ElaineB's Profile

Geez, you all have fridges the size of Rhode Island. Due to an acute lack of space, I can't even keep quite a few things that suggest you should refrigerate after opening. Mustard for instance, jams; they're preserves for pete's sake. Also from October to May we have what we call the beer annex - a box on the balcony. Since it rarely gets below freezing we use this area to store things that don't fit in the fridge and that aren't particularly temperature sensitive . Especially around Christmas.
What I always have in the fridge -
Cheese: selected from French, English, Italian, Dutch
Butter
Milk
Plain yogurt
eggs (strictly speaking you can keep these out of the fridge)
carrots and celery
berries in season or homemade applesauce
Fresh veg.
Leftovers
a jar of anchovies in olive oil
and a handful of annoying condiments that I do believe when they say refrigerate after opening (though I refuse to consume the whole bottle in one week!)

If our kitchen weren't so warm I could keep the cheese and butter out, but not having to wear four layers of clothes indoors in the winter is a vast improvement over the last kitchen we had.
My mother in law had a coolish pantry and a root cellar, lucky woman.

I use one of those plastic organizer trays they sell for use in desk drawers to keep my small utensils in order. Kind of like a cutlery tray. The stuff I keep in drawers is the wrong shape for muffin tins.

I have several ladles in different sizes and use them constantly.
Things I don't use
- strawberry huller (fingers work just fine)
- potato ricer - a real waste of space, but then I like lumps in my mashed potatoes
- Long handled Chinese device for lifting things out of hot oil. I gave up frying anything in oil after I nearly burned down my mother's kitchen.
- Chinese cleaver. This used to be in constant use til I married someone with a really nice set of kitchen knives. In fact I had a set of cleavers, the big one being Bert, and the littlest one Beaver, (boy that dates me!). Still, there are some things that I only trust the cleaver with (whacking great big butternut squashes down to size!)

People
Don't throw cookbooks away.
Give them to a local thrift store, charity rummage sale, what have you. Then some other poor fool like me can buy them!

My husband is the true hoarder. I tried to get rid of some of the cookbooks and he wouldn't let me. Ok, so I've probably got over fifty. Some are reference works that I use all the time. Some are souvenirs (I've got one in Portuguese, and a dictionary to decipher it with). Some were gifts, some I read for inspiration. Some are older than I am. At least a handful functioned as survival manuals when I moved to Tokyo and tried to cook and eat like a native. They're as much an example of social history as they are culinary reference. But the ones I treasure most are the recipes I've gleaned from family members' hand written cards, notebooks, etc. and put into a database.
Hey, I'm a librarian. Databases and books are what I do. Oh I did get rid of one annoying one from a famous restaurant because the recipes just didn't work. They were not tested, and things like the proportions of sugar to liquid for a syrup were flat out wrong. Sheesh.

Well I got as far as taking a few pictures before the battery died on the camera! Actually the phtography exercise proved to me how cramped our space is, because I had to sit on the counter in order to take a picture of the cupboards. Even then, it doesn't all fit in.
Didn't have time to clean, empty, purge, but have resolved to clear out all the old spices, especially the ones for Indian food that I love, but my husband doesn't like; dried beans that are too old to be used and plastic containers that have lost their tops. Then maybe stuff won't fall on my head when I open the spice cupboard. Now all I need is a rainy weekend when I'm not working. . .