A pantry full of extra food and sundries is always a good idea. Stocking up on items when they are on sale makes sense in these harder economic times.

A good way to store dried beans is remove them from their plastic bag and store in plastic bottles.

Another good tip I’ve recently run across is to make sure you label the bottoms of all your cans with permanent marker. Many people store their pantry items in the basement, and if water levels become high the paper labels might wash away. If you have the cans labeled with permanent marker you will still know what’s inside.