet! You may possibly just be getting it as part of the "Fall-Free View" from Eastlink. Every fall we always get a bundle of chanells for free to preview and then they go away on December 1st. It's very sad. Hopefully you just have it for good though!

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  6. Can I help you organize?????

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  7. I have tons of Mason jars you can have when you come to NB.

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