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Miscellaneous Tips
This is a collection of tips that I've picked up along the way. If you have relevant household tips that you would like to share, please e-mail them and we'll post them here.
This is what we've got so far:
- Disinfect Your Kitchen Sponge
- Speak to a Human
- Cheaper Chicken
- Whole Yolk
- Quick Roasted Garlic
- Chicken Wing Feathers
- Yuck Bucket
- Home Made Window Cleaner
- Kitchen Sanity
- Blulow Blog
- Disinfecting Your Kitchen Sponge: What a nasty little germ breeding tool the kitchen sponge can become. Using it to clean up the mess after handling raw meat tends to spread the bacteria from the meat over every surface. Using plain kitchen dish soap cleans the sponge superficially, but the bacteria will live on.
To kill the bacteria try placing the sponge in a shallow bowl. Pour hydrogen peroxide (3% grade) over the sponge, just enough to saturate it. Let it sit for about 5 or 10 minutes or so (watch it foam). Wash it out and repeat a couple of times. You'll notice that the foaming will diminish. Once it stops foaming profusely, the germs and bacteria have been defeated. Try disinfecting nightly, or right after using the sponge to clean the remnants of raw meat.
Using hydrogen peroxide is a much cheaper option than disinfectant wipes. A large 32 oz. bottle of hydrogen peroxide cost 87 cents in Wal-Mart. A canister of 35 disinfectant wipes may cost anywhere from $2.50 and up.
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- Speak to a Human: Tired of getting mechanical voices on the phone? Do you crave human contact when you want a simple customer service question answered?
Visit www.gethuman.com. They have a database of phone numbers and instructions on how to speak to a real live person. I've found it very useful.
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- The whole is cheaper than the sum of the parts. It takes a bit of work, but buying whole chickens costs a whole lot less than
 buying chicken parts. If you catch a sale on whole chickens, buy several (I buy anywhere from 5 to 8 at a time). When you're through cutting the the chicken freeze the various parts in groups as if you had purchased the parts from the store. The pieces that no one likes to eat, use them to make chicken stock. Once the parts are boiled, my able bodied assistant (my daughter), pulls the meat off the bones, and we use it to entice Fido to eat his nutrient rich horrible tasting dog food. The giblets are great for gravy. If we have too much gravy, we freeze the extra in little sandwich bags and defrost it daily to pour over the dog's food (waste not, want not).
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- No yolking around: Don't you just love it when you decide to have a boiled egg and end up with mostly yolk because the whites are still firmly stuck to the egg shell? Well, a little salt in the water when boiling the egg should solve your problem. I can't tell you the scientific reasons why it works, but it works for me. I've also been told that vinegar will have the same affect as salt (I think salt smells better).
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- Microwave Roasted Garlic: Too hot to turn on the oven to roast garlic? Try this. Take a few cloves of
 garlic, put it in a small container and pour a little olive oil over it. You want a small container so the olive oil will remain on/near the garlic. Stick the container in the microwave for oh...about 25 seconds (time will vary depending on the amount of garlic). That's it...microwave roasted garlic (yummy).
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- Pesky Chicken Wing Feathers: If your family loves chicken wings as much as mine does, you spend a lot of time cleaning them. Those little feathers (hair like thin) never want to come off when cleaning. Don't waste your time pulling each one of those pesky little hairs. Singe them off. If you have a gas stove, quickly hold the hairs over the fire and they will singe off. Then you can wash season cook and eat your chicken without staring at little chicken feather hairs.
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- Yuck Bucket: Yes, I said yuck bucket. Any cook who cleans chicken or fish or cuts the fat off of meat needs a yuck bucket. Let me explain what it is. Get a large bowl or tupperware container (or not so large depending on how much yuck you'll have), and place it on the counter. Then take one of the plastic grocery bags
 you get from the store and line the bowl. Make sure that the bag doesn't have a hole in it or else you'll have a yuck bowl too.
As you clean the yuck, chuck it in the lined bowl. When you're all done, just grab the bag and toss it in the trash. It saves you from walking back and forth to the trash with your yuck (dripping yuck juice on the floor isn't pleasant). I find this especially helpful when shelling shrimp.
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- Natural Window Cleaner: When your current spray bottle of window spray runs out, don't throw it away. Rinse it out and reuse it with a natural alternative. If your spray bottle is the 32oz size, add 2 tablespoons of white vinegar and fill the rest with water. Your home-made solution will clean just as well as the store bought one. It's cheaper and safer for your family.
Don't worry about the smell. The vinegar is pretty well diluted, and any residual smell dissipates quickly.
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- Kitchen Sanity Tip: Always clean your kitchen before you go to bed.
Wait, don't click away, just hear me out...Imagine that you're way too tired and frazzled to clean the kitchen so you go to bed.
The next morning you wake up, not fully rested because you know you have a dirty kitchen ahead of you. You get up and make a cup of coffee to get your day started. Before you get to the coffee maker, you look at your kitchen and are de-energized as you look at the mess.
You start to clean the mess before you can even make your coffe and two of your three little loved ones wake up and start "Mom, I'm hungry." "Mom, where are my slippers" "Hon, can you fix me a quick egg sandwich before I leave for work."
So, now, not only do you have a dirty kitcen, no coffee and no energy. Your family is starting to make demands that you're not ready for. This all could have been avoided if you only had cleaned the kitchen the night before.
Here's what I do. When I'm absolutely frazzled and tired and don't want anyone to bother me and I don't want to clean the kitchen, I put in my earphones, music and tune everyone out. At that point, I imagine I'm on the Home and Garden network showing the tired housewives out there how to quickly and efficiently clean the kitchen. Once my fantasy ends, my kitchen is clean and I can then go to bed. The next day when I get back into the kitchen (the same kitchen that I swore I'd never go back in again) at least it's clean.
Gotta enjoy the small vicotries.
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Felicia A. Williams is a freelance writer and webmaster of this website, Visit Hudson Valley.com and No Job for Mom.com. She also blogs about Living Green one choice at a time.
Last Modified: Monday, 26-May-2008 12:19:16 EDT
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