Cooking Tidbitz

Cooking Tidbitz

An easy way to prepare lasagna noodles?

Soak lasagna noodles in hot tap water for 20 minutes prior to using in recipe. They will be soft enough for your recipe, but will not fall apart when handled when assembling your lasagna. After cooking your dish, you will not taste the difference between boiling them and soaking them.

How do you keep your fried food both warm and crisp?

When you are frying your food, for example chicken breasts, an easy way to keep your food both warm and crips until you are ready to serve your dish is by using a cooling rack. Place the rack on top of an aluminum foil covered cooking sheet and place it in a warm oven. As you finish frying your recipe, place your chicken breasts, right on the cooling rack. This will prevent your dish from becoming soggy, keeping it crisp, while keeping it warm. The Rachel Ray Show

Do your hands smell like onion?

After cutting onions, an easy way to get rid of the smell off your hands is to take a silver spoon and rub your hands with the spoon under cold running water.

Spray Aluminum Foil before covering!

Before covering your casserole or cheese topped dish with aluminum foil, spray with non-stick spray. This prevents the top of the dish from getting stuck to the bottom of the foil.

Two Things to know when Cooking with Garlic!

Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste
of garlic and at the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of garlic.

Cooking Ground Beef Healthier

Add a teaspoon of water when frying ground beef.
It will help pull the grease away from the meat while cooking.

Keep your bread warm. (Perfect for the Holidays!)

This will be good just in time for the holidays. Go outside and get a few bricks, or rocks that are around the same size. Clean them and wrap them up in tinfoil. Place them in the oven and heat them up. After, place them in your bread basket and cover them with a cloth. Place your bread on top and the radiant heat from the brick/rock will keep your bread warm. A perfect for a nice dinner.

Need coffee and ran out of filters?

Use a clean paper towel. Cut the towel to fit into your coffee maker. Push down slowly into filter basket, and make coffee as usual. I am enjoying my coffee right now because of this.

How to Reheat Pizza
Heat leftover pizza in a nonstick skillet on top of the stove; set heat to med-low and heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy micro pizza.

Making frozen bread and rolls fresh again!

Do you have a whole loaf of bread, unsliced, in the freezer? Some leftover rolls, or a half loaf of frozen, unsliced bread? Want to make them good as new?

Run the bread under warm water just to rinse the outside well, a few seconds. Place on the rack in a 50-300 degree oven and check on it after ten minutes. Voila, rejuvenated bread, hot and crusty and good as fresh. Tidbitz given by Karen K., West Bloomfield, Mi

Ways to use coffee filters...who knew!

and you can buy 1,000 at a time at the dollar stores for almost nothing....

1. Cover bowls or dishes when cooking in the microwave. Coffee filters make excellent covers.

2. Filter broken cork from wine. If you break the cork when opening a wine bottle, filter the wine through a coffee filter.

3. Recycle frying oil. After frying, strain oil through a sieve lined with a coffee filter.

4. Weigh chopped foods. Place chopped ingredients in a coffee filter on a kitchen scale.

5. Prevent a Popsicle from dripping. Poke one or two holes as needed in a coffee filter.

6. Put a few in a plate and put your fried bacon, French fries, chicken fingers, etc on them. Soaks out all the grease.

(This tidbitz was given by my girlfriend Dense.)

An easy way to use your measuring cups
Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water.
Dump out the hot water, but don't dry cup. Next, add your ingredient (peanut butter, honey, etc.) and watch how easily it comes right out.