Time to get your kitchen ready for holiday baking. For me, the kitchen takes the longest to really deep clean and organize; there is just so much stuff in there. Get some boxes together so you can box things up as you clean, and then take then to the thrift store and the food bank to donate.
The best way to deep clean your kitchen is to empty out every drawer and cabinet, one at a time. Take everything out of the cabinet and put it on the kitchen table, if there are things you can live without, put them in the donate box. Once everything is out of the cabinet wash it down, inside and out then put everything back, keeping only what you love.
When it comes to dishes, bowls, glasses and coffee mugs, somehow I always wind up with more than will neatly fit into my cabinet. If this is a problem at your house, time to donate those extra coffee mugs. Do you still have sippy cups and toddler silverware and your baby is sixteen? As you clean out the cabinets, be ruthless, the less clutter the easier it is to find things. I have so many bowls, plastic bowls, glass bowls, metal bowls, and they all fit neatly in the cabinet, if you take the stack out and make sure you put the one in your hand into the right place in the stack, but I don’t always do that. Usually that cabinet looks like a bomb exploded, it’s time to get rid some of those bowls. I keep whining to myself that they all serve different purposes, but really, how many bowls does one household need.
Plastic storage containers are taking over the world, or at least my kitchen. I have so many and somehow always manage to buy more. I don’t need them, certainly not in the quantities I have. If plastic is taking over your kitchen pull it all out and match up every container with a lid, if you have extra lids or extra containers, they need to go in the thrift store box. I love that now you can buy Pyrex glass containers will lids that seal, I plan to slowly replace all my plastic with glass but in the meantime I need to organize the plastic. I have all those containers because I do lots of baking at the holidays and need storage containers, but the rest of the year they just sit in the cabinet taking up space. This year when I pack away the Christmas decorations I’m packing away all that plastic too.
Now your appliances. How many do you need? How many do you use? Get rid of the ones that are broken or are only used once a year. They are not worth the space they are taking up. Utensils are the same, I have enough wooden spoons and spatulas for several households, time to purge!
Make your kitchen clean and clutter free, it will make all that Christmas cooking and baking easier.