Pantry perfection

HEAVEN is a packet of small labels.

Nothing fancy, just a plastic envelope of 18 blue-boarded labels such as your favourite aunt would use to indicate the jam type and date of a batch she’s just whipped up in between weeding the garden, planning her next CAE course, going to Probus, her part-time job and her volunteer work with Red Cross, Meals on Wheels or lobbying the state government via the CWA.

Anyway. This small packet of labels have just transformed my life, well my pantry from a jumble of heaven-knows-what into an organised, well less haphazard resource.

No longer the temple of doom...

Like many an Epiphany,this resulted from cooking. While looking for the plain flour to make rhubarb and ginger pies the other day, I came across five jars of white stuff, all of which could have been the desired ingredient, scattered amongst four containers of sugar, several packets of brown powder (Spice mix? Paprika? Crushed cloves?) and a few plastic boxes of various types of lentils. Suffering a temporary memory lapse, I could not recall which flour was what - apart fro the wholemeal. One would have needed the combined skills of a detective, MENSA member, sniffer dawg and food archaeologist to work out what was what. In the end I decided against making pastry with unknown ingredients and wen with store-bought, (oh the shame, the shame.)

Yesterday push came to shove and I pulled out all the jars, boxes and food containers and had a right old tidy.

Now when i open my pantry i can tell the raw sugar from brown and the star anise from the cloves. I know it won't be long before chaos reigns again, but for the moment I'm in pantry heaven.

Now, I have to tackle the cake tin drawers, but that's a whole other story.