How to store what you brought home in the cloth bags!

Now that you got home with all this stuff you bought using your spanking new not-shinny cloth bags... how do you store it? A few tips for the most common items:

• Apples: if you are not going to eat them in few days, place them in a paper box inside the fridge. I took a running shoe box and placed a kitchen cloth inside it, put the apples in, and into the fridge. It's very funny to open the fridge and see a running shoe box in there, the kids like it a lot
• All vegetables: I put a wet towel on the bottom of the (plastic) vegetable bin, place the veggies on it, and cover them with another wet towel. This keeps the moisture in so the veggies don't dry up.
• Bread: wrap it in a cloth, then into a tin can (like those you use for cookies during the holidays).
• Grains, flours, sugar, beans, nuts, seeds, pasta, cookies: store them in glassware or glass jars. Don't discriminate against your "older" jars, use all the jars from jams, honey, mustard, spices and pasta sauce as well. I have the kids make labels for them so they know what is in where and don't confuse their ingredients. If the flour came in a paper bag, I leave it in there cause frankly, I ran out of jars...
• Milk: the farm where I buy milk from gives it to me in a plastic jug. So when I get home I transfer it to a glass milk jar that I saved when I bought milk in the store. I also use the glass jars from the apple juice that comes in the gallon glass jars. The milk lasts longer in them than in plastic, and you don't have to worry about plastic leaching into your milk- remember that fatty foods such as milk/cheese/meats tend to absorb more of that stuff than produce.
• Meat: I go to the butcher counter in the store and ask them to wrap the meat just in paper. Then I place it in the fridge in a plate or bowl. That is a must if you don't want to open your fridge to a bloody mess, literally (cleaning blood out of the fridge is not very fun)
• Onions, potatoes, garlic, ginger: not in the fridge. Leave it in a paper bag (like the ones they give you at the check out, they are sturdy); fold the top over so they stay in the dark- very important to keep them in the dark.
• Citrus: again, not in the fridge. Place it in a paper bag as well, they stay nicely and don't dry up like they do in the fridge.