Wednesday 1 February 2023

The Food Cupboard ... and Guess What I Forgot to Do?


The Food Cupboard as she will from now on be known, the star of my kitchen and one of my favourite pieces of furniture.

She is actually a Welsh Bread and Cheese Cupboard, and for those of you who haven't read about her before you can read more about her on this post on my old blog.   And here is a slightly more expensive looking one that I found online.  Anyway to move on, I never know whether to call this my larder, my pantry, my store cupboard or what, and giving her the full title seems silly.  So from now on she is simply The Food Cupboard.

What do you call your food storage area/cupboard?


I showed this photo on the 'mince pie' post the other day, but I'll put it on again as it shows clearly what the top section looked like until sort out day.  Lots of foods thrown in slightly willy nilly and the things at the front of the top shelf hiding all my big storage jars and putting me off struggling to get them down.

I'd call it organised chaos ... but it's not actually that organised!!


The left-hand side of the bottom cupboard ...


... oops I had started emptying it before I remembered I was supposed to be taking photos!!

The things on the floor were from the gap in the photo higher up.


These are the contents of just the left-hand side of the lower cupboard.  You can see now why I am sometimes known as the Tetris Queen!!  Wow ... just how did all that fit into half of the cupboard?


The other half was somewhat easier to empty as it contained baskets of food, the top two held all sorts of sauces and jars and the bottom wicker one was full of pasta and nuts.

I got all the food out a section at a time, checked the dates on everything and put anything that had a 2024 or beyond date to one side.  

All this was done in fits and starts with lots of rests in between, so in all this sorting and organising took me the full day.  By the time I finished it was too dark to take any photos, as the light in my kitchen is awkward at the best of times and not good for photographing inside anything at night.


So here are the photographs I took the next day.

The top cupboard now holds all the foods that I need to eat first, anything with a Best Before date sometime in 2023 or earlier ... and as you can see this actually goes back to 2020 in the case of  some the homemade jams and marmalades.


And hiding behind the lower doors are all the foods with a date of 2024 and onwards.


At the front are my big storage jars, this is so much safer than me struggling to getting them down from the top shelf of the top cupboard, and of course now that they are more easily accessible I should use them more.  Behind them are all the canned foods, jars and everything else that is later dated.

The basket still holds all the pasta with the newest being on the bottom and the ones to be used first at the top.  While I was doing all this I looked through the little drawer unit that sits to the right of the food cupboard for the tins of potatoes that I knew were in there ...and found a whole drawer of pasta.  So a s well as being the Tetris Queen it seems I am also the Pasta Buying Queen!!

It took me a whole day to do it all, but it was so worth it.  I keep peeking into the properly organised cupboards while I'm waiting for the kettle to boil for a cup of coffee ... yes I'm sad like that.  😄

And what did I forget to do ... yep, I was supposed to be making an inventory!!

Oh well, as least my mind has been refreshed and I know what I have to menu plan from for the next few weeks months.


Sue xx





36 comments:

  1. I'm not surprised it took you all day but definitely time well spent, your cupboards look fantastic, no wonder you keep admiring the contents. After reading your freezer organisation post the other day I reminded Jon that he used to write an inventory, too and he was inspired to do that yesterday - no more huffing and puffing when he cooks the tea!
    I love your Welsh bread and cheese cupboard, our edibles are divided between a Victorian wall-mounted cupboard (the sauce & pickle cupboard) and a 19th Century Hungarian cupboard with a glazed front (the food & spice cupboard). Here's ours: https://vintagevixon.blogspot.com/2020/11/our-lockdown-kitchen-makeover.html xxx

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    1. That antique Hungarian cupboard is gorgeous, well all your kitchen is really, and that sink was a fantastic find. I also went down a bit of a rabbit hole and went back and read the post about your home being in a magazine. And I have to say I love the sound of a 'sauce and pickle cupboard'.

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  2. As always, I covet your Welsh cupboard but sadly have nowhere it could go . . .
    Our food stores are in the kitchen cupboards with a little overflow on some shelves in the boxroom where the freezer lives. I don't think it has a name.
    Your organising looks fab 😉.

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    1. It is very easy to squeeze it anywhere ... not that I'm letting you have her of course ... as it actually is in two halves. I've often though that if I moved somewhere even smaller I would set a worktop on the lower cupboard and use the top one elsewhere if necessary.

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  3. I just have "the kitchen cupboards" - but the organisation and listing activity is always called "The Pantry Sort"

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    1. It's funny how many words for food cupboards are so interchangeable, and it's not like it's in different areas of the UK either. My Nana called her kitchen cabinet her pantry, and two streets away her sister called her pantry, The Larder.

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  4. Looks lovely, I would be peeking in too! Yep, I have a spreadsheet for my pantry under the stairs, sad that I am

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    1. Oh no, that just sounds very organised. Anything that makes life simpler and means that food doesn't get wasted is good in my book. :-)

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  5. Goodness, what a lot of everything you have! You will be OK for the zombie apocalypse!!

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    1. I'll have to let John Gray know that he can head to mine if ever the zombies come. ;-)

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  6. It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever - outside and in. I agree - it is amazing just how much one can fit in with a bit of organising and, yes, I do the same - take refreshing little peeks every now and again and each time I go out to the freezer, I feel extra happy!
    It's lovely!
    xx

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    1. She's beautiful isn't she, sometimes you just know that you have to have something. It's the one thing that I couldn't grab in a fire and that I would be really upset to lose. In fact I can imagine myself shouting at the firemen to douse the kitchen cupboard with water NOW!!

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  7. Mine's called the Food Cupboard too! Keith made it from a solid oak wardrobe we got for a couple of quid an an auction when we first came to Wales. It was used in one of the bedrooms as a bookcase then, with "useful bits" in the bottom drawers. Then he decided it would be a food cupboard and made up a door from an old solid wood headboard I think it was, using some old oak from a headboard (auction bargain) and solid brass handle and Anglo-Saxon looking brass hinges (car boot sale bargain). You are well stocked up anyway. Pasta is something I don't often eat - I am the Rice Queen!

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    1. Now that sounds amazing ... and you know what I am going to say don't you!! We need to see a blog post about your Food Cupboard ... as soon as possible.

      I love rice too, it's a very close second to pasta, perhaps that's why there is so much pasta actually I have been eating rice quite a lot just recently, so maybe I should just call myself a Carb Queen. :-)

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  8. I enjoyed this post and seeing the finished look of your food cupboard. We call ours a pantry. And I had to giggle at you forgetting to do inventory. That's something I would absolutely do! :) But, at least you know what to eat first! Well done!

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    1. It's funny I love all the descriptive words for kitchen food storage cupboards ... perhaps that's why I have never settled on one, I love them all.

      Thank you, I enjoyed doing this sort out and posting about it, my foot and back didn't though. But I'm just about getting over that so I really do think it was worth doing.

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  9. What a feat of organisation. I would be peeping in at all that tidiness often too!
    Alison in Wales x

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  10. My husband calls our larder the Tardis and says he will only go in if a rescue team is on standby . I would like to say he exaggerated but there is some truth in what he is saying.

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    1. Haha ... I love it. Tie a rope to his waist and send him in. ;-)

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  11. Great idea to separate out and store all the longest dated things separately. Looks like you won't need to buy any storecupboard stuff for a while :-))

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    1. It's going to make life a lot easier and stop me having to keep reaching for my reading glasses to see which is the oldest item to use first. Yes, I am going to try really hard not to shop for store-cupboard stuff until I actually run out of something.

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  12. I have cupboard envy! You are so well stocked I think anyone passing might mistake you for the local co-op or maybe the posher Booths with all that homemade jam and unless you have a large family hidden in there that we don't know about I imagine you won't have to shop for a number of months.

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    1. I think shopping will just be for fresh things that I really need. It would be so wrong to shop for anything else really, even bargains. I don't need them and I certainly don't have the space to store anything else.

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  13. We have ours stored in an Ikea unit in the spare bedroom, it is known as " The Shop " , not half as lovely as your cupboard but it is organised to a degree, one section predominantly designated to pickled onions.

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    1. Oooh, I love the sound of a designated pickled onion area. I only have four jars so they just have to live with everything else ... but they are good friends with the pickled beetroot. ;-)

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  14. Good work! You might not have made a full inventory list, but you can at least use your photos to figure out most of what you have in your cupboards. Blog photos to the rescue! Mary

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    1. Blog photos are a brilliant resource for being able to check up on anything you do aren't they. They have to come to my rescue on many occasion. :-)

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  15. I have “The food cupboard” (one of everything either on use or to be opened) and “The overflow cupboard” (back up stores). Regards June

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    1. Now that sounds very sensible and a really good way of being able to make up a shopping list really easily. Perhaps I'll get to that one day when I've chomped my way through all this excess.

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  16. This looks much like my pantry cupboard! Come on over and help me organize my mess, lol!

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    1. Now you know you just want to do it all by yourself don't you. It's a good time of year to check up on what you have in stock and have a bit of a Spring Clean, as you seem to be doing just now while you have all that snow outside.

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  17. My food storage cabinet is called my pantry. But I have never had so much food stored in there as you have now in your food cupboard! And we used to be a family of seven!
    That's a lot for one person to go through, Sue!

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    1. The ironic thing is when my boys were small and we were living had to mouth the cupboards were bare an now that it's just me there is so much. There's a definite reasoning behind people buying too much, and it's usually linked to not having enough at some point. I will get through it over time and nothing will be wasted.

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  18. Nicely done. You have everything well organized.

    God bless.

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    1. Thank you, a bit of organisation is good for the soul isn't it. :-)

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