Kitchen cupboard hack

I don’t know what possessed me to attack our kitchen cupboards last weekend but something did.   I can’t even claim that I had bought a new labelling machine and had found a determination to use it because we have had it for years.  Saturday morning though and Mr B came downstairs to find the contents of our kitchen cupboards all over the table.

And when I say the contents of the kitchen cupboards I don’t mean nicely organised bags, tubs and boxes.  What I mean is multiple bags of stuff in varying sizes that up until that point had been playing cupboard Jenga for years.  Open the door and prepare to have a bag of flour land on your feed, or a bag of sugar cascading all over the coffee machine.  It was a joy every time.

Except it wasn’t.

Not only was it not a joy it was expensive.  I couldn’t find things so would buy more whenever a recipe called for something.   So now I have eight bags of almonds (I am not even kidding), four bags of hazelnuts and five bottles of peppermint essence.   Far from efficient and far from economical.

So we have now gone from this:

To this:

All in a morning, and all for relatively little expense.   We also went from this:

To this:

We have a pile of them from various take away deliveries (that is a whole different cupboard and story) but I wanted to make sure they were all clean so I ordered new ones from Amazon, in varying sizes.

This is the link to the boxes I used:

Plastic takeaway boxes 

I found the small 500ml tubs were perfect for a 250g bag of nuts, pine nuts, seeds etc.   750ml were useful for bigger bags of sugar and the 1000L tubs perfect for flour that comes in bigger bags.    Then you just need to decant your ingredients into the boxes.  You might want to use a Sharpie to write best before dates on the bottom too.

In the midst of all this, probably whilst drinking cup of coffee 75 I began thinking about how maybe we needed to replace the whole kitchen, or maybe even just update one or two of the kitchen units.   I spent a happy half an hour browsing the Kitchen Warehouse site, mentally spending a few thousand Pounds in the process before I realised that it was lunchtime and nobody could actually get into the kitchen to make food so I best crack on.

We already had the labelling machine but you can pick these up quite cheaply if you want to, either online or if you are quick I have just heard that Aldi have them for less than £20 on their “central aisle of all the things you never knew you needed”.    But I found that labelling the shorter end meant I could then then stack them all in the cupboards with the label facing out to show me what the contents are.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning and now I know I don’t need to buy red lentils or pine nuts for a very long time.

Or peppermint essence.