A messy fridge can promptly turn into a massive problem. From unattended leftovers to missing ingredients, a chaotic fridge can pose a danger to your health and budget. The positive aspect is that you can smoothly avoid these problems by using a few simple organizational strategies. By keeping your fridge organized, you can truly make the most of your available space and keep everything fresh and ready to eat.
Clean and Sort
The first step to organizing a fridge is to clean and sort all of your fridge items. Clear everything out of the refrigerator, verifying expiration dates, mold, or other signs of spoiled food as you go. Remove anything that is past the expiration date or looks filthy. For leftovers or food in plastic storage containers, if you’re not particularly sure how long it has been in there, throw it out. When it comes to your food, it’s best to err on the side of caution.
With everything out of the fridge, find some time to deep-clean your fridge’s interiors. Taking hot, soapy water or a mild bleach solution, wipe down and dry all surfaces, including inside drawers and bins. In this regard, you can start with a clean fridge for your new organization system.
Label Everything
The subsequent move to an organized fridge is to make a register or inventory of how long your food has been there. Though conceding plenty of pre-packaged foods will come along with an expiration or sell-by date on them, for fruits and veggies or food that you carry home or that is leftover from meals, you have to have a system to keep track of when it was added to the fridge and when it will be necessary to throw it out.
One very easy tip is to use a dry-erase marker to write the dates of meals and takeout on the container. You could implement the same thing for other perishables, using the inside of your fridge. By keeping track of both when you brought them home and when they need to be used, you can better make sure that you are using up the groceries you buy before they spoil and avoid eating leftovers that can make you ill.
Use Containers
Always keeping loose items clean and tidy in a fridge can be tedious, like fruits, vegetables, and even small condiment jars. To decrease clutter and always know and see that you have everything you’re looking for at hand, think about using plenty of clear storage bins to group loose items together. Look into investing in some quality reusable food storage containers with tight-fitting lids. This can actually help you to store food safely and shorten waste by reusing your containers frequently.
You can equally apply a dry-erase marker on the bins and storage containers to keep track of the dates things were bought. Employing bins and storage containers in your fridge will effectively create space for larger items elsewhere and more easily track expiration dates of perishable items.
Develop a System
As you begin replacing items, it’s necessary to develop a system for storing everything. This has two benefits: first, that you will be able to see where things are, and second, that it can make your food last longer and make it safer. By way of illustration, understand that certain items should be kept in certain places.
Meat should always be kept on the lowest shelf to stop dripping and contaminating other food. Indeed, never store milk in the fridge door – it can spoil quickly once exposed to warm air many times. You can as well separate your fruits and vegetables, and put to use trays for messy items to keep spills.
Plan Ahead
When your fridge is clean and organized, the most essential thing you can perform is to make a plan to keep it that way. Even the most organized fridge will have to be cleaned, and old items are thrown out every once in a while. Assess generating a cleaning schedule to be sure that your fridge stays organized. As an illustration, you could choose a day of the week or month to go through everything, rotating and updating your fresh produce, and wiping down fridge surfaces. By doing this persistently, you can avoid the awful deep-clean and purge of your fridge (and freezer), a job very few are happy with.
By minding these very easy pointers, you can keep your fridge clean and organized week after week with less effort than you would never have thought possible!
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