The reasons I preserve food are many. I like knowing what’s in my dinner (and if it’s too sweet or too puckery, I have no one to blame but myself). I appreciate knowing where the food came from and having a relationship with the people who grew it (even if that relationship is confined to Saturday mornings, a few words and exchange of money for goods). I also find it to be quite life affirming. Canning is a way of reminding your future self that she matters and that, barring any unforeseen events, you intend to be on the planet for a while longer.
There’s also something so cozy about having a stockpile of good things to eat. Lately, I’ve been enjoying seeing the ways in which people stash and store their home canned stuff. There was a period there where I was posting at least one link to the Food in Jars Facebook page a day, sharing the various pantry pictures I found or was sent. I was particularly tickled when I got to see Heather’s kitchen shelves in person when I was in Portland last month.
I figured that it was only fair that I finally share with you all where my own extended pantry lives. I’m reluctant to confess that when it comes to pantry management, I am not the most organized. I like to imagine that if I had a dedicated space in which to store these filled and sealed jars, I might be better about maintenance and categorization, but deep in my heart, I recognize that I will never be Martha-like in my devotion to scrupulous neatness.
At the moment there are three primary spots where my pantry resides. The first is in a dry sink in my dining room. That’s the piece of furniture you can see at the top of this post. It mostly contains jams and fruit sauces, although I do keep the pressure canned stocks on the bottom-left shelf. I think the jars like it in there, because it’s nice and dark.
The next place is our front-hall closet. We are quite fortunate in that though this apartment is just 1,100 square feet, the closets are nice and roomy. The one closest to the front door is large enough that I’ve entertained thoughts of cleaning it out and transforming it into a home office. However, if I did that, both the coats and my tomatoes would be homeless. So it remains home to all manner of coats, folding chairs, coolers that primarily serve as yogurt incubators, backpacks that only get used when we fly and lots of pickles, canned fruit and tomatoes. It always surprises people when I go to retrieve their coats at the end of an evening and also hand them a jar of hot dog relish for the road.
Finally, there’s the overflow spot, under my desk in the den. This is a space that is primarily Scott’s domain. However, he’s willing to share with me and so I use the built-in desk along the wall. When I’m not snapping photos of the space, I throw a dark towel over those jars, so that the light coming in from the window (not pictured but to the right of this desk) doesn’t prematurely age the contents of those jars.
My pantry story is my current coat closet. The floor has six carboys (each one being six gallons!) with wine fermenting. Any time we open it to grab a coat or bag the smell of fermenting fruits rushes out. It’s quite the conversation piece!
I’m new to canning this year, but right now the majority of my jars are living in the extra linen closet in our guest bathroom. People are always horrified when I say bathroom (I know, the bathroom!), but when I open the door and show them the neat rows of jars, filled and waiting to be filled, they can’t help but smile.
I would LOVE to win these books!! My pantry about 3 months ago (when I was living alone) was amazing. Huge, organized, beautiful. Now, I have a roommate (a chef), and it’s a total disaster. Small, unorganized, too full to close the doors and just plain upsetting. I must fix this asap. I have to say I’m super jealous of your canning cupboard. It’s so delish.
I acutally have a pantry in my kitchen. I finally worked up the courage to reorganize everything in it and to my surprise, everything fits quite nicely! (Double and tripple stacked of course!) This winter my husband plans on expanding the pantry so I can really get to work, especially with another little one on the way.
I have a fabulous pantry with nothing in it. I’m a bit behind on my canning since our garden was pretty much a fail this year. So for now, I will admire your pantry and canned goodies!
Pantry. Hmmm. What we have for food storage seems to be remote locations throughout the property! Stacks of jars and some filled jars in the guest room. Some under the kitchen table. Some on shelves in the mud room. The only pace we DON’T have jars stored is the bathrooms!
Just moved into a very old apartment with some built in wardrobes that are serving as the pantry. Your storage plan looks comfortingly like mine.
I am seriously lacking in pantry space in my current apartment, but hope to get into canning soon… I will have to remedy something. My parents turned a closet into a pantry, though, because my mom is an avid canner. They built shelves on both sides so one side holds things like extra pasta, store bought canned goods, and extra cookies and the like and the other side is home to all of the home preserved goods. It’s very cozy and I love going in there to pick out what I’m going to take home with me.
Ah, to have a real pantry! My husband and I are students, and jut had our first beautiful child. In our small apartment, our pantry is under our bed! It actually works quite well, and I love peeking under the bedskirt to see beautiful apple jelly and jalepeno jelly (the two most recent canning adventures). I have loved reading the comments and discovering where other people store their food!
I remember my Nana’s pantry in a San Diego suburb called Normal Heights — it was to the right of the sink in the kitchen and went from the counter to the ceiling — the home built in the 30’s. It had heavy wire screen on the shelves and the cool air came up from underneath the house! I was lucky enough to win the last giveaway and have no prospects of winning this one — just wanted to add the comment and read the posts. . .
We added a pantry when we put an addition on our house a couple of years ago and I LOVE it. For the first time this fall, it contains home-canned goodies and I have a flashback to my grandma’s pantry every time I look in. It was a rite of passage to be old enough to go to Grandma’s pantry and pick out the jar of pickles or relish to put on the table for family dinners. You were a “big kid” when you were tall enough to reach the shelves and old enough that she trusted you to get a glass jar to the kitchen without breaking it.
I’m glad to see your jars stacked. None of my canning books addresses if that was OK, but I had to do it to save space.
My kitchen was built with a pantry (an oversized closet really) but I don’t store any of my canning in there. I store my store-bought goods in the pantry and my canned, “pretty” stuff is out in the open for all to see. I found a ‘crate’ furniture entertainment center at goodwill for $40 earlier this summer that houses much of our canned items…or so I thought it would. I ended up canning so much this summer that I found a 7 foot tall bookcase unit (again, at goodwill) that I put in my utility room and have already filled that up as well. I love how beautiful all of the canned items look!
I turned a coat closet into my pantry! Our coats currently reside in storage boxes under the beds, or hanging from a mirror with storage hooks, but I would not give up my pantry space for anything.
I relocated across the country back to my home state of Michigan in August and have been canning non-stop ever since. I’m living in a renovated farm house and am blessed with a large pantry in the kitchen and a large laundry room that I plan to add shelving to for additional storage.
I also live in an apartment, but am fortunate enough to have a walk in pantry.
I have a couple of large crates piled on each other with the openings on the sides in the bedroom. It stays dark in there all day since we don’t open the blinds. I would give my 2 daughters the cookbooks. Oh wait, one of them doesn’t cook, so I will be giving it to her husband…lol.
We live in a little 500 square foot postage stamp apartment. In order to store all of my canned goods I pack them tight into old fruit boxes and stack them in a corner of my bedroom. Its not the most romantic or convenient place but there out of the way and in the dark for the most part.
Such a niche website! Reminds me of my grandfather making homemade pickles up in ny or my mother boiling and skinning tomatoes out of her garden in tx!
ryan
I’m using the space underneath the stairs (in the Living Room) to store most of my canned goods, using the assemble-yourself wire cube shelves. Works great and I use bungee cords across the openings just in case of earthquake.
One of the biggest selling points of our new house was the walk-in pantry. It’s amazing! There’s even a spice rack hanging on the back of the door… which is great under normal circumstances, but during July-September of this year while I was pregnant with my son I couldn’t fit through the door any way I turned! Not only am I glad to have my sweet baby out here to hold in my arms, I’m able to get back into the pantry and start eating all of the goodies I canned this summer (in cranked up AC since pregnancy in TX is hot!)
We have a really nice cold room in our basement… the only problem is, there’s no shelving! And I’m not sure why but my husband didn’t want to put up shelving, so instead he made some large wooden “crates” to put all my jars on… which still doesn’t solve the problem that you have the bend down to pick them up. Lol. I guess I can’t complain though 😀
ah, the joys of a good pantry! i once moved into a co-op because of its pantry and spice rack. it was a 27 person co-op, and the pantry was like a small bedroom- lined with eclectically painted shelves with huge garbage bins of flour, sugar and rice. i made a lot of great food in that house, and to this day the memory of that pantry makes my fingertips tingle.
We don’t have a pantry…It seems to have been removed, so now there are high cabinets and a useless open are underneath that wouldn’t fit appliances. In a quest for storage, we special ordered an industrial wire rack for pots, pans, etc. I love it.
I have a small house that was apparently built before the idea of storage was invented. Only one closet in the bedroom! and it isn’t all that large. I have a small cabinet off the kitchen that I store paper napkins, foil and such and have a couple of shelves for things I have canned. I am hoping to add some shelves in the kitchen to store some dry goods so I can free up more shelf space for my home canned goods. I want to add a pressure canner to my equipment so I can can more variety. I like having really good and special ingredients to cook with. I would appreciate any recipes you have on how to use canned potatoes and the like.
This year my goal was to can, freeze and dry enough food for a year. I quickly out-grew the pantry space in the kitchen, moved to the storage area under the staircase and by September had added wall-to-wall steel shelving to an un-used empty downstairs bedroom! I love walking into that room with my basket and filling it up with a week’s worth of *groceries* and then putting everything in the kitchen cupboards…talk about reducing your carbon footprint!
My Grandmothers pantry is easily the best and the most scary…. She is an excellent cook, baker, and canner but doesn’t understand basic food safety. She definitely stores rat poison next to her food in the pantry along with all her other cleaning supplies mixed in amongst the jars. Her haphazardness is so much a part of her personality, I wouldn’t change it. 🙂
I am comforted that you, like me, store canned goods in the coat closet! If I was more organized, I imagine I could find adequate space in my kitchen cupboards. But as a creature of habit, I hate the thought of relocating my jams and pickles! I would love to be entered into the drawing for the books. Thanks!
I am loving my current pantry, 1970’s style folding doors and terrible location by a big window and all. Since moving to the USA and finding produce so much more seasonal than I was used to I have started to get into canning.
I still get a buzz when I reach into the pantry and see the 6 remaining little jars of strawberry jam that were the first thing I made. I am loathed to use them because they look so pretty.
How about sharing these photos for Other People’s Pantries? My readers are all pantry voyeurs!
My family never were big on food preservation, but my grandmother was a world-champion at canning tomatoes. All summer long, she’d buy them from farmer’s markets and put them up for the winter, so we could enjoy them in stews and chilis. I miss her home-canned tomatoes.
My grandmother built a special room in her basement for her canning pantry when they rebuilt the old farmhouse in the late ’90s. Unfortunately it has some mystery goods-jars that not even she knows the contents of-we will spend a fair amount of time this winter discarding those to make room for the bounty of this year!
we have a nice little closet area in our kitchen that is our pantry. It is now starting to get filled with jars of food since we have taken up canning. Looks a lot nicer and cleaner than a bucnh of cans that used to be stored in there.
I have taken a bathroom closet and turned it into a pantry. Gottal do what you gotta do to store all of that delicious food you’ve prepared and it’s comforting to know that I have delicious food/meals in the pantry.
I’d love to win the cookbooks and would give them much use!
Some previous owner of our very old house built shelves into the ceiling of the stairwell down to the basement. I’m not sure they were built for jars, but I like to think so, and that’s what I use them for. But since they’re suspended over the stairwell, I’m always nervous that the weight of all the jars will bring them crashing down one day!
My grandparents had the best “pantry” — an old-fashioned dirt floor cellar. It was lined with shelves and they were filled with rows upon rows of canned bounty. I never went down there much as a kid (scary!) and I regret that now.
I am lucky in that I have a second kitchen in the basement where I do all my canning and where I store my canned goods in the cabinets. It is wonderful and I’m not sure I would do as much canning as I do if I didn’t have this space.
I don’t have a pantry (small city house) but my mother has a giant one. Every time I go home it blows my mind how much stuff is in there. It’s only her and my dad, but they could eat for years out of their stocked pantry!
My kitchen is quite small, so hubby put a not-needed anymore bookcase in the back corner. Not my dream pantry, but what a difference it’s made.
No pantry in my little house. Jars are stored in every nook and cranny… under the bed, behind the couch, under the bathroom sink.
My pantry is a cold room in the basement that was built as an addition to my house before I moved in…..I absolutely love it. It is my pantry, cold room, freezer room, storage room all wrapped up in one.
My “pantry” is a set of Ikea shelves in this huge walk-in hall closet I have in my Brooklyn apartment. I’d love to take over the whole closet, but my roommate might object.
When I was a kid, my aunt had a pantry that only today do I realize was the ur-Pantry space. It was a separate little room off her kitchen, with a whole wall of shelves and cupboards and COUNTER SPACE, and I think there may have even been a sink. She used it for some bulk food and the occasional overflow kitchen utensils. I didn’t have an opinion about it as a kid, but now…I have dreams about having an honest-to-God pantry like that.
My grandma had a walk in pantry and I used to just sit there and play with the packages when I was a kid(I used to pretend I was a little market and sell the goods to my imaginary customers)!
You are an inspiration to me, and I love your blog. I am learning a lot. I bought all of my canning supplies earlier this year in the hopes of putting up any number of foods, but have not yet done it. I was fortunate enough to make a new friend who gave me 2 cases of her well-loved canning jars. So I feel like whatever I end up preserving will be good. But I can always use a new cookbook!
Living in apartments makes storing pantry items quite tricky (and possibly inventive). Currently I’m just using 2 cabinets near the fridge, and they house my first apple butter. 🙂
FYI, Anyone Can Cook is a fun and easy book, but it relies a lot on some prepackaged foods (especially on the easy rated meals).
I also have a question about canning… Why are so many of your preserves without a ring holding the lid on? I guess I thought the ring was necessary or the lid would pop right off…
Like you, I have my “pantries” in several places. The front hall under the stairs closet holds Christmas decor and golf clubs in the back and I’ve got a metal rack toward the front that has jar storage. I also have canned goods in an odd linen half closet that is in the same hall. The kitchen has a pantry closet that used to have three huge shelves where I would “loose” items. I put narrower shelves on two sides and now holds all kinds of food.
Since moving out on my own, I’ve never had a decent pantry or a good spot for storing my canned goods… Right now, they live in the laundry room on a shelf next to the chest freezer. In our dream house, among other requests, will be a huge pantry with optimal storage for canned goods.
My current pantry are two lazy susan cabinets in my kitchen. I dream at night of a full size pantry!
The most impressive panty I ever saw was of an older woman living in the Grampians in Australia. The family ran a sheep farm, and also grew most of their own fruits and vegetables. I was completely awe-struck by the pantry and embarrassed myself fully taking a ridiculous amount of photos of it. Unfortunately, those were the days before digital cameras, so I’d have to rustle through some old albums to find those pictures.
My teeny apartment doesn’t have a “pantry”, per se, but does have a hallway with some shallow open shelving. These shelves have become my pantry and are currently covered in curtain rods hanging bright pink Ikea curtains. While this works, I can’t wait for the day when I have a real pantry!
My “pantry” consists of our kitchen cabinets! Our house is only about 750 sq feet, with only one closet. Storage is always a problem, except for books: I have three bookcases that are regularly “purged” to make room for new books. Now that our daughter is an adult, I’ve been trying to expand our cooking repertory, so these books would certainly be welcome!