Weddingbee Blog

There’s something about suddenly having cupboards that look like this:

Matching!!

Full of all the stuff we registered for, and received thanks to our awesome family and friends, that made me want to attack the rest of the kitchen. Mainly our pantry drawer and our spices.

See, we keep some of our spices in these magnet containers that I made. Supplies: Lee Valley watchmakers’ tins and rare earth magnets, IKEA magnet board, glue, spice & herb labels from Safeway. But some spices live in here:

In the middle shelf of our pantry drawer. These spices are still in the bottles from Safeway. Some of them are spices that react badly to light—I don’t keep paprika in the glass-topped tins any more because it fades both flavour—and colour-wise so fast. Some I just haven’t decanted yet. Some are too big for the tins, like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg. To add to that, more spices also live here:

In those black baskets hanging off the lower shelf of our pantry cupboard. Those are the spices that come in bags and generally get decanted into the tins. The tins won’t take a whole bag of most things, so the extras get clipped shut and stuffed in a Zip Loc.

So if that kitchen tour hasn’t lost you, our herbs and spices are stored in 3 different places! It was time to do something about that, and the mish-mash of stuff in our pantry drawer.

I save all my canning jars, pasta sauce jars, curry sauce jars, anything glass jar, because they might be useful one day. Today they were finally useful. I got out all my jars, and all the 2-part canning lids I’ve saved. Now when you’re actually canning things you don’t want to use the little disc part of the lid more than once, but for sealing stuff like sugar or walnuts they’re just fine. I sorted through the jars and recycled all those that wouldn’t take a standard canning lid. Then I took all the lightly-used lids I had and gave them a quick sand:

Then out came the chalkboard paint. We have a can of the liquid stuff, because the one time I bought a spray can it wouldn’t spray. I gave each lid a good coating of chalkboard and let it dry for a couple days. Then I started the fun part: decanting!

I also sorted through the spices, and put more onto the magnet board as well as my spare tins so if I buy something new, it’s easy to put it up.

After a few days the chalkboard lids were ready to write on, and all of a sudden my pantry drawer looks like this:

I didn’t decant some things, like the yeast and baking powder - they’re fine by me in their little jars. The sugar I kept in the two big canisters because a 1 cup measure fits into those.

This project not only tidied up the pantry, it made the storage room look better because I used up the last of the 1L canning jars that were hanging out in a box in there, plus the pile of small jam-sized jars and lids that had taken over the top shelf of the pantry cupboard. Not to mention recycling all the jars that didn’t take the right size lids!

I was using regular chalk (you can see the box beside the Panko and Triscuits) but I might try to find a liquid chalk pen, because my writing looks like a 5-year old’s with the regular stuff.

Has your wedding inspired any nesting?