Get Organized!

I like to think of getting organized as investing in your self and your family. You invest some of your time and money now in order to save greater amounts of time and money in the future*. Getting organized can also reduce stress levels by providing an extra degree of certainty in your life. As far as nutrition, my organizational tips revolve around recipes and food storage.

Recipes
Start by making your own cookbook in a three ring binder. As you find recipes on the web or in your existing cookbooks that you like, add them to your personal cookbook. Categorize them within index tabs so that you quickly find what you need (use existing cookbooks for ideas on how to do this). We plan our dinners once a week, taking out the recipes that we are going to use and putting them in the front of the notebook in the order that we’ll use them. In preparing our menu, in addition to seeking to eat tasty, healthful meals, we also seek to:

• When possible, we buy local foods that are in-season. We use this guide to Idaho produce to help determine what’s in season.


• Plan meals to have leftovers. Most one-dish meals make great lunches, while it is easy to cook extra lean meat to reheat for use with breakfast or lunch. We try not to have leftovers for dinner, assuring that we have one fresh cooked meal every day.

Food Storage
For most of my life food storage meant throwing a bunch of canned food in a cabinet. But as we’ve reduced the amount of processed food that we eat (yes, even canned peas are processed food, though not as highly processed as a TV dinner), we’ve had to rethink how we store food. Being just the two of us, it doesn’t always make sense to buy large packages of staples, and since we want to enjoy our meals, we likewise can’t always justify buying packages of nuts or spices that we won’t use often. Our solution is to buy food and spices in bulk from a store like Winco or Fred Meyer whenever possible.

We store dried fruit, nuts and similar items in disposable food containers, as they are inexpensive, stack easily and use space very efficiently. We purchased empty magnetic spice containers for storing most herbs and spices. They stick to the side of our refrigerator, so it’s easy to find what is needed and to determine when it is time to buy more (these don’t work so well for finely ground spices (especially cinnamon), which end up getting stuck between the lid and container, making it all but impossible to reopen the container). And buying spices in bulk will save you a ton of money. We recently paid 8 cents for bay leaves that cost more than $2 prepackaged, and 27 cents for enough oregano to equal two $3 jars! The same goes for nuts and dried fruit – bulk offers considerable savings over buying pre-packaged.

There are tons of other ways to organize aspects of your life to save space, time, money and reduce stress. These are just a few tips that make it easier for us to live a healthier, happier lifestyle.

*Remember that the money in your wallet is worth than the wages that you earn because you’ve already paid payroll taxes on it. Most of us need to earn around $1.25 to $1.50 before taxes to replace each dollar that is in our wallet. You can learn more about this concept and other frugal living tips at websites like www.thepennypinchergazette.com.