I love my kitchen. I really love it.* But maybe I love it even more than I did before with our latest addition.

If you live in the US or Canada you probably cool or heat your house so that it stays in some sort of reasonable middle range. We don’t do that, though – in the summer our living spaces are made more comfortable through the use of lots of fans but the temperature is just what it is. And that can be hot.

We don’t really pay a lot of attention to the temperature outside – we have a thermometer in the kitchen, though, and we keep do an eye on it! When it hits 84 F and stays there we know that summer has arrived. But then it continues to climb, with the highest we’ve ever seen in our kitchen being about 91 F. Who knows how hot it is outside?

Since we cook at home a lot and I like to make things up ahead for the freezer we have been fighting the space battle in our fridge and freezer every day. I mean how much kefir, kombucha, jugs of fermented kimchi, pints of guanabana pulp, premade brown rice and homemade dog food can you cram in there? Then every week I have a little shopping spree at the organic market and woe is us!

Not to mention that pasta, spices and flour get buggy and nuts go rancid in the heat. Our snowbird friends put all their spices and pantry items in their fridges when they leave for the summer. Not an option for us with the space crunch we already had! It is so disheartening to open a spice jar and get a whiff of mold or worse.

So last week I said “enough!” We moved things around a little and then bought a fairly modest size fridge that is tall and thin to be our pantry. In it are ALL our spices, nuts, seeds, flours, rice and more! Our original fridge is now perfect for our daily needs and the new fridge is perfect for storage. As an added bonus I now have room to keep the ice cream tub frozen so there will be more ice cream in our future. I may even make Méxican chocolate ice cream this afternoon!

* What do I love about my kitchen? (see the panoramic photo at the top) The huge island. The tree trunk taco stand chopping block. The roomy cooktop. And now, the fabulous storage! Oh, the fridge? There was a ten percent off sale and then another 15 percent off, too, so it ended up costing us a little more than $350 US. It even has that new energy saving inverter technology.