I’ll start this post with my hands in the air; I am probably not the most domestic food blogger who ever lived. However, lately something made me start organising our food cupboards and fridge to see what was actually in there. It all started a few weeks ago when we had to buy cereal canisters for rabbit food as one of ours ate their way into a large food sack causing a telltale trail of kibble from the conservatory back to the rabbit hutch. Then the lovely people at Fresha sent me a sample and I started storing fruit and veg in the food bags. (FYI, Fresha bags are a wonderful invention which keep your fruit and vegetables at their best for way longer, they’re also reusable and seem to stop my kitchen smelling of banana).

So I basically realised that if you keep your cupboards more organised you’re more aware of what you have in and you stop yourself buying the same thing with every shopping trip. You also minimise the risk of food spoiling by getting damp (or hungry pets getting into stuff). The more food you buy and don’t eat the worse it is for the environment and the more money you waste spending money on food that goes in the bin

So here are my best learned food storage rules so far:

1. Proper storage of fruit and vegetables is your friend. Fruit and vegetable storage bags, banana trees and fruit bowls all help keep things more fresh. Make sure you don’t hang onto rotting things as they impact on the freshness of your surrounding produce.

2. Keeping dried foods in plastic boxes and jars looks much tidier, helps you to store more in your cupboards and stops you repeatedly buying spaghetti when you don’t actually need to.

3. Store your cakes and biscuits separately. Cakes cause biscuits to soften and biscuits cause cakes to harden. My heart actually aches when I have to discard cake as I love it so much.

4. Keep a cheese box. This stops you from finding random old bits of cheese in the back of your fridge but it also prevents that cheese pong you get when you have been to the deli (or in my case this weekend the Wensleydale Creamery)

5. If you eat meat, every couple of days go through your fridge and check nothing is coming to its use by date. If it is, either freeze it or cook with it as soon as you can. Nothing says “I love you” like a nasty case of food poisoning from old chicken.

It turns out, I quite like being organised in one place in my house.

As an entertaining side note here are a couple of photographs of our mischievous pets who inspired me to be more organised.

Also a big thank you to Fresha and the nice PR lady who sent me the sample without whom I would not have written this post. I was sent my first pack of Fresha bags free of charge but they can be purchased for £3.99 for 20. I will be buying more.