Pantry

Yesterday was a cold and dreary Saturday. Cold rainy days are not conducive to working in the yard, no matter how diligent. Last night we hoped for snow, but when it finally got cold enough (the low last night was 21F), it quit raining.

Kathy is visiting her parents in California, which, oddly enough, gave me license to tackle the pantry. I don't know what other people's pantries are like. They aren't usually featured on home tours, unless they have been emptied of everything that functionally makes them a pantry. Ours was expanded when we redid our kitchen. We added about a foot to the port side, the benefit being that we also added a wall full of shelves that increased our storage capacity by about 40%.

The problem we have had has been moths. This has been a somewhat enduring problem, almost since the day we moved in. It seems that, no matter what we do, we eventually see the little creatures flitting around in the room. I have refused to fumigate. Mostly, we try to catch and kill. The biology/ecology has to be pretty easy to understand. Moths are attracted to food and spawn. So, there must be food that they can get to. We have taken to storing opened cereals -- both the contents of boxes as well as rolled oats -- in gallon sized containers with tight lids. We have tried to put as many other things in containers as well. But, there are things that are hard to store that way -- chips, saltine crackers, and cookies, for instance.

One of the big culprits this time was a sealed container of split peas and other beans. It was so loaded with vermin that I opened it outside before I put it into the compost pile. Sort of hate to see things like that go, but when they are bad, they are bad and there is no use trying to save them. What is telling is that the inside of the container was loaded with moths, many of which had already died. So, basically, the container worked, but in the wrong direction. Somehow moths had infested the contents when it was opened and then were trapped inside. It suggests we need to figure out how to be more efficient at keeping things free when we are storing things the first time.

My strategy was to pull out everything that was on a shelf and sort through it, cleaning up as I went. That meant that the kitchen became a temporary pantry. But it allowed me to sort things and get rid of things that no longer needed to be kept. I was able to clean up and organize the spice racks and put things back in a more organized way. There are lots of some things -- cereals, mixes, soups, canned and bottled fruits, cookbooks, pasta, oils, sweeteners, and, in our case, chocolate -- that can all be grouped. But then there are odd things like seaweed for sushi and samples of jams that we have just a little of.



No pantry that we have managed has ever been totally organized. I don't think it is possible. The second law of thermodynamics applies. All systems tend to entropy and disorganization over time. The other truth is that, when you clean up one mess, you almost always make another. The pantry is clean but the kitchen has suffered some and still needs some further cleaning, which will create a mess some where else, ad nauseam.