Folks responded enthusiastically to my diary of small life hacks and asked for more, so let’s step into the kitchen for a few food and cooking related hacks.
- Embrace the joys of leftovers. We cook more on weekends so that we can cook less on work days. A quiche on Saturday leaves half for a quiche dinner during the week (when Tall Son lived with us, two on Saturday made for two dinners and two of his breakfasts.) Chicken barbecued and smoked with hickory on the weekend re-emerges during the week as enchiladas, soups, or sandwiches.
- Tool canisters: they exist for a reason. The smaller on the counter where we do our most prep has small wooden spoons, some spatulas, two small whisks, and a long tablespoon/half teaspoon measure. The larger ones near the stove have larger spoons, tongs, pancake turners, and so on. Tools at hand make cooking easier.
- Buy several sets of measuring cups and leave one in each canister, scaled to what is in it. We have a one cup measure in the flour, half cup in the plain sugar, and so on.
- A good scale. If you don’t cook by weight yet, browse around to read why it makes many things much, much easier.
- The great white base (no, not Trump voters): equal parts mayonnaise, plain yogurt, and buttermilk. This is modified from the Kaiser salad dressing a nutritionist gave Tall Papa’s father. Add something to get a salad dressing or sauce: feta, blue cheese, dill, tarragon. Add more of the solid to made a feta or blue cheese dip. Add more buttermilk to make a cold soup. If you’re curious I’ll expand in the comments.
- Almost any entree can be added to soup if you cut the solids up into spoon sized pieces. Except turnips. Don’t do this with turnips. The whole soup will taste of turnips. Don’t ask how I know this.
- Cloth table napkins can last a week if you refold them occasionally to bring up fresh sides.
- Get a small three tiered cart and put it on the counter. All the fresh vegetables and fruits can be put here, where you can easily see what is on hand and what is ripe, for little more than the foot print of a fruit bowl. Ours usually has bananas on the bottom shelf, seasonal fruits on the middle shelf, and garlic, onions, sweet potatoes and other underground veg on the top. (I realized writing this that the order is upside down from the field but it works for us.) I line the shelves with cushiony shelf liner.`
- Air drying is more sanitary than wiping with a dish towel. If you don’t have a convenient place to set aside for this, a dish towel on the counter will serve.