7 Kitchen Tips & Simple Solutions

If you run out of ice to shock vegetables after blanching them, reach for a chilled ice cream maker insert and fill it with cold tap water. After the vegetables are finished cooking, shock them in the cold water in the insert. The water remains cold for at least one batch of vegetables.

Recipes often call for adding a variety of vegetables and other ingredients at different points during the cooking time. Instead of placing each prepared ingredient in its own smaller bowl or into piles crowded onto a cutting board, you can save both space and dirty dishes by layering the ingredients in a single large bowl and separating the layers with sheets of waxed paper or plastic wrap. (make sure that the ingredients are in the right order, with the one you’ll need first on top.)

In the test kitchen, we extract as much liquid as possible from salted raw vegetables destined for a salad or slaw by pressing down on them with a weight. One quick and easy way to do this is to place the salted vegetables in a colander, then set a 1-gallon zipper-lock bag filled with pie weights on top of the vegetables.

Cooks who have a garbage disposal installed in their sink often peel and pare vegetables and fruit right over the sink. Of course, this likely means they have at some point also dropped the item they were paring and watched in dismay as it vanished down the drain hole into the disposal. Avoid this problem by positioning a small funnel in the drain hole. The funnel catches the desirable pieces of food, especially things like new potatoes, kiwis, and strawberries.

Grill cooks know the pain of watching perfectly grilled vegetables slip through the grate and scorch on the hot coals below. Protect your vegetables with this tip. Place a wire cooling rack perpendicular to the grate bars. Heat for about 5 minutes, then rub the rack lightly with oil before grilling.

Grill marks enhance both the appearance and the flavor of grilled vegetables. Here’s a way to get that tasty marking on both sides of squash and zucchini on the grill.
1. Cut a zucchini (or yellow summer squash) in half lengthwise and run a cheese plane or y-shaped vegetable peeler over the skin side a couple of times. This exposes some flesh and flattens the squash for stability on the cooking grate.
2. The extra exposed flesh allows for grill marks on both sides of each squash half.

It is not unheard of for a kitchen fire to start from a casually extinguished match that was tossed into the trash. Make doubly sure to avoid this potential disaster by holding the head of the extinguished match under a running faucet (or dipping it into a water-filled dish in the sink) to douse it before putting it in the trash.