Donna’s helpful cooking tips

Here are a few things that can help you out in the kitchen either as a convenience, substitution or money saving shortcut.

Buy a bunch of lemons.  Squeeze and strain the juice.  Freeze in ice cube trays then put the cubes in a ziplock.  Each cube is about 2 TBSP.  Zest the lemons with a microplane grater.  Freeze the zest.

Don’t throw away your orange peels.  Zest the orange before you peel it and freeze the zest.  It only takes a minute and the zest from citrus fruit adds just the thing to your baked goods.

When you cook a chicken or turkey, simmer the bones for stock.  Cover with water and cook down for 2 hours or so.  Cool, strain and freeze in ice cube trays.  Add a few cubes to soup, gravy, carbonara, etc.  You won’t believe how much flavour this will add to your food.

Save and freeze beef bones from steaks and such.  When you get a bunch, throw them in a pot, cover with water and simmer for a couple of hours.  Strain and freeze in ice cube trays.  Use in any beef based dish.

When you boil cabbage, save the cabbage water.  It makes a phenomenal base for vegetable soup and beef based soups.

Buy butter on sale and freeze it.

When you cook bacon, pour the grease off into a jar.  Use it in place of butter when you’re sauteeing onions, frying steak, etc.

If your blueberries are starting to shrivel, freeze them.  Use them in baked goods.

If your bananas are starting to get too brown, freeze them right in the skin.  Use them to make banana bread.

When you have a ham or large ham steak, cube some of it.  Put it in a baggie in the freezer and use it in potato or cheese soup.

Save the ends of your bread and freeze them even if the bread is stale.  Use them to make bread crumbs.  Put them in your food processor with some parsley, chives, italian seasoning, garlic salt, what have you. It’s a lot cheaper than buying them.

Make your own vanilla.  Buy 8 beans.  (I get them here.) Split them lengthwise and put 4 each in two ball jars and cover with one half pint of decent vodka.  Put it in a dark cupboard and shake the jar once in a while.  You’ll have two jars; one ”making” while you use the other.  It takes about 3 months until you can use it but all you have to do is add more vodka to the beans when it gets to about half full and use the other.  You can switch jar-to-jar like that and you will never have to buy expensive vanilla again. It gets better the older it becomes.  If you don’t want vanilla specks in your baked goods, strain what you’re using through a fine mesh sieve.  Don’t strain the whole jar though!

Put a vanilla bean or two in a cannister of sugar and use it in your coffee instead of that french vanilla cremora stuff.  It’s cheaper and tastes better.

For the above vanilla and vanilla sugar, you can use the beans after you’ve scraped out the good stuff for another purpose.  It will still flavour the vodka or sugar.  Also, if you buy beans from that site, save the pouch it comes in and stick it in your underwear drawer.  You’ll have vanilla scented undies...good enough to eat!  (Did I say that?)

Keep evaporated mile and instant potato flakes around.  You can use the milk in place of milk or cream in a pinch and the potato flakes make a good thickener for stew or any other roux based sauce that isn’t thick enough.

If you run out of buttermilk, add 2 TBSP of white vinegar or lemon juice to 1 cup of milk.  Let stand for 10 minutes.  You won’t notice the difference.

If you run out of confectioner’s sugar, make your own.  Add 1-1/2 TBSP cornstarch to one cup regular sugar and whirl in the food processor or blender.

Posted by Donna on Thursday, January 07, 2010 at 02:03 PM
Filed in: Tools, Tips, Tricks • ◊ Permalink
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