Things You Should Be Doing In Your Kitchen: Part II

Posted by Brittany Arcand on April 11, 2014

I am so excited! Part II of my of cooking tips and tricks series is finally here! With Parts III and IV soon to follow….

Wether you want to hear it or not, it seems we are constantly being told what to do. No matter if it is which food is healthiest, what chemical to avoid in your cleaning supplies, or how soon you should start saving for retirement. Someone else always knows ‘best’. I try not to be too preachy when I blog, since something what may work for me, may not work for you. But in general, I believe bloggers have useful things to say. We don’t write about food all day and dream about it all night because we are hungry. We don’t created recipes in our heads while folding laundry or frantically record voice notes about that salad dressing we just enjoyed while our date drives away from the restaurant because it is interesting to us. It is because we love it. We read cookbooks like novels and our palms get sweaty at potluck dinners, just waiting to see the variety of colors and flavors. Food is our way of showing love, expressing gratefulness, marking events, and enjoying ourselves. We can’t help but pick up a few things along the way. Either from trial and error, all those cookbooks we read, or the next door neighbor that has mastered the art of the perfect chocolate chip cookie. We soak it in like a sponge and filter out the good stuff for you!

Speaking of cookbooks, I found this in the 1961 edition of The Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook. Kitchen Know-How. Awesome.

A few weeks ago, I posted my top ten pieces of kitchen and cooking advice. When I asked if others wanted to join in and share about their hard earned knowledge and experience, my fellow food bloggers answered the call. How great is that?! You get the down to earth, REAL life, honest to goodness tips from Moms, professionals, and food enthusiasts that have been through it all! I had so many who wanted to participate, I have decide to break up the posts. Each entry will include two or three bloggers, thus avoiding a blog post that is seventeen pages long. Think of it as a progressive sprinkling of wisdom throughout the spring! I will forward any questions or inquiries back to the bloggers themselves, but please be sure to click on the link to head on over to the contributors blogs and see what they are up to!

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Un-Processing My World-Karla Herzmann

1) Invest in a really good set of knives, and keep them SHARP. I am a minimalist when it comes to kitchen gadgets, which makes sharp knives a must. I chop everything by hand, and having properly sharpened knives makes it more efficient, easier, and safer! Even when I am given a gadget to, say, chop garlic or make french fries, I never use them because they are just something else to wash and something else to take up space in my kitchen. Knives can do everything.

2) Have a garbage bowl, or one of these: http://solutions.blair.com/p/scrap-happy/51750.uts. This can be credited to Rachel Ray, who I’m not exactly the biggest fan of, but having something to throw scraps, pieces of wrapper, seeds, skins, whatever into without aiming for the garbage every time is really convenient.

3) Another of my essential kitchen tools in my food scale. You can find really affordable ones that work just fine, like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Ozeri-Digital-Multifunction-Kitchen-Elegant/dp/B004164SRA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1393618321&sr=8-3&keywords=food+scale. Especially now that I am using all sorts of different flours, I think measuring by weight is really important. I also use fresh yeast for bread, and you have to weigh it out. I use it to portion out cake batter between pans, divide up pizza dough, and on and on.

4) Don’t throw away lemon and orange peels without peeling of the skins (peel them before you juice them). If you can’t use the peel to flavor your food, throw it in a glass jar or bottle, add some vodka, and make your own extract. You can make tons of extract for pound cakes, puddings, cupcakes, and whatever dessert you like to have that lemon or orange flavor (lemon blueberry bread….yum). It is so much cheaper and easy! Let it sit for about a month and just keep adding more peels and more vodka. When the peels look like they have lost all color throw them away.

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Back To Her Roots-Cassie Johnston: Author of the cookbook Cooking With Greek Yogurt

Avoid unitaskers: It can be tempting to pick up every gadget at the kitchen supply store, but 9 times out of 10, you can use something you already have at home. Trust me, you don’t need a corn shucker or a hard-boiled egg slicer. It’ll just take up space in your kitchen the 360 days out of the year you don’t use it. Instead, focus on pumping that money into really high-quality multitaskers. Get great knives and great utensils!

Clean as you go: I’m terrible about this myself, but when I do manage to clean as I’m cooking, clean up afterward goes so much more quickly. Start with an empty dishwasher and rinse dishes and fill it up as you use them. Have a few minutes of baking time? Use it to wash your pots and pans or put away ingredients. The goal is that once dinner is done, all you have to do is rinse your plates, put them in the dishwasher and start it!

Freeze it up: It might seem intimidating to try and fill up your freezer with goodies, but it’s a breeze if you just tack it onto your regular cooking. Next time you cook your family’s favorite casserole, just double the recipe and freezer the second one for use at a later time. You can do the same with all kinds of main dishes, sides and even desserts!

Skip the plastic: We have a mostly no-plastic kitchen. Using plastic for food prep and storage has taken some flack over the past few years (especially plastics using BPA), so we made the change to glass and stainless steel storage and utensils years back for safety. What we weren’t expecting was how much more enjoyable using glass and steel were than plastic. Glass and steel containers are easy to clean, they last forever, they’re readily available, and they don’t stain or retain smells. Plus, we think they just look so much nicer! Now, when I take a big bowl of salad to a pitch-in, I just pop in a spoon and it’s ready to serve.

Thank you for reading and be sure to check back for future installments from food bloggers around the web! Hopefully, it will make you as happy as this lady! 🙂