Pantry Clean-up

Beware....these are not attractive pictures -- on many levels.  I'll explain.  I'm sure I'm not the only woman on the face of the planet that has let her pantry go.  One gets busy.  One goes grocery shopping, throws items into pantry, pantry gets messy, woman goes grocery shopping again, throws more items into pantry and on and on it goes.  Then before you know it, you don't know what is in the pantry at all.  It looks like there is a lot of food but there's never anything to cook.  UGGHH!  It had become unbearable for me.  Not to mention if someone in my family asked where something was. Imagine the following:

 "Mom, where's the peanut butter?" 

 "In the tall pantry dear"

  Hearing sounds of cans and such falling and the subsequent "I can't find it")  Well, enough was enough.

I just want to ask, do you think cornstarch is still okay when it says "best used by September 2007?"  Yeah, that's what I found in my pantry.  Alright, let's just get it out in the open.  That's embarrassing.  I am ashamed to say that I threw A LOT of expired things away.  How does that happen?  Well, after a couple of hours.  I have a completely new pantry.

That feels MUCH better.  After I cleaned and organized, I made a list of pantry items that I need to get.  Like, maybe, CORNSTARCH?  My goal is to have a  well stocked pantry with items that I USE!  I don't want to run out of peanut butter, flour, sugar. You know what I'm talking about.  My ultimate goal is to run an organized kitchen -- to be able to cook from the pantry and hey, be able to find things.

Lastly,  I'm not proud of these photos.  Not only because they show what a mess things were but because I have some work to do on taking the silly photos.  They look a tad out of focus. well, more than a tad.  However, because I'm simply doing it, I decided to post them anyways.  There would have been a time that I would have let that keep me from posting.  I'll improve on my photo taking , but for now, I'm simply doing it!