Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I love pantries, those giant-sized cupboards where you stock up on everything from soup to nuts. Where you take advantage of the two-for-one sales on canned goods and pastas and beans. Where you squirrel away chocolate chips for cookies and walnuts for brownies. Oh, sure, you can store these things in kitchen cupboards along with your dishes and glassware; and there\’s nothing wrong with that. But an honest-to-goodness pantry makes a kitchen a finer place.

A couple weeks ago I got the idea that my pantry needed a facelift. It had been five years since the first can showed up on the shelves and an equally long time since I\’d cleaned them. In some spots, cobwebs passed themselves off as subtle decorations, while sticky bottles were starting to hunker down and homestead.

I didn\’t want to just repaint in the standard white; I wanted pizzazz. The sort of pizzazz that might look garish on other walls in my home, although some might think my eggplant colored entry has already claimed first place.

Before the actual painting (which I had someone else do), I emptied the contents of the pantry and rearranged the moveable shelves for better use. This way I knew where they would go once the fresh paint was applied. Then I decided that primary colors, like those in an eight-pack Crayola® box, were just the thing. Radish red, yammy yellow, berry blue, and bean green turned my shelves into something akin to a kindergarten room, without the noise of five-year-olds. My painter shook his head when I explained the scheme, but he went to work with a will.


We are now on the other side of this project. My Campbell red soup cans are alphabetized (yes, you read it here) on a yellow shelf. My blue pasta boxes are on a green shelf. The tiny Jello® boxes are cozy on a blue shelf. All in all, it looks like Andy Warhol ran amok, but I love it. Especially the sign that I put up in the very middle of the pantry, which reads “Kiss the Cook.”

Now that my larder and the things in it are clean and happy, I may even learn to enjoy cooking a little bit more.