If you’re here, you’ll probably be glad to know that yes, you can peel and cut potatoes the day before you plan to serve them — and that it’s super easy! All you have to do is submerge the bare potato pieces in water and refrigerate (more on that later).
Storing garlic properly is an easy way to make sure it retains its quality, flavor, and pungency for as long as possible — and life is way too short to eat bad garlic. Here’s everything you need to know about the best way to store your whole, peeled, and minced bulbs.
By Corey Williams
Corey Williams
Corey Williams is a food writer for MyRecipes and Allrecipes. She has a decade of journalism experience.
Updated on December 9, 2022
Judging solely by the names — spare and baby back — you would naturally assume one rack of ribs is smaller than the other, and that assumption would be correct. (Though if you assume one of them is extra, you’d swing and miss.) That said, size isn’t the only detail that sets these two cuts of pork apart, so let’s dive in.
A pantry is a room or cupboard where beverages, food, (sometimes) dishes, household cleaning products, linens, or provisions are stored within a home or office. Food and beverage pantries serve in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen.
I’ve talked about Meal Prep and Recipe Prep. To my mind, that just leaves Pantry Prep. What is Pantry Prep? Pantry Prep, to me, is going through the items currently found in your pantry and making sure you have what you need to make your family’s favorite meals.
Stop right now and think about your pantry. Do you know what is in your pantry? If you had to, could you grab what you needed from your pantry to make a satisfying meal? If you had unexpected guests drop by close to mealtime, could you extend your planned meal to cover these guests? Maybe it’s time to organize and restock your pantry!
There are dozens of shelf organizers that you can use to make your pantry easier to work with. Start with defining how much space you have to work with. In my cabinets, I discovered that my spices are the hardest to keep organized.
This is the type of organizer for my Spices I currently have. It fits into the small, narrow corner cabinet.
You can find it here: https://tinyurl.com/yf585zxt
I’m starting to consider this one. It seems to be very versatile and easily customizable.
You can find this one here: https://tinyurl.com/5cb9z84h
Bins like these can help you gather all those odd-sized items and store them neatly. They are also useful for the many bottles you have.
They can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9xyaj8
To show you what I mean, recently I put my groceries away only to find that I now had 3 bottles of Ketchup, 2 bottles of Balsamic Vinegar, and 2 bottles of Molasses!
If I’d had any kind of organization, I could have avoided that. Since then, I have tried to rotate things on my pantry shelves, putting the newest items in the back and the older items in the front. If you have the room, try to separate things into zones. Keep your staples like sugar, flour, etc., all together.
Can racks such as this one help enforce the idea of “first in, first out.” This rack can also be stacked if you have the space.
Find it here: https://tinyurl.com/4cc68mzd
See these? They may become your best friend when you start organizing your pantry. There are a number of sizes that work great for storing food items that you can’t store in the original packaging.
Here’s where I found it: https://tinyurl.com/5dnphsju
If you notice in the After Photo, you can see labels on several of the containers. That’s an easy way to keep track of what’s in the container exactly. Bread Flour and All-Purpose Flour look the same but are not interchangeable! Also, on the various containers of pasta, I labeled the container with how much a serving was. Using containers for the pasta, instead of the original box made it much easier to see if I needed more.
Most cookbooks that are for beginners tend to have a section on what the author recommends for the pantry. In searching Pinterest, I found several pantry checklists. I’ve started a board of Pantry ideas where I’m collecting these ideas and others.
The format you use is completely up to you. I can’t tell you what will work best for you. Here are a couple of ideas and where I found them.
This is a simple checklist that you can use. I found it on All Recipes.
Take a moment to follow me on Pinterest. My next post in this series will focus on why we’re doing this. I promise you, there’s definitely a reason!
Meal prep is something that many of us leave until the last moment. I’m not talking about taking the meat out of the freezer or refrigerator. I’m talking about chopping up all the vegetables that go in that soup, stew, one-pot meal. I’m talking celery, carrots, peppers, onions. (Onions are the worst in my humble opinion!)
Before you jump up and tell me that you can just buy those items already chopped up, stop and think about it. What is cheaper, buying the already chopped up items and having to take what is available, or doing it yourself and including the items that your family likes? Last time I checked prices in the grocery store, it was cheaper to buy the produce in the produce section or at the produce market than to pay someone else to do all that chopping.
There are tons of books/pins/blogs that detail how to accomplish this. I love to look through these places for ideas. I don’t have a problem with the ideas they present, just the quantities!
It’s just my husband and myself, that’s it! I don’t need to cook a meal for more than 2 unless we are talking about soups. So what’s more convenient for me is ingredients that are prepped in such a way that I can simply measure out how much I need.
I got this idea the second time I bought a bag of celery stalks and part of them went bad before I could use them all. I grabbed a small cookie tray that would fit in my Side-by-side freezer and lined it with parchment paper. Then I grabbed my celery, cutting board and knife before starting to chop. 5 – 10 minutes later I had the tray filled with chopped celery. I popped it in the freezer and waited. About 2 hours later, I came back, and the celery was frozen enough that I could dump it from there into a freezer container. The pieces remained separated enough that I could easily just get what I needed out. I repeated this until I had all the celery done.
I took one large onion and cut it up using a mandolin slicer. It took maybe 5 minutes to do. This is going into the refrigerator for use. I’ll cut a few more up and freeze them to use later.
This is sliced Starfruit. A friend of mine has a tree in her backyard. She has started freezing the slices and then adding them to drinks instead of ice cubes.
Think about what you want to store the frozen vegetables in. I use a mixture of freezer bags and freezer containers. This makes it easier for me to see what is in the bags. Just remember to date the bags/containers so you know when you froze them.
Yeah, so do mine. My favorite cooking magazine, Cook’s Illustrated, once tackled this question. According to their tests, a small onion = 1/2 cup of diced onions, a medium onion = 1 cup, and a large onion = 2 cups!
Now, of course, you probably won’t only be dealing with just onions. Which led me to another website, https://www.howmuchisin.com/produce_converters Great website! Having found this, I plan to go back through my favorite recipes and make notes.
Book Reviews by the Reluctant Retiree 