This time of year, we eat winter citrus like our lives depended on it.
Each week, we go through at least one five-pound box of clementines. We pack them on workdays for a midday snack, and at night we gobble them up after dinner as dessert.
Most of the time, we buy Darling Clementines, which come in simple wooden crates.
We love the zingy citrus, but we hate discarding all those great little boxes. So rather than just tossing them in the trash, we've found that old clementine boxes can be quite useful around the house.
Here's how we use reuse and recycle clementine boxes.
We have a small bookcase that sits to the right of the fridge, where we store the majority of our spices. And as we've discussed before, it needs help. The shelves are extremely narrow and packed with all kinds of small jars of spices, bottles of oils and packets of rubs and other seasonings. Things fall off the shelves all the time.
But clementine boxes keep things nice and orderly, and they're way cuter than plain plastic organization bins.
We've also deployed an old clementine box to store our onions, which have a similar proclivity for rolling off the shelf.
Keeping our spices in boxes like this has the added benefit of allowing us to easily pull them off the shelves and find what we're looking for. When we're on top of things, we place little labels on the tops of the jars to save us from rooting around to find that elusive jar of Chinese Five Spice.
If you need to bring a little order to your spices or your pantry -- or your home office or another busy shelf -- don't trash that clementine box!
Clementine Recipes We Recommend:
Chicken Paillards with Clementine Salsa
