Spring clean and superpower your store cupboard
Spring must be on its way soon, but while we wait there are plenty of little jobs that could make life easier once the seasons change. We like to start with a well stocked larder! Organising your staples can make all the difference when you’re trying to eat a wholefood diet. Once your food storage is clean and tidy, and you’ve restocked those staples, getting your meals sorted should be altogether simpler and more efficient.
Where to start?
It’s inevitable that over the course of time, unless you’re super tidy, your food storage space will have split packs that aren’t sealed up properly, out of date food, food no one wants to eat, and missing key ingredients that you’ve forgotten to re-purchase, the list is long!
Toss it out
We’d never advocate food waste, but there are times when you’ve kept food just a little too long and you know that no one in the household is going to eat it, or it’s been hidden at the back of a cupboard for so long that it’s had its day! You can set aside, in date, canned goods that you just don’t think your tribe will eat and send to your local food bank (find yours here)
Get clean
We like to empty everything out entirely! Then have a deep clean of all shelves, baskets, storage containers (you know the ones, they’ve got honey on the handles and you always mean to give them a wipe, but never quite manage it!). Give all those sticky condiment bottles and jars a good old wipe down. We love Purdy and Figg for their gorgeously naturally scented cleaning sprays, or why not make your own? Check out these simple and natural ideas from the superlative Moral Fibres here.
Top 10
We’ve all got those top 10 ingredients that we’re always reaching for. If you’ve found that that packet of pumpkin seeds is needed on repeat and is constantly spilt all over the place why not recycle some of your glass jars and use these as storage? Make sure that your favourite ingredients are also easy to reach on those lower shelves and move your less loved ingredients up a shelf. We love to jar up ingredients and get them out of their plastic wrap, or even better to use our local refill store and avoid plastic entirely!
Keep track
Keeping track of use by dates needn’t be hard either, we love to use either a strip of masking tape and a sharpie to stick to a jar, or use a glass pencil (these are fab and we’ve been known to decorate our jars too!). It’s also great to box up ingredients that you tend to use at the same time. We have a baking box for example, and it’s filled with Baking Soda, Vanilla Powder, Yeast etc; all those smaller jars that we need to hand when we’re struck with the urge to bake!
Get nourished
Trying to stick to a more nourishing, wholefood diet? Once you’re clean and tidy make a list of those ingredients that you,
- Want to try and include more of into your diet,
- You have run out of.
Making sure that you’ve got a good stock of these wholefood base ingredients will definitely help to ensure that you can more easily create meals that will really nourish you. Abel & Cole and Ocado are both great places to start with a restock of your pantry, and they both stock your favourite Nourish snacks!
Our fave store cupboard staples include, Nourish Bites and Macaroons, lentils, all the nuts, seeds, brown rice pasta, wild rice, tinned or jarred, fish, tomatoes and pulses, herbs and spices, jars of olives and quick to grab pasta sauces. Condiments like tamari, tahini, Hunter & Gather mayo, avocado oil and Sriracha and Nojo’s miso sauce.
Want some meal inspiration? Just take a look at our recipe section and check out Ineke’s easy, family meals.