Today, I thought it would be fun to talk about some kitchen hacks. These are all just quick, simple hacks that you may know about and some you may not, but it’s always good to be reminded!
Here’s one for peeling potatoes. If you’re busy making mashed potatoes and you’re peeling them, and you don’t want them to go brown from the sugar on the surface exposed to the air, then you just need to have a bowl of water. Put the potatoes in the water as you go, and they’ll stay nice and crisp, and not go brown.
When you’re making rice, you can add some bone broth instead of water, or add a vegetable stock cube to the normal amount of water that you use. That’ll give you more flavor, and in the case of the bone broth, good nutrition.
When you’re cooking pasta and you have the water ready, you bring it to a boil and add the salt to that water. Joe Basianich from MasterChef always says “Salt like the ocean”, so quite a lot of salt is a good amount to add to that water. Also, a tiny little bit of olive oil or coconut oil added to the water will help the pasta not stick together.
When you boil potatoes with their skin on, then put them in ice water till they’re cool. Then it’s easy to just rub the skin off, and you don’t need to peel them. It’s actually delicious, though. to make mashed potatoes with a bit of skin. Garlic mashed potatoes with the skin in is something I remember enjoying a lot in the states.
A great kitchen hack is to use ice cube trays. For example, if you have some leftovers of basil pesto, put them in an ice cube tray. Alternatively, you can buy a container of pesto and put it into the ice cube tray immediately. Then as you need pesto, you take out an ice cube, and it defrosts quite quickly in a bowl, and then you can use it. You can use either ice cube trays or soup containers for things like this. You can get those silicone soup containers in different sizes, so you can divide your barbecue sauce or your leftover soup. Take your portion of soup, and divide it up into those soup cubes. You can store passion fruit for flavoring things when you’re baking. A lot of those kinds of things can be put into ice cube trays. Leftovers can go in the ice cube trays, or as you make food, you can portion it out into the containers, and freeze it ready for when you need one of those portions.
If you have fresh herbs like parsley that you want to use, pull them through a cheese grater with the stalk first, and then the little bits of the herb will pull off and get broken up a little bit, and you can just use them straight away like that instead of having to chop them.
Crushing garlic is always the thing. You get all these fancy garlic crushes, but they’re so hard to clean, and the garlic gets stuck in all the places. There’s a couple that I enjoy using, such as one that’s a roller, but it’s also quite easy to use a potato masher, a fork, or even a big knife to crush the garlic. To get the garlic cloves out of the head ready to use, you can slightly separate and crush them, and then put them in a jar and give it a good shake. The clove should come out separated from all the skin.
So when you’re using a lemon, there’s a couple of ways to make it easier. One thing you can do is roll it on the counter until it’s soft, and then pierce it with a skewer or a toothpick. Move the skewer around inside to mash up the insides of the lemon, and then when you take it out, there’s a little hole, and you can squeeze the lemon juice onto whatever you are using. Or, when you cut it in half, it’s easy to hold your hand underneath to collect the pips as you squeeze, and the juice will run through your fingers.
Bananas always seem to be green when they arrive and then go brown very fast. Here’s one thing you can do to keep them fresh longer. When they arrive, wrap the stems with foil or plastic, just around the stem part, and then they seem to last longer that way.
When you’re dicing a sweet melon, you can cut it up into slices and then either run your knife along the skin to cut it off, or you can leave it there, and then quickly slice the melon into sections, and then you can serve it like that as an appetizer, or just eat the pieces. That looks elegant, and it’s also an easy way to chop it. This works great with watermelon too.
In a similar way, when you want to cut mangoes, you can cut the two sides off by finding where the pip is, and then dice the mango in the skin and then flip it inside out like a porcupine. Then just eat the little pieces off the skin.
When you’re cutting avocados, it helps to carefully cut around the whole avocado around the pip, and then twist to separate the two halves. Then hit your knife against the pip, and twist to pull that out using the knife. You can use a spoon to scoop the avo out of the skin, and then you can slice it. You could also crisscross dice it while it’s in the skin, and then use a spoon to scoop it out. If you have half an avocado left that you want to keep in the fridge, it’s best to leave the pip in to prevent it going brown, and you can also cover it with something like a bit of plastic. It’s not ideal, but it works.
If you don’t have a fancy olive pitter, you can take any soda bottle, whether plastic or glass and balance the olive on the top. Hopefully, it won’t be small enough to fit through the gap. Balance it on top of the bottle, and then use a skewer and push the pip through into the bottle, and then you have your olive ready to use. You can de-core strawberries in a similar way. Use a metal or perhaps a plastic straw, and either hold the strawberry or balance it on something, and then push the straw through the middle to remove the green part. Then they’re easy to eat.
To marinate steak, it’s a good thing to add pineapple juice because it’ll tenderize it really well. The bromelain in the pineapple breaks down the proteins in the meat, so adding pineapple both gives a nice sweetness, and helps break down your meat.
A fun thing to do is to take a cupcake or muffin tray that you’d use in the oven, and then use the bottom instead of putting things in the top. You can make cookie dough and then you place it on the bottom of the muffin tray around each of the container parts. You’re going to get an inverted shape like a little bowl. Baking the cookies on the underside of the muffin tray like that gives you little bowls to put dessert in – delicious ones that you can eat.
Any meat that you take out of the fridge for cooking, whether it’s steak stroganoff or stew lamb, it’s always best to let it sit at room temperature for about half an hour in the summer. Just be aware of it, especially with chicken, which you should do for a bit shorter than 10 minutes. Generally, though, I leave it for about half an hour, and it brings the meat to room temperature, and also makes it more flavored and less tough when you’re cooking it. So, leave it for half an hour, and then season it with salt and pepper, and then you would start the cooking process.
Have you heard of a baine? – a container or a basket to store your utensils on the countertop. It’s easy to have the ones you use most often nearby when you’re cooking. We have a couple utensil holders that have holes in them, so we can put our utensils in there to dry, and they won’t hold water. You can also get ones that are solid stainless steel, and they’re just very convenient to have in a couple of places in your kitchen. Then you don’t have to have all your utensils in your drawer, and they’re easy to access. It helps a lot, especially for those big kitchen spoons and egg lifters.
When you’re cooking, it’s important to season each part of something you’re going to put together. If you’re making lasagna, you need to make sure you season your sauce, your meat, and whatever you’re gonna be using. Also, season something that you’re cooking at each stage. When the meat’s raw, you can add some salt, and then in the pan, you can season it again to make sure that your flavor is good.
If your cutting board slips while you cut, it’s very unsafe, so you can use a kitchen towel to prevent that. Dampen it slightly, put it on the counter, and then put the cutting board on top to prevent it slipping.
Also, if you’re doing lots of chopping, or you’re opening plastic containers with vegetables in them, instead of having to walk back and forth to your kitchen bin many times, just keep a bowl nearby for the scraps. You can put them in there whether they’re compost or rubbish scraps, and then take them to the relevant bin when you’re done.
If you burn something in a pan or pot, the way you get it clean is to fill it up with water. However high the burn marks are, go just a little bit higher. Then heat it on the stove and add some spirit vinegar. Give it a bit of a stir to make sure it reaches all the spots, and then once it’s boiled, you can pour the water out, and the marks should be gone. You can repeat if it’s got some stubborn dirt on it.
Then – last tip for today – if you need something to cool down fast to use in the next stage of your baking or cooking, you can use an ice bath in the same way that you would for eggs when you boil them. You just need two different size bowls, and you can put the ice and water in the lower one, and then the sauce or whatever in the upper one, and it’ll help you to quickly cool that element down.
This was fun, and I’ll do another lot in a different session, but I hope there are some things that you can apply. Send me your ideas if you have some. You can do that at karyn@familyfoodformoms.com. I hope you have a great cooking week!
