Love Your Fridge Again
It’s time to purge your overstuffed fridge.
In the summer, the fridge is where food goes to die. With the warmer weather comes fresh produce, plus the kids are home all day, and it’s BBQ season; no wonder our fridges are jammed! It can be a bit much, and all of the visual clutter stresses me out. Plus, when the fridge is so full that you can’t even see what you have, things start to go bad. I’m sorry, arugula, I meant to eat you! Luckily, there is a better way.
Stop stuffing your fridge
The fridge isn’t meant to be stuffed to its gills. Fun fact, it works better when the air can circulate around the food! But beyond refrigerator mechanics, I find that a lot of us use our fridge as a junk-drawer for food. And that’s got to stop. Because when you keep adding more, you lose sight (literally) of what’s in there. Which leads to buying even more. And then the food goes bad. And now you have a mess to clean. And you need to buy more (again).
At the root of the problem, the simple fact is that we are buying too much. What we need instead is to get into a routine of buying only what you need from week to week, so that you can spend less on groceries, stop dumping your money into the compost in the form of slimy lettuce, and won’t waste time wandering the grocery store because you have a plan for what you are buying! But first, let’s clean out that fridge.
A good old fridge clean out
The ultimate goal here is to be able to see everything in the fridge with a glance; no moving heads of cauliflower to find the yogurt that (dang!) expired two weeks ago. But to prevent that from happening (again), we need to start fresh.
1. Open your fridge, and ask yourself: What’s bothering me? Is it the stuffed produce drawers? Is there one shelf that’s jammed, and one that’s empty because nothing fits? Are there too many condiments falling out of the door of the fridge? What are the problem areas of your fridge?
This is your chance to finally move the shelves around, and do whatever it takes to love your fridge again. Do you always forget about the produce in the drawers? Then store your soda water in there, and put the produce on the shelf. There is no “right” way to organize your food if it works for you.
2. Next, look for what needs to go. Yes, get rid of anything that is expired or rotten. But also toss that mint chutney that you bought to try, and hated. Why leave it in the fridge, only to toss it when it expires? Look for multiples of things, and see what can go or be consolidated into one container (five BBQ sauces? really?). As you are checking each item for expiry dates, it’s a good time to give everything a wipe down.
3. It’s time to create food zones. Now that you’ve identified problem areas and shuffled things around in your fridge, whip out that label maker and make it official. I love labeling shelves in the pantry and fridge, because it takes a bit of work to get it all organized! So if a well-meaning family member puts things away wrong, they ruin the whole system! Labels mean no guessing where things go, and no spats about fridge organizing.
Your zones will be different from mine, and that’s totally okay. Create a system that works for you; I even have a friend with a cheese shelf! I do recommend a leftover-spot, though. We used to just shove our leftovers wherever, and they’d often go uneaten because we’d forget about them. But since we love leftovers, we created a little “home” for them in the fridge. Now we can easily see if there’s something quick to reheat for lunch the next day.
Refilling the fridge
Before you head to the grocery store all willy nilly, keep the below tips in mind to help keep the fridge nice and tidy - and as waste-free as possible!
Consider clear bins. You know I’m not one who needs a bin for everything. (In fact, bins often make our clutter problem worse!) But they really do work if you are fighting with a poorly designed fridge. They help keep food visible, and I also love them for keeping certain foods separate, like oh, peaches. That way, if one goes bad and gets all mushy, the juice isn’t now covering the whole inside of the fridge or other food.
Clear, stackable square or rectangle containers are amazing. They fit better and take up less space than circular containers, you can see what’s inside, and stacking saves space, too. Hooray!
Try to buy less. Those Costco-sized bags of lemons may be cheaper per lemon than if you buy them individually, but if half the bag goes bad, you aren’t saving anything. You also need to deal with a packed fridge and have to clean mouldy citrus from the drawers. Ew. Instead, I want to challenge you to buy only what you need for the week. After a few months, see if it makes a difference in your budget and how much food goes to waste.
Once you have a tidy fridge where you can find everything at a glance, you are bound to waste less. Start the week with a full fridge, and end it with an empty one where you can see what needs to be restocked. It’s kind of like Goldilocks: not too much, not too little, but juuust right.