It is hard to believe Thanksgiving is this week. It is officially Holiday Season everyone! No messing around, time to get serious with shopping, eating and fun! Do yourself a favor before all of the excitement. Sit down, take a big deep breath and figure out how you will enjoy the holidays but also stay organized with daily life. It can be easy to overlook your current bills, healthy goals and entertainment budget when you are distracted by all the shiny things. Prioritize your calenders for the final months of 2011 so you can kick off the new year with ease.

Your organizing task for today: start clearing out your home of unwanted items you no longer need or want. Donate clothes, toys and food to clothing drives, churches or a shelter.

Did you have a lot of leftover food at your Fourth of July party? We often over buy for parties or decide we don't want to experiment with a new recipe or ingredients. The food we buy ends up staying on our shelves uneaten until it expires. This food gets discovered while organizing your pantry and eventually gets thrown away. Do yourself and others a favor by donating unopened food to a local food pantry before expires. Go through your pantry from time to time and ask yourself if you are really ever going to try this food. If not, give it to someone who really needs it.

Take your organized kitchen up a notch with batch cooking. If you are going to mess up the kitchen by chopping, grilling and baking try to do it just once a week. Double or triple recipes for browning meat, preparing sauces or entire meals then separate into resealable bags, containers or pans and freeze. Just pull out of your freezer when ready to use. This will cut your cooking time even more and allow you to prepare healthy meals. It will also save you money on convenience items such as shredded or precooked foods that you can prepare yourself. Its important to keep your freezer organized by labeling the ingredients including the date. Liquids can lay flat in a resealable bags and plastic containers can stack taking up less space.

You have to eat, so you have to shop and you have to cook. It's part of your everyday life. The better organized you are in the kitchen the happier, healthier and hopefully less hungry you will be. Here are a few simple kitchen organizing tips I follow for the week. First of all plan your menu. What do you want to eat each week? Who will be eating and when? The more prepared you are the easier the preparations. Next go shopping in your refrigerator, pantry and freezer for staples you can use, spices and other ingredients. If you can use what you already have the less money you will spend. Look up recipes that call for those ingredients or check your own recipe folder for simple meals you know everybody likes. Ingredients you don't have should go on your weekly shopping list.
This is how I look at each week. Monday through Thursday is quick and Easy. Friday is Pizza or other delivery. Saturdays and Sundays we have more time to try new recipes or meals that take longer to prepare. We try to make enough on the weekend so we can have a leftovers on Monday. A simple salad is always nice to add on Monday's to make up for weekend fun.

Grocery shopping can be overwhelming. First you have to shop, then you have to transport everything back home in time to prevent frozen or refrigerated foods from thawing or spoiling. Once you get home you have 15 mystery bags of groceries to put away. One lucky bag contains a quart of ice-cream, another has a carton of milk and somewhere there is a pound of fresh fish. There is a lot to do when it comes to food shopping. It can take a few hours from start to finish. Make it easier on yourself from the time you unload your grocery cart to the last can of beans put away in the pantry. Get organized before you leave the house by bringing your own reusable grocery bags and cooler bags for all your refrigerated and frozen items. Separate your items in the checkout by refrigerated, pantry items, cleaning products and paper products. Be sure to notify the cashier that you would like to keep your items separate. When you return home you can immediately grab the items that need to go into the refrigerator or freezer and put them away. Different types of bags will help you distinguish what goes where, refrigerator, freezer, pantry or sometimes even the garage for overstock items.

Baking during the holidays is a fun way to get into the spirit. But overbuying supplies can easily overcrowd your pantry wasting space and supplies. Be sure to only purchase only what you need. Baking items like yeast, flour and baking powder expire and loose their effectiveness. You dont want to spend the time and money working with other ingredients only to spoil the final product. Nobody likes a flat cake or bread that doesn't rise. Take inventory before shopping and be sure to label food storage containers with expiration dates.