Kitchen Principles

When I was in second grade, we had a pair of tricky spelling words: Principal and principle.

My teacher was so smart -- she came up with a great way to remember that the Principal who was in charge of the school was our Pal, just like the last three letters of the word.

I don't really recall her ever explaining the meaning of the other word that sounded the same but ended differently. But it must not be a pal, right, or it would reflect its friendliness in its spelling!

Oh, how wrong I was!!! These days, I feel like principles are indeed my good buddies! In a world full of almost too many choices and options, principles help me differentiate, determine, decide, declare, and dedicate myself to a simpler, purer ways of living. Principles help me avoid chaos, organize action, and satisfy specific needs. POWER, right there, dude, in those oh-so-friendly principles!!!

This applies to all sorts of areas of life, but today's discussion will apply to life in the Kitchen. This is where I spend approximately 83.2 percent of my time. The rest of the time I am in the car or asleep. Oh, except for the .003 percent that I get to be in my mom-cave blogging!!!

Since I spend such a large portion of my time in the kitchen, I decided awhile ago to organize my kitchen according to principles -- but first I had to figure out what those are!

The first one to make the list has to do with shopping smart and having a pantry I can shop from and avoid waste by rotating wisely:

STORE WHAT YOU EAT and EAT WHAT YOU STORE.

Nice, huh? I didn't make it up. I heard it at a food storage class and I grasped onto it and let it guide me through lots of tough choices. Like, should I buy tons of those pre-packed, dehydrated meals "just in case?" Well, since we don't eat them regularly, it doesn't fit in my principle. I have found a few items that we like and use regularly (powdered milk for baking; freeze-dried yogurt bits - yummy snack!) so we do have some of those infamous #10 cans. But we rotate them -- mostly -- not waiting for their expiration dates to come around...

When there are case-lot sales (do those happen outside of Utah?) I used to buy various canned veggies. But I noticed as the year or two went by that we didn't use them very often. I attempted to fit them into our diets a little more -- using them in soups and what-not -- but overall, I decided not to stock up so heavily next time on those, because we just ended up donating them to the food bank as their expiration dates drew near. Not that donating to the food bank is an unworthy cause! However, I have to balance it with my own food bank!

Some items don't have a very long shelf-life at all, so I also determined that I needed to store the ingredients for items like granola bars and graham crackers and tortilla chips so that if I ever can't get buy them items themselves, at least I can make substitutes.

Curious to know what the next Kitchen Principle might be? Join me tomorrow!