Tag

kitchen tips

Cooking Tips for Small Kitchens

written by Ali

If you love to cook, having a small kitchen can be incredibly frustrating. If you don’t enjoy cooking, it simply makes your hatred grow even more! However, your small kitchen does not need to hold you back at meal times. You simply need to get a bit more creative. With that being said, read on to discover some top tips on cooking in a small kitchen.

Stow baking pans above the cabinets – There is no denying that pans and pots tend to take up most of the room in any kitchen. One of the best ways to combat this is to store your baking pans above your cabinets. Not only does this keep them out of the way, but it ensures they are in easy access too. After all, one of the most frustrating elements of any kitchen is when your daily items are at the back of a cupboard, meaning you have a hassle on your hands every time you prepare dinner.

Invest in a convection oven – Convection ovens are great because they do not take up a lot of room. Not only this, but they can cook your meal in no time, so it can really speed up the cooking process! You can head to Oven Shopper for more information about the different types of convection ovens that are available and their features.

Purchase a fold-down table – Fold-down tables are a must for any small kitchen. If you feel you don’t have anywhere to dine, think again. Fold-down tables can act as counter space when they are folded, and then when you can open the table up and entertain guests. Yes, it may be a little bit cozy, but it’s better than having no table at all. Plus, you make the most of the space that is available to you.

Re-think your appliances – Your oven is not the only appliance you should re-think. Nowadays, there are so many different multi-tasking gadgets. Take the immersion blender as a prime example. This tool is easy to clean and reuse, and it can replace several bigger and chunkier appliances. Look at your current kitchen and ask yourself whether you need each and every appliance, or whether you could replace them with one appliance that does all of the same tasks.

Install a taller faucet – Last but not least, another tip for those with a small kitchen is to install a taller faucet. This will make it much easier to clean. If you feel like you have a military operation on your hands whenever you go to clean your pots and pans, a taller faucet will definitely transform the way you use your kitchen.

Hopefully, you now have all of the tips you need to improve your cooking situation. Yes, a small kitchen can be frustrating, but it does not need to help you back. Follow the tips that have been provided above, and you are bound to notice a difference.

March 14, 2018 0 comment

Foodie Lists Pickles and Preserves

Essential Canning Tools and a Giveaway

written by Ali

Spring is here and with spring comes an abundance of fruits and vegetables that are just perfect for pickling and preserving. If you are new to canning, I want to share my list of essential canning tools to get you started. I keep all of these items together in one place in the kitchen, so that when I lose my senses and buy ten pounds of asparagus from the farmer’s market or pick ten pounds of strawberries, I have the resources necessary to pickle and preserve. I’ve never regretted preserving; in fact, recently, we made pancakes for breakfast and I realized I still had a jar of lavender strawberry sauce (the recipe is from Food in Jars) stashed in the cupboard. We were still about a month out from fresh local strawberries, so it was wonderful to have strawberries from the prior year that tasted about as fresh as when I picked them. I had a moment of extreme foodie bliss – the strawberry preserves were summer canned in a jar and perfect over my pancakes.

This was one year’s tomato canning effort.

So here are my essential canning tools. With a small investment, you will be preserving and pickling like a pro in no time at all.

Check out my blog post about the must-have books in the home canning library. You can easily get started canning with just one book – my suggestion is to start with either Food in Jars or Canning for a New Generation. Both are excellent resources for how to safely preserve foods.

I only do water bath canning. I’d love a pressure canner, but don’t have the room right now to store one. The one critical piece of equipment for water bath canning is a stockpot large enough to hold at least six pint jars. I don’t can anything in quarts – I did pickles in quart jars my first year canning in Oregon and quickly realized that a) my stockpot could only hold 3 jars without boiling over and b) the odds that hubby and I would eat a quart of pickles in a reasonable time frame were pretty remote – it’s a lot of pickles. Since then, I only use pint, ½ pint and ¼ pint jars. I have two stockpots – a large one and a medium sized one: the large one gets used for the water bath and the medium sized one gets used for larger patch preserves. If I’m in a hurry and only prepping one thing, I might use the medium sized for the water bath canning process. It’s not necessary to have two, especially if you are planning to only do small batch preserving and you have limited space to store kitchen items.

This is my absolute favorite piece of canning equipment – my absolute I can’t live without. Which is why you can enter my giveaway for your very own! (See details at the end of this post). One of the things I discovered about my large stockpot is that it wasn’t quite large enough for a canning rack. In water bath canning, it’s important to get water circulating all around your jars, including underneath them. So – what to do? I started out by using a kitchen hack of putting lids at the bottom of the stockpot and placing jars on top of the lids. This works just fine, but the lids will rust pretty quickly. A friend introduced me to this silicon trivet, and I’ve never looked back. This spreads out so you can give your jars plenty of breathing room and still have them lifted off the bottom of the pot. One tip about working with this – always keep at least one jar in the pot so that the trivet doesn’t retract. It’s no fun having to spread the trivet back out when your water is already boiling.

A jar funnel is a great tool for ensuring that preserves and pickles are neatly canned. It’s really important in canning to ensure that the top of your jar is clean. A jar funnel helps with this by making sure that more of the preserves or brine go into your jar – not on your jar. I also find I use my jar funnel when I use my jars for smoothies, salads, etc. for my lunch.

A jar lifter is the go-to tool for removing very hot jars from the hot water canning bath. Long tongs are wonderful for placing jars into a hot water canning bath, as well as removing them to fill them. They are also great for grabbing canning rings out of hot water. A magnetic lid lifter is a nifty tool for pulling jar lids out of hot water. It’s also a great tool for those times when you drop something small and magnetic on the floor (like a nail) and have to grab it before the dog does. Not that I would know from experience or anything. (Yes – in this entirely hypothetical scenario, I would thoroughly sanitize my lid lifter before using it again to can).

A soup ladle is invaluable for transferring hot liquids into jars. Not to mention, if you don’t have a soup ladle, how do you ladle out your soup? Personally, I adore the Loch Ness Monster soup ladles on the right just because they are cute. I use the more practical soup ladle on the left to can, though.

This one is probably pretty obvious, but to have beautifully canned foods, you definitely need a good supply of jars, rings, and lids. I use Ball products, mostly out of brand loyalty and the fact that they are pretty ubiquitous. I love the quarter pint size jars for really small batches of preserves. I find that the smaller the jar, the easier it is to use up what’s inside the jar, especially in a two-person household. One tip that I find it’s easier to say than do is this: keep your canning jars separate from jars that you use for other purposes. If you’ve read Fix Me a Little Lunch for any amount of time, you know that I often use jars for my lunch. Those jars get a lot of heavy use; they get frozen, they get bashed around in my work bag, and they get dinged with silverware. All of this weakens the jar and can lead to spectacular canning failure when the jar’s bottom bottoms out in the hot water bath. Trust me; this is one way to learn very quickly exactly what my curse word repertoire is. I’ve lost at least two jars of pickled asparagus this way (heartbreaking), some diced tomatoes, and a couple of jars of preserves. In addition to losing the very produce I’m trying to preserve, this kind of failure also means stopping, cleaning out the hot water bath canning set up, and having to start all over again. It’s not fun. So keep your canning jars stored separately from your everyday use jars.

One other note about jars, rings and lids. You can reuse rings, as long as they are rust free. Lids need to be repurposed or recycled. Always use a new lid, as you don’t want to risk your cans not sealing.

Alright – so giveaway time. To jumpstart your canning adventures this spring and summer, I’m giving away a silicon trivet. It’s red, just like mine.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

April 19, 2017 42 comments

Foodie Lists Pickles and Preserves

Must Have Canning Cookbooks

written by Ali

Canning and preserving is one of my favorite cooking activities, which is why I want to share my must have canning cookbooks list with you. I first learned how to can from my mom. Many years ago, when I was an early teen, she and I went out to a farm, probably in some way out place like Brighton, Colorado, and bought pickling cucumbers and peaches. These stand out in my mind because that Christmas, we had our own canned pickles to go with our Christmas Eve buffet. I also remember the peaches, because I remember the taste of peach conserve that had maraschino cherries and walnuts. I also remember that we used the Ball Book of Canning, which is the sort of the original bible of canning and ended up with a billion quarts of pickles and as many pints of peach conserve. To say that these lasted us awhile is an understatement.

We were canning before small batch canning became popular. I think my mom only canned for two or so seasons. I remember doing more pickles, along with some watermelon rind pickles. But beyond that, my canning memories are a bit fuzzy. I didn’t pick up a jar until many years later, when I had one canning season in New Mexico. I made some sort of crabapple jam, scavenging crabapples from just outside our neighbor’s trees. Somewhere along the way, I’d picked up a cookbook on small batch canning, which was revelatory. Instead of having to can thirty jars of something, I could do four. And four jars of something canned can be a lot easier to get through, especially in a family of two.

I decided it was time to try it again when we moved to Oregon. Oregon has some of the most incredible farmer’s market and U-Pick farms, and we were lucky enough to have both close by. Around the same time, I discovered Marisa McClellan’s Food in Jars blog and then her first Food in Jars cookbook. For several seasons, I canned just about everything I could get my hands on. I loved having all the pretty jars lined up in the pantry and loved experimenting with more exotic flavors in some of my jams and preserves. I also loved making pickles and canning tomatoes. I discovered Dilly Beans, which are the absolute best snack food I’ve ever made. I was a canning convert. I even entered my preserves in the county fair for two years in a row (and even won a couple of blue ribbons, along with a couple of second and third place prizes). We grew 60 pounds of tomatoes in our own yard in 2015 and I canned them all.

You don’t have to preserve 60 pounds of anything though to get the joy of canning in your own kitchen. You can most definitely do small batches and enjoy the fresh tastes of fruits and vegetables all through the long bleak winter. In this post, I’m going to run down my favorite canning books. These are mostly all small batch books and cover jams, preserves, and pickles. I’ll also share why each is a favorite. Check back here in a few weeks, as I’ll also be posting about my favorite canning gear, along with a giveaway of one of my absolute favorite canning tools.

These first three books are all from Marisa McClellan. I love both McClellan’s lovely flavors, but especially the ethos of small batch canning. These are so perfect for the home-canner who doesn’t have storage space, time, or the desire to eat jar after jar after jar of one type of strawberry jam. Food in Jars is also the perfect introductory book for someone who hasn’t preserved before.

The Ball Book of Canning and Preserving is a standby for me. If I want to make a large batch of tomato sauce, for example, this is where I’ll turn. It’s a great book, too, for the novice canner with lots of great tips. It’s updated often, so the flavors stay contemporary as do the tips for how to can safely.

Canning for a New Generation is a gorgeous book with so many yummy recipes. One of the things I love about this one is that it also includes recipes for what to do with the stuff you’ve just canned. Because I promise you, there’s not much worse than looking at a pantry full of jams and pickles and thinking – uh oh – what do I do with all of this now? Most of the recipes here are also small batch, so really perfect for the weekend cook.

The Joy of Pickling is entirely focused on pickles, from fermented pickles to small batch refrigerator pickles, to freezer pickles, to chutney and relishes, to canning pickles. I made my first batch of fermented pickles using the recipe in this book and munched on them all summer long. This one is a cookbook I could just curl up with and read from cover to cover.

The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving is another great book for beginners looking to try out some small batch recipes. This one covers everything from jam to pickles and everything in between. There’s also a chapter in the most recent edition about what to do with what you’ve put up. There’s a chapter on low-sugar preserves, too.

Last, but not least, is Put Em Up! This one covers all sorts of preserving topics, including canning in small batches, but also freezing and drying. This is a great book if you are looking for ways to make use of produce from a CSA or if you are a farmer’s market fan.

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March 22, 2017 10 comments