Canisters. A humble fixture of the pantry—or the counter top or baker’s rack, depending on your setup.
I like using them for a few reasons. First of all, they’re more air-tight and easier to track how much is left inside than a folded-over bag. It’s easier to measure flour, with a light hand and without making a mess, from a canister than from a paper sack. I buy dried rice and beans from the bulk section at Sprouts, but I prefer a hard-sided container for storage once I get home. I keep flour, sugar, light and dark brown sugar, white and brown rice, and lentils in canisters at all times.
I even pour my can of salt into the smallest canister. I like to be able to dip a measuring spoon into a big reserve of salt and then shake the excess back into it, rather than pouring salt from the spout into a spoon and having excess spill on the counter or in the sink. Plus, if you just need “a pinch,” it’s way faster to literally pinch a few grains out with your finger than to try to pour only a few grains from the can.
My husband disagreed with my salt canister for quite some time. In our house in Missouri, the canisters found their home out on the baker’s rack, next to the coffee maker. I didn’t see any need to label them. I thought it would be obvious that the big canister of small shiny white granules was sugar, and the tiny canister of similar-appearance contents was salt.
I was wrong.
Justin, two or three times. My mother-in-law, twice. My mom, once. Maybe another friend? After this many incidents of people I like accidentally adding a heaping teaspoon of salt to their coffee, because they thought it was sugar, I realized that Justin had a point. If there’s a small thing of white crystals right next to the coffee maker, people gonna think it’s sugar—the nearby real sugar is invisible to their peripheral vision due to one-track-mindedness, and, perhaps, the fact they haven’t had their coffee yet.
So, I decided to label the canisters. And when the writing periodically gets rubbed off, I write the label on again.
Canisters can be annoying, however, particularly if you have toddlers in the house. Just last week, Luke got his hands on one of them and very sneakily was playing with it outside the kitchen. Of course it ended with him dumping it out. Lucky for us, there were only a few tablespoons left of the brown rice in there anyway. Still, grains of rice sticking straight up from between slats of ancient wood flooring are somewhere near Legos on the list of Things Parents Don’t Want to Step On. Sorry about that the other morning, Justin.
The worst incident was several months ago and by the hand of our elder child. If I’m around, she knows not to touch the canisters in the kitchen. The kind we have latch in a “fun for little hands to play with” fashion. She’d been in trouble for playing with the latches before.
One day, during nap time, I had decided to watch TV, which isn’t actually a common thing for me to do by myself. Miryam took advantage of my being occupied not in the kitchen by sneaking to the kitchen and sneaking back to her bedroom with canisters in hand. By the time I noticed anything was amiss…flour, sugar, lentils, and two kinds of rice were all over the carpet in her room.
There are moments in parenting when I have had to choose not to punish my children for their transgressions, because I know I’m too mad to be fair. This was one of those moments. I sent her away to the play room so I could clean up the mess. The vacuum’s motor overheated halfway through cleanup and I had to postpone the rest, but not before I had sucked up a big “OMG” in the mess like a reverse etch a sketch to send a picture to Justin.
I was thankful that at least she hadn’t tramped around in it to grind it into the carpet. Our vacuum at the time was on its last legs and couldn’t manage the rice and lentils, so it was a multifaceted cleanup process. Oh, dear child, you’re so small, yet your messes are so big!
Anyway, I still use the same flippy-clippy canisters because that is what I have and they’re not broken. Spilled beans (etc) is just a calculated risk I take. I do, however, store them on a shelf completely out of the kids’ reach now, in our Texas kitchen with a bigger pantry where they fit. (…the baking items. I admit the rice and lentils are still where Luke can reach them, but I try to put other things in front of them so maybe they won’t catch his eye. I don’t always win.)