Popcorn Basket

If you think I’ve exhausted the basket topic, think again.  This move has opened up even more basket organization ideas for me.  But I’ll just share my latest and greatest use of the basket in this post.

Although our house is much bigger than our last one, our kitchen and pantry area is actually a lot smaller.  So I do not have room upstairs for all of our food and appliances.  But I do have a big storage room downstairs.

I had to decide what I really needed in my kitchen and what could be stored downstairs without too much of an inconvenience. As I was trying to figure out where everything was going to go, I came up with this idea.

Meet popcorn basket:

Rather than store the popcorn popper in one cupboard, the popcorn in the pantry and the popcorn cups on a shelf, I decided to put all the popcorn supplies in one basket and store it in my downstairs storage room.  We only make popcorn once a week so it could not take up valuable kitchen real estate.  Friday night, when it is time to make popcorn, I just have one of the kids go downstairs and grab the popcorn basket.  And we are good to go.

I also made a hot chocolate basket.

This basket contains our Coco-Latte machine, our varieties of hot chocolate and our mugs (since we only use our mugs for hot chocolate).  I should probably add mini marshmallows to the basket too. Again, I didn’t want these items to take up kitchen space since we weren’t using them everyday and I wanted all the hot chocolate supplies in one location.

My last basket (for now) is my disposable dinnerware that I use when I take meals to people.  I put foil pans, sturdy paper plates and washed out yogurt and sour cream containers in this basket.

I know my mom has a bread basket where she keeps the supplies unique to just making bread.  You could also do a waffle or pancake basket that contains your waffle iron, pancake mix and special syrups. And I am thinking about doing Play-Do basket with all our Play-Do and cookie cutters.

Now even if your kitchen has plenty of room, I still like the idea of the ‘popcorn basket’-  especially for specialty foods. Storing items together in one spot rather than the the appliance in one cupboard, the ingredients scattered around, and unique serving dishes in another saves times and space.

(Are you sick of baskets yet?)