Since I’m not regularly writing about food/food things for Food Lush, I sometimes feel a void about…food…and so I figured I’d just talk about food here! Here are some of my favorite kitchen tricks, old and new.
Cutting hot peppers without burning your eyeball later
Dicing hot peppers is just something I don’t do. (Contact lens-wearing and touching hot peppers do not mix.) But, I recently found myself in need of diced jalapeños and no jalapeño-dicer to be found, so I improvised. Holding the whole jalapeño, I first cut it lengthwise one way, turned the jalapeño halfway around, and then cut it lengthwise the other way. This created four segments, all still attached at the top. Then, holding the stem, I sliced through the jalapeño and voila! Diced peppers, safe corneas.
Storing avocados
It goes against everything I know about fruit, but I’ve been storing avocados in the fridge and it’s been a life avocado-saver. All summer, I’d buy not-yet-ripe avos and all summer, they’d ripen too quickly (like, in a day) and finally, I complained to my friend Kim about it and she said she kept hers in the fridge. I decided to heed her advice and hello! No over-ripe, smushy avos and they do ripen in the fridge, which I was concerned about. I just take the avo I want to use out of the fridge a few hours before I want to use it, in order to bring it up to room temperature.
Fridge cleanliness
I’m sort of maniacal about (among other things) fridge cleanliness. Every few months or so, I take everything out shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer, and wipe down with baby wipes (food safe!) Then I line the drawers and door shelves with paper towels to keep everything cleaner, longer. No real trick/tip here, just that I’m a fridge clean freak.
Vegetables two ways
I do compost (although not in the summer because rotting vegetables + heat = BARF ) but occasionally instead of composting, I freeze remnants of vegetables (think mushroom stems, leafy tops of beets, fennel fronds, broccoli stalks) to use for chicken stock. I actually recently made vegetable stock, but it wasn’t as flavorful. Something about that chicken carcass…
Peanut butter sans stirring
I shared this on Food Lush back in the day, so I apologize for the repeater, but after I buy natural peanut butter (with all the oil that floats to the top), I store it for as long as I can first upside down, then right side, then upside down again. If I can let it go a week or so, turning it over daily, gravity pretty much mixes it up so I don’t have to slog through it. (Full disclosure: This is a trick Chris created and also I don’t ever stir the peanut butter because I hate that job, even if this makes it way easier.)
Freeze frame, freeze everything
I mentioned freezing vegetables for stock, but truth is, I freeze anything and everything. We buy in bulk from Costco, so we sort of have to freeze stuff unless we plan on eating 10-pounds of pork in one sitting, but I freeze anything from butter to leftover soup (freeze flat in a freezer bag) to sliced bread. Hell, my friend A’Dell freezes individual slices of Costco chocolate cake; everything is freezable.
And that’s all I’ve got! Any wisdom you care to impart today?
Baby wipes, huh? I’m going to give that a whirl.
Tell me more about the cake. Seriously though, nothing squicks me out more than a dirty fridge. I just cleaned ours today. There were BITS OF HAM in the meat drawer. Horrrrrk.
We freeze things like crazy. We have a deli slicer, a food saver, a Kitchen Aid with every single attachment (I think), and pretty much any gadget you could want. We buy huge pork loins at Costco, and freeze portions of it. We buy blocks of cheese, slice it or shred it ourselves and freeze it. We also buy big things of turkey breast and slice it for lunch meat and freeze. And then there’s freezer meals for the oven or crock pot. Uhhh… we’re a little crazy, I guess. 🙂
And now, anytime I make a dressing or marinade, I freeze some for later in ice cube trays or silicon molds. In fact, I just made some greek vinagrette and italian vinaigrette and froze what we didn’t use for dinner.
A sweet trick that I love is I pre-chop a boat-load of romaine lettuce, and I store it in a large tupperware container with a slightly damp paper towel on top. It stays fresh and crispy for a week! I love doing it this way so I don’t have to chop salad every night.
Which reminds me, we use our salad spinner CONSTANTLY. If we make homemade fries (we soak the fries in water for about a half-hour to rid them of starch), and then we’ll give them a whirl in the salad spinner to dry them off. Or if we wash broccoli or cauliflower, we spin the pieces.
This might be the most run-on comment ever, but whatever. It’s late, and I’m tired.
I forgot to mention that with the salad, I store the tupperware upside-down. Don’t ask me why.