SquareRooms | Issue 180 • April 2020

IMAGE COURTESY OF @HELLONUTRITARIAN Less is more While your fridge will keep most of your shopping as good as new, many fruits and vegetables can be kept just as fresh in a pantry or even just on the kitchen counter. Some things even stay fresher outside of the fridge! Foods you shouldn’t keep in your refrigerator are: • Tomatoes and potatoes • Onions, ginger and garlic • Bananas, apples and citrus fruits While some general rules apply to the overall fridge, such as moving new items to the back in order to use up the older ones first, there are some temperature differences between each shelf that will impact your storage. For instance, the top shelf has the most consistent temperature, making it a good place to store ready-to-eat items. The middle shelf should be kept for dairy and eggs, and the coldest bottom shelf for meats, stored separately to avoid cross-contamination. The doors of the fridge are warmer than the rest, maintaining juice and sauces but allowing milk to go sour. Storage is ultimately about your own needs. As such, you need to be creative with how you arrange things in your fridge. If you have a lot of vertical space, use it to hang up clear baskets or tiered racks for extra storage. If you cannot seem to avoid bulky sauce jars and drinks blocking your view of smaller foods, invest in a rotating container for those tall items. As long as it keeps things tidy and fresh, you’re good to go. Now that your fridge is spick and span, it’s time to organise food in containers. Save for fruits and leafy produce that should not be sealed away as moisture causes them to rot faster (tip: they do best in the crisper drawer), all other foods can go in boxes. A safe choice for fridge storage is air-tight glass containers as they are easy to clean and don’t absorb stains and odours. As far as shapes go, square and rectangular containers fit nicely into the corners of your fridge and don’t leave awkward gaps. For the freezer, you may also want to consider storing foods flat in freezer bags to save space, enable faster thawing and prevent freezer burn. Finish off the process by labelling your containers and reusing them for the same types of food in the future. 4 Stack and stash 5 Know your fridge 6 Think outside the box 63