Cooking Anxiety, Meet Kitchen Organization

Happy hump day, everybody. It's coach Dan and Cadre. Hello. Hello. I hope everybody's doing great. I hope everybody's warmer than we are here in Michigan. Happy Wednesday, everybody. It's Dan Ancadre. I'm checking in with you in the middle of the week. We're going to talk about organization and the kitchen and stress in the kitchen. So many people that I work with cannot stand a cook. They cannot stand a shop, and it creates them a bunch of stress and anxiety. So enter me. I love to minimize stress and anxiety for the people I work with.

And I have tons and tons and tons of tips and tricks from just a lifetime in the kitchen, cooking myself, things that worked for me, things that didn't work for me. And, you know, that's always evolving my interests, my time frames. You know, life is always changing for all of us. So what might work for you now may not work for you next year, but if you check in regularly and just gain some awareness about when you're anxious in the kitchen and what isn't working or what is to help you move things along.

So let's talk today first about cooking itself. There's some tips I want to share with you around just the physical act of cooking, and they're very simple. This set of tips that you can use, very simple, not many of them, and they're guaranteed to help the cooking process along and enable you to have fun in the kitchen and cook healthy food without being stressed out first. At the grocery store. Go to the grocery store on off hours. I was just there yesterday at noon purchasing stuff for an instant pot class that I lead, and it was packed, packed, packed at noon.

But I've been there at 08:00 and I had been just the night before and it was empty. There was hardly anybody there. If there's an opportunity that you have to hit the grocery store on off hours, it will really minimize stress and anxiety. Go with a list and make sure you've got your cart and shop and scan on the app if that's available to you. A lot of grocery stores have those options now that just help ease the whole process for everybody. I love to shop and scan. The grocery store that I shop at mostly has an app, and you can just scan every product you put in your basket.

And then by the time you're up at the cart, you just hold the phone to the register and it just loads everything up and tells you how much you owe. Think about things like that when you're at the store. I'm going to look in here and see who's who. Katie. Hi. Junk food junkie's here. Hello, boat. Oh, Katie, I wish I could grocery shop for you every day. I really do. I love it so much. So grocery shopping can be a little bit more fun if you just keep those couple things in mind. Take a list. Go it off hours if you can.

Also, there's so many apps that delivery apps and services now that the grocery stores offer post pandemic that really make it so much easier. So if you are organized, you have a list, you know what you need, make a list and order it and have them deliver it. So those are options too. All right, now in the kitchen. So these three things are what I see most when I go to organize a kitchen for when I go to work for my clients. Number one, grocery bags everywhere. Everywhere. Crammed everywhere. Why do we hoard bags?

We hoard bags all the time. There's like packs of them and they're crammed in cupboards and entire cabinets are. The space is wasted because bags are just crammed in there. Listen, go through your kitchen and pull out all of the bags. You get new bags every time you go. And if you're using your own, you shouldn't even have those anyway. So help the environment. Get some reusable shopping bags and get those plastic bags out of your kitchen. And the paper ones too. I use paper bags. I do keep some and I use them for one thing, and that's when I roast peppers.

I steam my peppers in the paper bag, but I only keep two and all the rest go. I try to utilize cloth bags when I shop and help the environment along. Hello, Brian. I see you in. Thanks for joining in. So shopping bags, get them out. The other thing is a junk drawer. I love to do junk drawers. It's really fun because there's so many cool things in there, little tidbits, and you're like, what is this? Oh, we found that on the ground or whatever. There's all kinds of weird stuff in people's junk drawers.

Think about what you really need in your junk drawer. Scissors, paper clips, rubber bands, I don't know, whatever you use, your cell phone charger or whatever, but empty your drawer, dump it in a box and go sit by the tv and just dig through it. Get a trash and get another. So you have your box of the stuff you just dumped, then have a little trash can, you know, and have another box for things that these go at other places in the home and you'll be amazed. Go back and get a drawer organizer or something for your junk drawer and try to just keep on top of it.

Our junk drawer gets out of control. We both are tossers, but I know that about myself. And so every month, I'll go over there and I'll just take a minute and dig through it. And if you do it more often, it's not such a big deal when you do. All right, so the junk drawer, the bags, and the third thing is duplicates, duplicates, duplicates, duplicates. So many of the jobs that I do, I'll find utensil drawers packed full of utensils that aren't used, gadgets that, you know, were impulse buys and duplicates.

Peelers are huge for duplicates. Tongs. And I have a bunch here, too. I'm guilty myself, but some things I just still have an emotional attachment to. But really decide if it brings you joy, you know, the whole Marie Kondo groove. If it brings you joy, you know, keep it. But eliminate all of your duplicates, and it'll open up so much space. We're going to talk much, much more coming up about spices, about pantry organization, about cooking utensils, pots and pans, different ways to store things in your kitchen that will allow you to just really enjoy the process of cooking instead of feeling just scrambled and chaotic and anxious and who wants to eat after all that?

I mean, wouldn't it be so much nicer? It really would. So I'm going to teach you ways to do that. All right, so today I just wanted to talk a couple things other than the three main glass. Clear, clear, clear glass. See through everything. Everything that you can in the kitchen. Get into see through containers. I love them. Label them. These are just mason jars. I got a whole case of these at the store for $12. An entire case. They come with these lids. I also like purchasing these, these plastic lids for these.

Cause if you're not using these for canning, you have the ring and the top, and they. They fall apart. Get some of these lids to go on. These are fantastic. You see what's in it. You know how much you have left. You can label it. It stays fresh. No critters. So these are great. I love these. These are divided plastic tubs. But again, they're clear, right? So we can pull out whatever noodle or rice or grain that we want to use. We can see how much we have left. They stack. So think about all these things when you're purchasing stuff for your kitchen.

Also, never, ever purchase all this stuff until you have organized your kitchen and, you know, really what you need. That's a big mistake in organizations. People go out and buy, oh, I'm gonna buy all this stuff, all these boxes and bins, and they haven't measured. They don't know what they have left to store. So a lot of times when I walk in and they've got a bunch, they went shopping. They're like, oh, I hope you saved your receipt, because a lot of that's gonna go back. These bins are great for the fridge.

They're top, they have a little handle, help you pull out in the fridge. These are fantastic because they're clear. You can see everything in them, but you can pull an entire, you know, deal out instead of rifling through the back to try to get what you need. They come in a lot of different sizes. We've got these. These I like to find when I'm, when I'm thrift shopping. So keep clear in mind when you're going ahead and working on kitchen organization, so look for much more of my content coming forward.

We're going to dive deep into kitchen organization and how much it helps us every single day do what we all have to do, which is make food and eat and nourish ourselves and our families. We're gonna learn how to cook healthier. We're gonna learn how to cook smarter. So much more to come. Give me the thumbs up here. If you liked what you saw, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. If you wanna see more of me, you can save this video. I love the comments. Thanks for hopping on. I hope I saw each one of you today.

I think I did. So that's it for now. I love you guys. I love Cadre. Look for more me, I'm going to look for more from you. Thanks. Bye.