Kitchen Hacks
13Just sharing a video I found very interesting and occasionally revelatory. Dont be baited in by the mysteriously irrelevant pic of the long egg, though. The vid is well made, which makes it easy to watch but it is long. Some of these I knew, some I didn’t. Tell us about your own kitchen hacks.
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Neat video, though some of these (use an egg slicer to slice an egg! and a pepper corer to core a pepper!) definitely cannot be called hacks with a straight face…
Also not a hack, but something that has been very helpful to me as of late is premeasuring more and more. Pastas and grains in half- or full-cup mason jars. Even if I estimate half of a cup from a full cup, I’m much closer than doing the same from a box or bag. Likewise, I make and freeze my own vegetable stock from discarded bits. I use silicone portion control containers so I have roughly 1-cup chunks of frozen stock which I can (relatively) easily pop out of their containers.
@brhfl
I am in awe.
Can I live under your sink and sneak out at 4am to raid the fridge?
Corn on the cob with no more messy shucking!
Nuke one ear of corn in the husk for ~4 minutes.
Cut off the stem end
squeeze from the tassel end
Neat, sweet corn on the cob!
@KDemo I always bake corn in the husk, but shucking it when it’s fresh out of the oven can be a steamy experience… I’ll have to try it push-pop style like this
@brhfl - Seems like it should work. If it becomes too dry to slide out, I wonder if a bowl of water in the oven while it’s baking would make it steamier/less dry?
@KDemo that’s the only way I’ve eaten corn for the last year. (Unless someone else cooks it.)
@KDemo The husk itself does a really good job of keeping moisture in, though I usually wet the whole thing first anyway to keep the husk itself from drying out too much (more a holdover from cooking it on a grill where the husk might catch fire).
@KDemo I was totally opposed to doing this when my husband first brought it up a few yrs ago. But, I gave it a go and have been doing so ever since. Easy Peasy and no silk stuck in your teeth.
@KDemo we just throw them on the grill in the husk - peels off easily once cooked.
@KDemo I shuck them in the grocery store and use waxed paper to cook them. Even less mess that way.
I want to try the potato flower thing.
@sammydog01 I do too, but theirs looked a little too roasted on top for my tastes.
My favorite kitchen hack used to be going to Souper Salad, ordering takeout, filling the salad bowl with cut veggies, then taking all those veggies home and using half of them to make stir-fry one night, and the other half to make pasta the next night. I’d get five or six meals off of one Souper Salad trip. Recently my supermarket started offering a 3-pound “grilling” box of cleaned and sliced portobello mushrooms, yellow and green squash, red and white onions, and red, yellow, and green bell peppers for $5. They also have a maybe 1.5lb pound “fajita” box of cut up colored bell peppers and white and red onions for $3. You could not buy just the peppers and mushrooms for $5, so this is a fantastic deal. I usually get at least 5 meals out of the grilling box in pasta dishes, stir fry dishes, and salads. The onions and peppers in the fajita box freeze really well so I pack them down into little snack bags and freeze them for using for weeks in different dishes.
I also have been mixing tuna and Greek yogurt and freezing it in ice cubes to make “pupsicles” for the dogs. I got a silicone tray with pawprint shapes, and I wrap it in a plastic bag till they freeze to avoid stanking up the joint, then pop them out into a sandwich bag.
I’ve been squeezing lime into water and freezing it as ice cubes to make instant limeade and lime water. I like the idea of making the bigger ice cubes with the actual slices in them. I also really like the idea of freezing cubes of olive oil with fresh herbs in it. I did not know that you could freeze olive oil.
@moondrake
Awesome stuff.
Re tuna
Don’t know if this is urban legend or not:
Have heard somewhere or other that you can’t predict or count on mercury levels being cool in canned tuna. So limit the amount and frequency or something.
I don’t eat so much tuna anyway …
Anyone’s know if this risk is real?
@f00l According to my reading, arctic circle predators are all dangerous to eat regularly and in quantity due to heavy metal contamination. A few years ago I read that you should avoid cod liver oil and get cod skin oil, as heavy metals tend to concentrate in the organs of arctic circle predators. The pups only get one pupsicle a day, which contains about a half spoonful of tuna and a spoonful of yogurt, so it should be well below any hazardous amounts.
A lot of these seem painfully obvious to me… But maybe that’s just because I’ve watched way too much Food Network and YouTube.
I was at a party once, and the host was trying to cut a mango, and he was completely butchering it. When I asked if I could assist, I showed them the “hack” from this video and several people were blown away.
@RiotDemon - I learned that mango hack off an Hercule Poirot episode but there was a little more to it. You take a knife and cut into the mango so the blade runs along the outer edge of the inner seed. Then you take a large spoon and slip it into the cut so the leading edge of the spoon cups over the flat side of the seed, working the concave side of the spoon over the seed so as to completely free it from the flesh. Once you have done both sides the seed will be free inside the mango; open the mango, remove the seed, score the flesh as shown and voila! Pop it out into cubes.
I’m too OCD to attach Command hooks on an angle like that, no matter how functional.
@heartny I agree! That totally bothered me when I saw the first one go up and when they sat the lid in it it still wasn’t ok.
@heartny I also don’t see why having my pot lids within reach is a plus. It’s not like I can use them without my pots.
My cat has posted a Thanksgiving Feast recipe contest over on Woot:
Winner Winner Turkey Dinner! An Unofficial Contest
@therealjrn I figured your cat was too busy posting about GOT to come up with a menu.
I like the potatoes from hot water to cold water to get the skin off but I wonder if it would then be too cold to eat. The egg trick to get the shells off was a great tidbit to add to my list.
When cookies get stale or hard, even if they are sealed in a container, I put a slice (or two) of bread in and they become soft again and I use the dried up bread to make croutons.
@WTFsunshine We do that only for potato salad because it does give the potatoes a different texture for mashing.
Wear an Ove Glove when using a mandoline. That’s a kitchen hack to PREVENT a kitchen hack!
@aetris ove gloves are cut resistant?
@RiotDemon - I wouldn’t grab any knife blades with them, but they’ll resist any mandoline blade I’ve got. Even in the wider-mouthed setting the glove just brushes over the blade. Which isn’t the case at all with fingers… And those mandoline gripper things are pretty useless with most stuff.
Awesome! Thanks for the share!!
I have always been known to be a hack in the kitchen.
So I decided to try out the frozen citrus thing. I got a dozen little plastic bowls at Dollar Tree, two were cracked so I had ten. I had a dozen tiny key limes, four small limes, one lemon and one orange. I put a little water in each bowl and squeezed in the juice of a key lime. I sliced the limes, lemon and orange thin and distributed 2-3 slices of each to each bowl, lime at the bottom, then lemon, then orange. I topped them off with water and froze over night. I was worried I would have trouble getting them out but they just slid right out of the bowls when I tilted them. I tucked them two apiece into lunch bags and threw them back in the freezer. Looking forward to using them this weekend.
Two kitchen hacks- one for food, one involving food.
If you’re making spaghetti squash, there’s one super easy way to prepare it: poke it with a fork 5 or 6 times, then shove it in the microwave to cook.
From “Urawaza- secret everyday tips and tricks from Japan”, here’s a way to clean up glass and other tiny stuff that fell on the floor- use one or more pieces of bread on the floor to grab the stuff. It’ll stick into the bread, and then you can discard the bread with the shards in it.
@dashcloud
/youtube threadbanger glass bread
I turn off the lights and place a flashlight on the floor to reflect against the glass. Helps to find pieces I missed with the broom.
@dashcloud - Poke the spaghetti squash with a fork, then (size-dependent) microwave for 10-15 minutes; let cool for @ 10 minutes, then slice in half and remove the seeds. I plan to do this tonight!
SLIGHT update - apparently you need to stop microwaving every 5 minutes to roll it a bit so it cooks evenly. Otherwise it’s a bit al dente, but you can always cook it a little more after cutting.
Find a banana, poke fork holes in a banana peel then microwave it for a bit. Carefully peel banana and enjoy warm banana goo.
@medz Put some chocolate chips and mini marshmallows in there first and I’m all over it.