All of us that spend time in the kitchen need lots of tips and tricks to make things run smoothly.
Years of Kitchen Experience
I love to learn from men and women that have spent years in the kitchen because sometimes, that’s the only way to learn the best tricks. If you have awesome tips for me, send them my way. Today, I’ll pass on my favorites. I hope you find at least one gem in the list!
Storage Ideas for the Kitchen
- Store Muffin Papers in a Wide Mouth Jar – This storage solution has kept my muffin papers neat and nice and easy to find. I like to use a quart size jar since I typically buy my papers in bulk and I can easily fit 500 papers in one jar. I make a lot of muffins! A pint size jar would work well if you don’t need to keep so many on hand. (These parchment paper liners are awesome!)
- Get a Salt Box – I bought this salt box about ten years ago and it has been so helpful. It keeps salt easily accessible for cooking and baking needs. I have a little metal 1/2 teaspoon that I bent in half and keep inside the salt box so I can measure quickly.
- Put a piece of bread with your brown sugar to soften it – Do you have hard brown sugar? Put a chunk of bread in the container with the brown sugar and close it up tight. It will soften up after about 24 hours.
- Add a napkin or paper towel in with your greens and berries – After washing and prepping your greens and or berries for the fridge, adding a napkin or paper towel in the bag or container with them soaks up extra moisture and keeps your food fresher longer.
Utilizing your freezer – Waste not, Want Not
- Freeze lemon juice in ice cube trays – Lemons going bad on your counter or a container of lemon juice almost to its expiration? Portion out the juice into ice cube trays at 1 tablespoon increments and freeze. Pop the frozen juice into a freezer bag or container and store for years in the freezer. Afterward, when you need 1, 2 or 3 tablespoons for a recipe, take out your cubes and use them up!
- Cook meat in bulk and freeze in 1/2 lb bags – Were you persuaded by the 3 pound chub of sausage at Costco? Cook the whole thing at once and then when it is cool, portion the meat into 1/2 pound amounts. (I typically weigh the cooked meat and divide that number by the amount of 1/2 pound increments I can get from the pre-cooked weight. For example, 3 pounds of sausage from costco will weigh about 2.2 pounds once it is cooked. I divide the 2.2 by 6 and that will give me the 1/2 pound amounts in each bag. Hopefully, that makes sense.) Place the 1/2 pound in a sandwich bag and flatten it, label it and put it in a large freezer bag. Place in the freezer. The flat bags defrost quickly. Often, because they are small and thin I don’t even defrost the meat, I just break it up frozen and add it to whatever I am making. This trick makes dinner prep so fast!
More Freezer Fixes
- Freeze your leftover fruit salad or chopped fruit – Fruit salad only lasts a day or maybe two but all that yummy fruit is not bad yet, just not as desirable in its looks. Give it a new life by freezing it and adding it to your fruit smoothies. Cut up strawberries or bananas, leftover grapes at the bottom of a bag, or watermelon in cubes – all of that delicious fruit can be frozen. Blend it up in smoothies!
- Leftover smoothie in the morning can be frozen into popsicles for an afternoon treat. I love this popsicle mold but it is a bit big for my little guys so I use an old one I have from Target that makes smaller ones as well.
- Wilting spinach can be frozen for smoothies – Again, you were persuaded by that large container of spinach from Costco and you only used half of it. The spinach that is left is looking like it might not last another day, maybe a little bit slimy? Throw it in a freezer bag and toss it in the freezer. You can’t use it for a spinach salad but it will work just exactly the same as fresh in a smoothie.
- Wilting basil or other herbs can be frozen for later use – Frozen herbs are great in soups or pasta sauces. When I had a plant full of basil, I pureed the basil with a little olive oil and froze it in ice cube trays. Those frozen cubes of basil were amazing thrown in soups and sauces.
Other Important Stuff
- Best way to boil eggs – Add eggs to a pot, cover completely with water. Bring water to a boil. Boil 3 minutes. Put a lid on the pot and turn off the stove. Leave covered for 8 minutes. Drain water and cover with cold water. Let cool and peel. Perfect yellow yolks everytime!
- No brown cut up apples – Mix up a solution of 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 cup water or whatever amount you need in that same portion to cover your apples. Chop up your apples and add them to the water solution. Let them soak for 10 minutes. They stay fresh looking for days!
- Get rid of spicy eyes with hair oils– Did you cut up jalapenos and then touch your eyes? Grab the end of your hair or someone else’s hair and rub it over your closed eyes. The oil in the hair helps neutralize the burn from the peppers. Magic!
- Boil pasta and all grains and seeds in filtered water – We drink filtered water to avoid the gunk in non-filtered water but then we boil our food in the non-filtered water. Use filtered water for anything that will go inside your body.
A Few More
- The best fruit fly trap – If you have fresh fruit out at your house, or a sourdough starter, you may have found that you are attracting fruit flies! I was teaching a sourdough class one week and we had an infestation of fruit flies, we were trying everything to get rid of them. My daughter made this fruit fly trap and overnight, they were all gone! It was amazing. Use a quart size jar. Add 1/2 cup vinegar, 2 drops of dish soap, 2 pieces of cut up apple and 2 pieces of cut up orange. Make a cone out of a piece of paper that has a small hole on one end for fruit flies to go into. They go in the cone and drink the vinegar solution. The soap kills them and even if it doesn’t they can’t find their way back out of the small hole in the paper cone, so they are trapped.
- Did you burn a healthy loaf of bread and you want to save it? – Cut off all the outsides of the bread. Chop the inner part of the bread into cubes. Spread the cubes onto a baking tray. If you want croutons, sprinkle with olive oil and garlic salt. If you want bread crumbs, don’t add anything extra, unless you like seasoned bread crumbs. Toast croutons or bread crumbs in the oven until desired toastiness. Run the bread crumbs in a food processor. Store both in an airtight container.
- Cook Dry Beans with Garlic – Adding garlic cloves to your cooking dry beans helps reduce the gas effect they have on certain individuals (gramps!).
Last But Not Least
- Let Food Be a Positive In Your Kitchen – This website is focused on tweaking food, changing it for the better to help with body issues. Sometimes those changes can be hard and challenging. Try to keep food positive through the change. Don’t focus on what you can’t have, instead focus on all the good that is available.
