tipnique of the week, November 1, 2013

You know the stars of kitchen product infomercials? The women who are overwhelmed by their inability to pour a glass of milk without creating the Exxon Valdez of milk spills on the table? The men who are driven to screaming insanities by complications arising from the slicing of onions?
There's a cabinet in our kitchen that turns me into just that sort of hapless, frustrated female.
It's the cabinet full of "disposable" (as if I or anyone I know can actually ever throw those things away) plastic containers, and their equally maddening lids.
Every container that was not an official disposable container went long ago. No more empty yogurt containers or cream cheese tubs. Yet still, matching a lid to a container drives me crazy! Here's a sort of solution that was implemented one night after I'd smeared leftovers on three different square lids before I found the one that fit the container of leftovers:
Step 1. You are embarking on the kitchen equivalent of matching a laundry basket full of socks, prepare yourself. Pour your favorite beverage, and turn on your favorite junk TV or audiobook.
Step2. Break out your sharpies, paint pens, or funky color nail polish- anything that will make a mark on plastic that will last through a few weeks of wear and washing.
Step 3. Dump all your containers and lids onto a flat surface and start sorting. If there are lids with no containers, or containers with no lids, gut it up and throw em away. Here are mine:

Step 4. here's the fun part.
With your sharpie or whatever, on the OUTSIDE of the container, draw a thing. A circle, a triangle, a flower, a heart, a smiley face, anything.
Step 5.On the OUTSIDE of the lids that fit that size and shape of container, draw the same symbol.
Step6. Keep going. Pretty soon, it'll look like this:

Of course in three days, these tidy stacks will be a jumble, BUT the next time I fill a black dot container with leftovers, I reach for a black dot lid, no matter where it is in the jumble, and I'm done.
Just that fast.
Now, who wants to make an infomercial out of that?