Kitchen Tips

I started putting together some kitchen tips and was sharing them with a friend. She suggested some of her own, so here goes:

Milk can be frozen. Hubbin and I don't drink enough milk before it goes bad, so I measure out one cup servings and freeze them in the many empty gelato containers we have accumulated (Hubbin LOVES his gelato!). When a recipe calls for a cup of milk, I defrost one COMPLETELY (so there are no ice crystals bouncing around in the jar), shake it well to remix it, and then follow the recipe directions.

To remove the core from a head of lettuce, simply grasp the head in both hands, rap the head against something solid (a countertop?), core side down. It will break the core away from the leaves. This does not work with cabbage.

I keep a plastic quart container in the freezer and add all the extra, leftover vegetables from dinner to it. When it is full, I use it as vegetable stock for soup.

A pastry cutter works well in a pinch to cut up eggs for egg salad.

I don't like promoting specific products unless I have found them to be worth their weight and I will swear by them, so with that being said, "Soft Scrub with Bleach" rocks on tubs and showers!!! "Palmolive" is the best dish soap for my sensitive skin. All others cause micro blisters on my hands. "Clorox Wipes" for door knobs and frames, counter tops, the washer and dryer, bathrooms, etc., etc., etc. I like Lysol, but the smell gets to me.

Lastly, ground beef can be purchased in bulk and frozen in manageable sized portions. My friend puts portions into gallon zip locking bags, flattens them out because they freeze and store easier. Recently she started scoring them before she froze them so that if she needs just a little bit of burger, she can 'break' off a portion of frozen burger to use. Also, she purchased magazine storage containers from the dollar store and stores the frozen bags of burger in them in the freezer.