Sweet Kitchen Tips 5

When using your blender to make dressings and you need to add oil or melted butter, the whirring blender can splatter back up through the opening in the lid and make a mess. To eliminate this problem, place a small funnel in the opening and pour the liquid through it slowly and steadily - No MESS.  This also works if using the food processor.

And speaking of grease…

Those basting brushes can be difficult to clean, and usually no matter what you do they tend to remain sticky and then get smelly.  But, here comes a little helper to the rescued. Wash the dirty brush thoroughly with liquid dish soap and very hot water, then rinse well and shake dry.  Place the brush, bristles pointing down, into a cup and fill the cup with coarse salt until the bristles are covered.  The salt draws moisture out of the bristles and keeps it dry and fresh between uses.

and speaking of salt…

Did you know that using salt can prevent flare-ups in the oven when using the broiler? Yep.  Cover the bottom of the broiler pan with aluminum foil and 2 cups of kosher salt. Place the perforated rack on top with the food you are cooking.  The salt catches any grease and prevents flare ups.

Sweet Kitchen Tips 4

As a avid baker, I have tons of baking pans, they are all different sizes and volumes, in most cases the manufacturers indication of size on them often are either totally illegible or nonexistent, leaving me with guest work when I’m trying to find the right pan.  Not good.  So, I have come up with a sure way to have them all nice and labeled.  Use oven safe metal paint (I found mine at the hardware store) to mark the bottom of each pan with the dimensions and/or capacity.  It will never fade and one quick look and you are all set.

How about when it’s time to bake those cookies and the recipe calls to line a baking sheet with parchment paper? Yeah, time to do the battle with the curly – unruly paper. Well, I put it on its place! Grab four refrigerator magnets and place one over each corner of the parchment.  Now the paper will stay in place while you scoop that cookie batter in place! (remember to remove the magnets before it goes into the oven!)

How about when you are trying to use the baking pan to pour bake batter? Obviously the magnets are not a good idea, so another way to keep the paper in place is to coat the baking sheet with a light coating of cooking spray making the parchment paper adhere to the sticky surface.  Now who is the boss?

And in the subject of coating pans…

Make your own all-in-one baker’s coating mix. Combine 2 parts shortening with 1 part flour and brush this paste lightly onto the cake pans when you need to coat the them for baking.  And the best part is that you can store any remaining mixture at room temperature in a plastic resalable container, so you’ll have the coating on hand when the need arises.

Sweet Kitchen Tips 3

And I’m back from a glorious vacation out in the wood.  As you can see, while we did have cellular service we had very limited internet.  Remember when dial-up use to be the best.thing.ever?

Yeah, well, after you seen mecca, slow dial up its not going to make the cut.  So, we decided (all of us, except for Tom) to let our technology drug of choice be put to pasture for a weeks time.

For the first 24 hours, we had a very hard time letting go.  Afterwards… “what iPhone?” while on the deck, sipping margaritas.

But, now I’m back with my tech-y drug of choice: high-speed, 3G networks and fully connected!  I will write up a post about our travels and how we saw wild animal life right in our cabin, as in “RIGHT THERE, staring back at us”. And will post pictures - because we took a ton of those.  

But, for now I will leave you with some kitchen tips, which actually came about when I found out that our great kitchen cabin was beautiful in the outside only.  As far as stocking the place up with the essentials kitchen gadgets, it was lacking, so we put our thinking caps on because as Plato will say: “Necessity, who is the mother of invention” will always come to the rescue.

Croissants for breakfast? or your sandwich bread of choice?  Except that you hate to crush then when using a knife to slice them apart - and if that knife is dull and awful, trust me, that croisant is not going to be pretty. To the rescue? Kitchen shears, or in my case a pair of scissors, was the solution.  Aim the points of the shears/scissors into the croissant at a right angle and start snipping.  Voila! Perfectly sliced croissants every time - the one you mangle before you came up with this, you can snack on.

Biscuits for breakfast? It’s on!  No so much when you roll out your dough and no biscuit cutter in sight. But plenty of caps from spray cans!  Specifically from the nonstick spay can, which is perfect substitute for a 2 1/2-inch round cutter.  The edge is sharp enough to clearly cut thru the dough and with just a slight squeeze of the lid, the dough easily releases from the cap.