Kitchen tricks and tips

[karrie]

1. When sampling a dish, it's easiest to have a spare spoon on hand. Simply thrashing about in the dish with a spatula until you've splashed some of the scalding mixture onto your face is a BAD idea, and an unrealiable way of getting a true taste of the concoction.

2. Keep burn bandages in your first aid kit under the sink... some people are known to burn themselves in stupid ways in the kitchen.


Anyone else have any useful kitchen advice?

 

[Twila]

1. Stainless Steel will remove the smell of fish from your hands. You can buy a bar of stainlss steel or you can use your sink. Just don't use your faucets, they're actually just chrome.

2. Keep onions in the fridge to keep them from making you cry when cutting them. The colder the better.

 

[karrie]

1. Most of the things you need for cleaning your kitchen are already in it. Vinegar, baking soda, salt, lemons... all come in handy for various messes, and with the simple addition of borax, a laundry product, you can disinfect surfaces inexpensively as well.

A paste of baking soda and water left to soak on a mess will often lift and scrub clean any gunk you can get on your stove, without scratching the surface. For tougher jobs, salt comes in handy (especially for scrubbing clean wooden cutting boards).

Vinegar makes a great glass cleaner, and pouring it into drains with after a couple teaspoons of baking soda can do wonders for deodorizing a foul drain.

 

[Said1]

pepper is a coagulant.

 

[Twila]

pepper is a coagulant.

So, when hiding the knives wasn't enough....

 

[karrie]

pepper is a coagulant.

so is cornstarch. I think I'd rather grab for the starch personally. lol.

 

[Said1]

My ex always went for the pepper. Total masochist!

 

[Said1]

So, when hiding the knives wasn't enough....

:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:


Only YOU can stop drinking and preparing salads.

 

[karrie]

My ex always went for the pepper. Total masochist!

I guess it depends what you have on hand too. I only have a pepper grinder... not about to try and grind pepper whilst bleeding. I can however get to cornstarch easily.

 

[#juan]

2. Keep burn bandages in your first aid kit under the sink... some people are known to burn themselves in stupid ways in the kitchen.

Here is about as stupid a way to burn yourself as any I've ever heard about: How about putting an oven mit on one hand, pulling the oven door open with the oven mit hand, and grabbing the hot pot with a bare hand. I wasn't burned very badly. I realized what I was doing just a hair after the nick of time.....:roll::-?

 

[karrie]

Here is about as stupid a way to burn yourself as any I've ever heard about: How about putting an oven mit on one hand, pulling the oven door open with the oven mit hand, and grabbing the hot pot with a bare hand. I wasn't burned very badly. I realized what I was doing just a hair after the nick of time.....:roll::-?

I almost... very almost... did that the day before yesterday. I nearly cried just at the thought of what the coming weeks would have been like. The kids were busy talking away to me, and I'd opened the oven to check on some chicken I had cooking on a ceramic pan. I couldn't quite see it, so I reached in to pull the whole thing out to look. I caught myself with probably a cm or so between my hand and the pan.

So, kitchen tip... pay attention!!

 

[Said1]

Here is about as stupid a way to burn yourself as any I've ever heard about: How about putting an oven mit on one hand, pulling the oven door open with the oven mit hand, and grabbing the hot pot with a bare hand. I wasn't burned very badly. I realized what I was doing just a hair after the nick of time.....:roll::-?

:lol:

I've done worse. I forgot to unplugged the hand blender when i was cleaning it, almost sliced my finger nail off. :-(

 

[#juan]

:lol:

I've done worse. I forgot to unplugged the hand blender when i was cleaning it, almost sliced my finger nail off. :-(

You were lucky. You could have had a much shorter finger....I'm glad it only caught the nail...;-)

 

[Diarygirl]

LOL Juan....I can laugh because the same sorta thing happened to me once. Man did I get a startle and a blister....I agree....total concentration whilst in the kitchen is required!
Here's a little cleaning tip...use aluminum foil on the bottom of your oven as it will stay clean longer...the foil catches the drips. Also, when cleaning your oven racks....spray oven cleaner on them and put them in garbage bags to stay moist while cleaning the oven....it amazingly cleans hard/crusted grim off easily.

Here is about as stupid a way to burn yourself as any I've ever heard about: How about putting an oven mit on one hand, pulling the oven door open with the oven mit hand, and grabbing the hot pot with a bare hand. I wasn't burned very badly. I realized what I was doing just a hair after the nick of time.....:roll::-?

 

[#juan]

Diarygirl
Here is something we ran across just a few days ago. We just bought new appliances a short time ago. The stove that was in the current house when we bought it was not self-cleaning. We had company coming and we wanted everything spotless. We put the oven on the clean cycle over two hours before our company was to arrive. As it turned out, the clean cycle wouldn't let us into the oven for about three and a half hours. Needless to say, we couldn't put our horsdoeuvres in the oven and we kind of wrecked our own evening.

 

[#juan]

We just got a new stove and I could write a couple paragraphs about some of the idiosyncrasies of the new smooth top convection stoves.
1. If you are baking something, turn the oven on to the desired temperature before you even start because it can take almost half an hour to heat up. This is a step backwards because in our old stove the Broiler element came on to help heat the oven quickly. Never took more than five minutes to heat up.
2. The stove top elements can take at least a half hour to cool off so they are a possible burn danger for some time after they've been turned off.

There are a few other things, but these two are the main ones.

 

[karrie]

LOL Juan....I can laugh because the same sorta thing happened to me once. Man did I get a startle and a blister....I agree....total concentration whilst in the kitchen is required!
Here's a little cleaning tip...use aluminum foil on the bottom of your oven as it will stay clean longer...the foil catches the drips. Also, when cleaning your oven racks....spray oven cleaner on them and put them in garbage bags to stay moist while cleaning the oven....it amazingly cleans hard/crusted grim off easily.

Some new stove have a hidden element (like my new one), so you can't do that. Putting foil in the bottom of my stove would likely destroy it, as the element would then be beneath the foil and you'd be trying to heat the oven through foil.

 

[#juan]

You're right Karrie

There is a blurb in the owner's manual about putting foil on the bottom of the convection oven. A definite no-no.

 

[dirtylinder]

For cleaning the floor try one of those "shark" steam cleaners...it disinfects without chemicals....ready in seconds and is quick quick quick....

 

[gopher]

10,000 posts for Juan!

Mucho congrats!!!