My Kitchen Tips: Storing flour and sugar

I hate having open bags of flour and sugar all throughout my pantry.  It drives me crazy.  Plus when I go to use one of them I end up spilling all over the floor.  Drives. Me. Crazy. I tell you.

I figured out early on that those cute little canisters for my counter drove me even crazier.  They end up being too small to store a usable baking amount of flour or sugar so I ended up filling them all the time.  Or pulling out my bag in attempts to not drive myself more crazy.

My solution?

The small buckets in the painting department of Home Depot or Lowe's.  I think they were about $2.50 each and the flour bucket holds 10 lbs, plus a little extra; and my sugar holds 20 lbs (if I remember correctly).

They have made me immensely happy.  Plus, they fit in my dishwasher so I don't have to hand wash them.  *Love*

My kitchen tips: How I store my recipes

Okay, so I have had the hardest time over the years trying to come up with the best system for organizing the recipes I collect from the Internet.  I did the whole box thing.  The impossibly high stack thing.  I even *briefly* considered copying them all down on recipe cards and filing them away (but understandably I nixed that idea pretty quick.)  I figured it I didn't have time to cook dinner most of the time, there was no way I was going to be able to come up with enough time to copy down recipes that I already had in print form.

So this is what I did:

For the index cards I already had I got a photo album that fit the 4x6 photos and stuffed them all in that.

And for the 8 1/2 x 11 that I have I separated into 3 binders.  I have one of all main dishes, one for everything else, and one of recipes, separated by tabs into categories, that I have not made yet.  This way I can keep organized and on top of the sheets of paper.  I have found that this works best for me.  Plus then I can put the binder in my trusty recipe stand, easel, holder thingy.