"Spring" cleaning

What can I say? We're a couple months late. Okay, I have a confession--in case you didn't already know, I am a messy person. A messy messy person by nature, and I have to fight every instinct inside my being in order to stay at all clean and organized. It's weird because in most other senses I am a total type A perfectionist. I really wish it transferred into this part of my life! Well, about 9 hours later, all my clothes are clean, our bedroom is sparkly, my car is completely void of all marathon scripts, teaching supplies and starbucks cups, and most excitingly, THE PANTRY IS CLEAN!!!! AND ORGANIZED!!!!!

We have this ridiculously enormous pantry that had started to feel so tiny as we shoved more and more crap in there, but nooooowwww, there are empty shelves! There are nice little areas for all categories of things! My numerous baking supplies are in order, and I even found extra containers to store some of my weirdo health nut food that you can only buy in the bulk section and looks really sloppy in those whole foods bags (chia seeds, nutritional yeast, and I transferred my milled flax seed also!).

Are you ready for thiiiisssss????

So first we have cleaning crap, pasta, nuts, tons of sf pudding (love) and two of my favorite foods on earth: oats and cereal.

Next, enough canned food to get us through the apacolypse, and my ridiculous baking stash. Note to self: You do not EVER need to buy the following things again--canola oil, corn syrup (gross--why do I have so much?), tomato paste, cocoa powder, and cupcake liners. Apparently, we have enough to last a lifetime. Oy!

Lastly, and second to my entire shelf dedicated to baking, probably my favorite: A cute little nook for all my cookbooks (including my favorite--"Ari's Recipe Book of Awesome by Heather McQuarrie)! We are hopefully going to get a bookshelf for them soon, but for now, this will do!
The most interesting part of the organizing? Discovery the brown sugar incident of 2011. I'm not sure when or how it happened, but somehow almost everything in our pantry seemed to have a light dusting of brown sugar--even the things shelves above where I keep the brown sugar. Weird. Many clorox wipes later, I think we are finally brown sugar less.

Today was supposed to be goat cheese day, but Steve and I were just too worn out from working on the house all day. I couldn't even get it together to cook dinner. Instead, I had chipotle for the 3rd day in a row. Haha. I just can't get over cilantro lime brown rice!

Alright, I think I'm gonna go open up one of my last delicious blueberry beers and enjoy my clean house!

PS: Coming soon--I just realized I don't think I ever posted the recipe for my skinny mini corn dogs! They are super cute and when I made them, they were downed in seconds--recipe to come!