Fridge Organisation - Labels & Vegetable Prep

I posted way back about how I slice and dice our food after doing the groceries, so that we have everything at our fingertips when we need it during the week.  This has always been a system that works well for us, and I was quite happy with how my fridge was organised.  Towards the end of last year, the lovely Bianca, from A Little Delightful, made over her fridge, which inspired me to look at ours and try to make it more efficient.  My new-look fridge is below!  I love it!

The big change for us was moving all of the drinks off the top shelf and onto one of the doors.  (I didn't get a photo of the doors yet sorry.) And then I moved the sauces off the doors and into caddies on the top shelf.  Bianca suggested categorising your caddies according to how you use the contents in them, so after a couple of weeks of trial and error, I ended up with these four caddies along the top shelf:

- Baby Food
- Cooking Sauces
- Serving Sauces
- Snacks

It is so great having these items grouped together in a caddy.  It is so easy to pull out the caddy when I need it, and everything is at my fingertips.  I obviously use the Baby Food caddy most often, as I feed Annabelle three times a day.  But I regularly pull out the Cooking Sauces caddy when I am preparing dinner, or the Serving Sauces caddy at meal times.  I have seen this concept many times before, but I just didn't see how it could work for me until now...

It was hard to photograph the labels without the flash or light reflecting the laminated labels, so I apologise that you can't really see them too well!

Anyway, I originally put my jars into one of the caddies, but I wasn't able to see the labels, and it wasn't utilising the height space available in the caddy.  So, I decided to trial them in the bottom drawer of the fridge, with labels on the lids.  This has been the perfect solution.

I still have my Clear Mates on the second shelf, but I added labels to these.  I made lots of different labels, so I have a label for most foods, and can just switch the label when the contents of the container change.  You can also see a couple of Illusions bowls on the second shelf... these hold pre-cut salad or fruit.  I find it stays really fresh in these containers too, and they make it easy to transfer to the table at dinner time without having to dirty another container ;)

Another change from last time I blogged about the fridge is the prep I now do of my veggies.  I started doing this last year, and found it was wonderful!  I would come home from the groceries and chop all of the veggies, and store them in Fridgesmart containers so that when I needed them throughout the week, it was all ready to go.  I was surprised with how fresh the veggies stayed even after being chopped.

The past few weeks I decided to take it one step further and store the food for each meal together in one container.  Previously I was leaving carrot with carrot, capsicum with capsicum, etc, and then pulling out what I needed each day.  This involved taking multiple containers in and out of the fridge, so I am trying to avoid this step, and just have one container per meal.  So far, this idea has worked just wonderfully, so I am thinking I might even make up labels for the days of the week so that I can pop the label on the front, which will make pulling out the container even easier.

My bottom four fridge drawers are labelled, although it is quite obvious what is in there:
- Fruit
- Vegetables
- Jars
- Dairy

My final fridge tips:
- I find even labelling the obvious things helps to keep things nice and organised.
- As mentioned previously, taking things out of the packets and putting into clear containers makes us so much more likely to use it.
- I try to clean out my fridge every Wednesday, before I do my meal plan.  This allows me to see exactly what we have left that can be used for the following week, or what I am now low on and need to replace when I do the grocery shopping.

Thanks to Bianca for the inspiration!  I love a re-vamp of a previously organised space, it just goes to show we can always improve our systems to make them more efficient :)