7 Cooking Hacks & Simple Solutions

When you’re grating ginger on a rasp grater, a brief stint in the freezer helps firm it up and keeps it from disintegrating.
1. Place peeled ginger in a zipper-lock bag and freeze for 30 minutes.
2. The ginger can then be neatly grated.

It can be tricky to grate a small knob of fresh ginger without your knuckles skimming dangerously close to the grater. To avoid scraping yourself, stick a fork into the peeled piece of ginger and rub it over the grater, using the fork as a handle.

Mincing large quantities of fibrous ginger can be a chore. Freezing the peeled root before mincing helps, but slicing the frozen ginger and giving the pieces a spin in a rotary grater completes the task in no time.

Here’s a timesaving technique for trimming green beans. Gather three or four beans with the stem ends together in one hand. Use kitchen shears to trim the ends from the beans.

Even a salad spinner may not get salad greens perfectly dry. To make sure that the greens are as dry as possible before dressing them, toss the spun greens in a large bowl with a few sheets of paper towel, each of which has been torn into quarters. The paper towels wick away the last traces of moisture. Or just throw the paper towels into the salad spinner with the greens and spin them all together. In either case, be sure to pick out all of the towel pieces before dressing the salad.

When you need to prepare just a handful of greens or herbs, here’s how to avoid hauling out the salad spinner.
1. Place the greens inside an empty perforated plastic clamshell container (like those used for strawberries) and give them a quick rinse.
2. Close the container and shake vigorously to drive off water from the leaves.

Sometimes even steamed greens have too much water, and when preparing a dish it’s often important to remove all the excess moisture for the best results. Try one of these easy ways to squeeze extra water from cooked greens.
A. Place the cooked greens on a dinner plate and put a second plate on top of them. Squeeze the plates together over the sink (or a bowl, if you’re reserving the liquid) until the greens are dry.
B. Put the cooked greens in a collapsible basket steamer and fold the sections shut to squeeze out the water, which escapes through the holes.