I took a break from the software project this week to focus on some other projects. However, I did end up helping my dad with the next step of his clutter organizing involving our dish and cookware. My mom collected a whole lot of this stuff because she liked to cook. Unfortunately, between returning to work (partly to get out of the house since I was old enough to survive for a few hours) and getting sick she didn’t have the time to bake anymore, and her getting diabetes reduced what she could have anyway. While she did still bake, usually with my dad’s help near the end, there were a lot of stuff in the lower cabinets that hadn’t been used in years, and even some that I don’t remember ever seeing in use. So we went through it and reduced more of our clutter to just what we’d actually use.

I’ve been trying to figure out where this mat was for some time. My mom used to go to Tupperware parties (do they still have those?) and bought quite a few things. I wonder if they ever sold them in stores or is it just at the parties? Anyway, this has a recipe on it and some cooking tips but I wanted it because it would reduce the need for wax paper. If I’m right you could knead dough on this (for breads or cookies–we have a bread maker) and clean it up easily. I sometimes make cakes outofaboxmix or pancakes or something and I’ve wanted to make a few other things. This might even be good for grilled cheese, since you butter the outside for flavor and so they don’t stick to the pan.

Here’s a really old mixer we found. We think we gave my grandmother’s old mixer to my cousin so no idea where this came from. The motor still worked but some of the dirt was stuck tight, you can see the spinner is all rusty, the juicer attachment broke trying to clean it, and I don’t know if this model had the grinder attachment. We also don’t know what happened to the actual mixing attachments. We might have tossed them during a previous kitchen project. Either way this wasn’t worth saving so we tossed it. It’s not worth much even in good condition despite its age.

Speaking of baking we found these little bread pans, or maybe their tiny cake pans. You could make Twinkies type snack cakes with them after all. We didn’t even know we had these, and that’s something we say quite a bit going through these kitchen cabinets. These we kept and might even use to make little snack cakes or snack breads. I’m thinking the next time we make cupcakes we put a bit of batter in these things and see what we get.

We also have way too many pie pans, but for some reason some of these were in the lower cabinets, along with a set of bundt pans the picture was too blurry to post. We kept those but we reduced the pie pans. Dad’s taken to occasionally making pies but he doesn’t really make anything this fancy and I don’t think it was worth much either. We donated a lot of stuff to a nearby church’s thrift shop. (Our church doesn’t have one.)

And that includes a lot of old containers and casserole dishes. Neither of us are going to make casseroles and the container count is way too high. I don’t think we even knew that many were down there. To think we’d been holding to those cheap things you get when you buy food from the deli case to save money. We ended up tossing those out (they’re only meant for a one-time use anyway) and just kept some of these. The rest was also donated because we don’t have that many leftovers.

This isn’t the end of our kitchen reorganizing. There are still more upper and lower cabinets to clean out, but this does reduce the clutter. Someone else can get some use out of what we donated and what was useless we tossed out. I think we did pretty well on this project. Now I just need to finish my other non-clutter projects and get back to the software.

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