This week of the study brought a new topic: Healthy Eating – and today’s task was to “Purge Your Pantry of Harm” – so I set out to make quick work of ridding my pantry of any “monsters” that were hiding in there. As I started… the children were still home as it was 6:00 in the morning! Talk about motivated!!! BUT, when my youngest asked what I was doing and I replied with “Getting all the bad foods out of the pantry,” she quickly questioned me a tone of worry in her voice, “You aren’t going to throw away all of our Halloween Candy are you?!?!?!?!?” My youngest sure does love her food, a habit I am working on with her, but I just could not toss the candy just yet. Am I a softie? Maybe – the candy may go next week, but for today… it survives. LOL.
I was pleasantly surprised when I went to the pantry to clean it out. Almost everything was in-date and had not gone stale, but the few items that weren’t went in the trash can. There are not a whole lot of high-carb, low-nutrient foods in my pantry because my husband was diagnosed with diabetes three years ago and we started making healthy eating changes THEN and have FINALLY gotten around to where he is getting better at making some healthy choices on his own instead of me having to be the “SUGAR CZAR.” SO, there were not any items in there that had to go.
The main thing that I did have to purge though, were my spices. There were duplicates – some items that we never used and were not even opened yet – and some were over TEN YEARS OLD! Yikes!!!! My son was so interested in seeing me throw away things – which is a rarity as I do have some deep pack-rat tendencies – that he offered his help. I was so glad he did as that gave me the opportunity to get dressed so the kids could get to school on time despite my enthusiasm with the pantry! He is very good at finding duplicates of items, so that was his job. 🙂 We combined two bottles of the same item if they appeared to be around the same age/container style. Some items, though, we could tell one bottle was WAY older than the other and barely had any smell to the spice, so they hit the trash can, too. I am so glad we did this because it was becoming a struggle to have to sort through spices when I was cooking something that called for a specific spice. I had to pull down this dangerously-overloaded box and pull everything out to find what I was looking for. BOO! It is so much better now… all the spices fit in my cooking cabinet near the stove and I am looking forward to preparing our next dinner without having to dig through the spices.
So, not too many monsters to purge from the pantry, but at least we got rid of the sneaky ones that had been hanging out for YEARS – those pesky spices!
Oh… I almost forgot… Here is the memory verse for this week. Feel free to download it, print it, use it – so that you can memorize it too and it can be a blessing to you.