After living in our home for nearly a year, I’ve discovered what works in our kitchen and what doesn’t. Specifically storage-wise. One can never have enough kitchen storage. Not only that, it has to work ergonomically and practically on a day-to-day basis.
For several years now, our kids have been helping to unload the dishwasher as part of their daily chores. Each of them has a certain section of dishes in the dishwasher to put away. Whitney deals with the bottom section since most of those items are ceramic and in harder to reach places. Brighton puts away all the utensils while Blythe is responsible for the plastics and dishes in the upper dishwasher section. Until recently, most of those plastics were stored in the cupboard above our dishwasher, which was a little inconvenient for her to reach. All she needed to do was pull over a stool to put them away. Do you think that an eleven year old would take the time to do that?
Usually, she’d simply leave them stacked on the counter. So, it would either be up to me to put them away in the cupboard or mistakenly back in the dishwasher because I’d inevitably think they were dirty.
Finally this past week, I decided to switch their position to a lower more accessible storage area. Now she cannot complain about not being able to reach the cupboard.
They are now at floor level in the large bottom drawer of our kitchen island. Ideally, I’d love to replace all the plastics with glass containers like these eventually but these work for now.
Prior to the kitchen storage reorganization, I was storing our onions, garlic and larger bags of rice in the drawer. Since there were less items to access and also it was mostly Matt and me who would get them out, it made sense to put them up higher. I had also come across a great tip from this bloghttps://www.theyummylife.com/store_onions_garlic_shallots that has made such a huge difference with the shelf life of our onions and garlic! If you have ever struggled to use those food items before they started sprouting weird growths, I highly recommend storing them in paper bags!
The trickiest part of that was a) finding paper bags and b) punching holes in the bags I ended up using. I used a normal single-hole punch to do the edges of the bags and then resorted to stabbing holes with a screwdriver or something. As long as there are holes for the food to breathe a bit, looks don’t matter.
And speaking of food and looks, I definitely do think it makes a difference when food is presented in a pleasing way. But I also don’t want it to take too long to prepare. One easy but eye-catching way I serve our kiddos food is in a platter (pictured above). It gets veggies and fruits into them in a non-threatening way and I will also put some other goodies in there occasionally. Brighton will often ask me to prepare one for them on movie night, which also happens to be tonight. We hit a little road bump with our movie night tradition last week though and have decided that it should be a monthly event now.
This weekend we are hosting another houseguest named Bonita. She needed a babysitter while her foster is away. So far, she has not enjoyed the company of the kittens, hissing and growling at them and almost attacking one today. Blythe joked that maybe she was mad that her birthday, which was yesterday, was forgotten. Happy Belated Birthday, Bonita!
It also happens to be my sister’s birthday today and tomorrow we’ll finally be able to enjoy a family bbq together. Summer colds have kept us apart and we will also be keeping Bonita separated from the Doritos boys to avoid catastrophe!
Happy weekend to you, wherever you may be!
