How to Keep Your Fridge Clean

You call your kid into the kitchen and ask why he's keeping his science fair experiment in the fridge, where it looks like it's about to crawl out of its container and snack on your fresh blueberries. "That's not my science experiment. That's the chili you made last Halloween."

And so it is. You sigh. As you eyeball the fuzzy remnants of a holiday long past, you realize how very quickly the time passes, and yet it stands oddly still in the back of your fridge. Which you rarely see, covered as it is by stacks of Tupperware^® full of leftovers you never ate because you didn't see them lurking behind the little foil packets of mystery foods sitting atop the crusty tubs of various expired dairy products.

You sigh again. Something must be done. You head to your computer and Google, "how the heck am I supposed to be able to keep the fridge clean when I'm up to my eyeballs in life and don't have time to empty and wash forty reusable containers and marry the condiments?"

And look - here you are! These tips should do the trick for you.

Use labeled baskets. There's a packet of turkey on the top shelf, some bologna in the door, and a little salami in the crisper. The yogurt is scattered about, and you have no idea which sour cream containers contain actual sour cream and which are full of leftovers. It's time to set some plastic baskets on your fridge shelves to help you keep like items together. Label the baskets with a Sharpie^® to denote what goes in each. You might keep all of the dairy tubs in one basket, the condiments in another, all of the meat in a third, and so on.

Label the compartments. If your crisper drawers and door compartments are a mixed bag of various items, and you have to rummage through all of them to find the dang butter, label the compartments and always put everything away where it belongs.

Line the shelves. The worst part about cleaning the fridge is wiping up the cold, goopy spills. The perfect solution? Line the shelves with foil, shelf liners, or press-n-seal food wrap. When a spill occurs, all you have to do is replace the liner.

Use clear storage containers. If you obsessively save cottage cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and other containers so that you don't have to invest in a set of Tupperware^®, you probably never know what's what. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Well, when "out of mind" means "growing mold," you can have quite a mess on your hands after just a couple of weeks. Bite the bullet and get yourself a stack of see-through food storage containers. You can find them for cheap at your local dollar store, and they can be recycled when it's time to retire them.

Lazy Susan the leftovers. A big lazy Susan on one of your shelves makes for a storage solution that's perfect for leftovers. Instead of rummaging through all of the containers of your shelves, you can simply stack the (see through) leftover containers on the lazy Susan and give it a spin to see at a glance what you've got.

Label perishables. Keep a roll of masking tape and a Sharpie^® handy in your kitchen. When you're unpacking your groceries, set the perishables aside and make a label for each one that clearly states the expiration date. Those tiny numbers printed on the lids are really hard to see, and it's a drag when they get rubbed off and you have to do a smell test.

Never leave the fridge empty-handed. Every time you open the refrigerator to put something away, do a quick scan for food that needs to be tossed out or put in its proper place. The best way to keep your fridge clean is to stay on top of expired items and keep the rest organized. Less than a minute a day is probably more than sufficient for getting the old stuff out and putting the good stuff where it belongs.

What’s your first thing to do since reading this article? Just clean it out? Buy more see through containers? What?