Peek into Liz's Pantry

This is obviously not a recipe, but there is certainly plenty of food!  I just wanted to give you a little peek into the pantry to show you how I organize things. 

The picture above is part of what we refer to as "the office."  First, a little background about our home:  it's approximately 700 square feet.  We are a family of five.  There are three small bedrooms, and "the office" is our smallest room--10'x9'.  It's our no-kid zone.  Part of the room is obviously an extension of the kitchen, and this is how we organize it!  Non-perishables on the left, kitchen appliances on the right.  What you can't see on the far right, bottom shelf, is a couple 25+lb. bags of things like flour, milk powder, whole white wheat, rice and beans.

The picture below shows our food storage buckets--this is where the contents of those large bags go when they're open, to keep the creepies out.  Again, we have little space, so we store many of them right under our kitchen table.  The shelf doubles as the bench our children sit on.

Now, I'm aware this isn't all of our food.  The storage places I don't have pictured are:  

1. the fridge.  If you opened my fridge right now, you would see cheese, eggs, plain yogurt, condiments, cold water, grapefruits and tangerines.  My husband would open it and say there is nothing to eat.  This is frequently the picture of our fridge, with minor alterations (like the type of cheese or what kinds of fruits and veggies are in the crisper drawer).  I regularly stock what I need to make what we eat. I stock real food ingredients.  Not ready-made food.

2. the freezer.  No one ever wants anyone to see inside their freezers--right?? Maybe one day I'll show you, but even if I do, the warm air will get to the packaging so fast that everything will be all fogged up.  So just check the list in my kitchen page--that will tell you what's inside my deep freezer.  Inside the fridge-top freezer I keep make-ahead meals and snacks, or open packages of fruits, veggies, butter, cheese, etc.

3. the baking shelves.  I do want to show you these someday, but they're so chaotic right now and all my canisters are empty.  Basically, there's a spice shelf (with all my spices and seasonings...), and a couple shelves holding small containers of different kinds of flour, leavening agents, fats (shortening/oil), pasta, etc.  Every cook organizes this differently; you don't really need to see how I do it, do you?