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5 Amazing Tricks for Keeping Fruits and Vegetables at Home

After cooking your own meals for a while, you may think that you’ve got everything figured out in the kitchen and even have a dedicated cooking section in your bookshelf – but there’s always more you can add to enrich your experience and improve your culinary skills. Here are a few tips and tricks for cooking and preparing vegetables that will completely change the way you do things in the kitchen:

1.  Ripen fruits more quickly

There’s a reason why you don’t want to keep certain fruits like bananas and papayas grouped together in the same place for too long. That’s because they release ethylene gas, which can make certain fruits and vegetables spoil much faster. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to your advantage. In fact, to make your fruits and vegetables ripen more quickly, all you need to do is to throw the occasional banana in there and then separate them when they’re ready.

2.  Re-use that pickle brine

Don’t drain that water away! Whether you made that jar of pickled vegetables yourself or bought it from the store, you can always make more than one use out of it by adding fresh vegetables in it and storing it in the fridge for a few days. For best results, you can even par-broil these vegetables before pickling them to speed things up.

3.  Keep vegetables crisp for longer

While wrapping in foil doesn’t work for all vegetables – it certainly doesn’t work for most leafy greens – using it for specific food items like broccoli and lettuce certainly helps to keep them crisp for a lot longer.  

4.  Slice your bell peppers in advance

To get the most out of your bell peppers by making them last as long as possible, the best thing you can do is to simply slice them up and store them in a zip-lock bag in your refrigerator. You can also slice them a lot more easily than normally would by doing the following steps:

• Slice the top and the bottom off; save them for later.
• Cut on one side of the bell pepper lengthwise. Be sure to slice down on just the skin for this.
• Roll out the skin and slice the parts connecting the core.
• Push out the middle part of the bell pepper’s top.
• Dice the skin, including the top and bottom parts of the bell pepper.

5.  Keep soft fruits from getting crushed

No one likes dealing with squished or saggy fruits, and the good news is you don’t have to deal with them, either. When storing fruits and vegetables in your fridge or pantry, you want to make sure to place the hardest items at the bottom, such as potatoes and cucumbers, and the softest ones, like tomatoes or mangoes, on top. This allows the weight to be evenly distributed among these various food items and keeps certain fruits plump rather than saggy.

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Top Recipes for Your Holiday Leftovers  

 

One thing we love about Christmas here in Singapore is its abundance when it comes to food preparation. It seems that no expense will be spared for us to have a good time and delighted stomach. If this year we decided to prepare tons of food because we finally invited many people, it is time that we think of our recipes.

Looking for the perfect recipe may be a daunting task to others but actually, the guests will appreciate anything that is served. However, did we stop for a moment to consider what to do with the leftovers? It is a waste to throw many foods so we have to maximize it and be inventive. Here are top recipes for our holiday leftovers:

• Poultry: Roasted poultry like duck, turkey, goose and chicken is a common dish. In fact, in the case of turkey, they are mostly considered the centrepiece. The good thing is that poultry leftovers can be made into different dishes. For example, you can consider it putting in your sandwiches or soups and even in your salads. If you think you cannot possibly consume it at one time, you can just cut it and freeze it for another time.
• Stuffing: If there are many stuffing left, you can make something out of it say combining it with cooked vegetables. Stuffing will be a good combination if mixed with carrots, potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

• Vegetables: It is not yet time to throw away leftover vegetables. You can make a stock out of it. A root vegetable soup will be perfect with potatoes, carrots and even parsnips.
• Pudding: For Christmas pudding, it can be salvaged. You can make a pudding strudel or better, muffins. If you want a simple thing, you simply need to reheat the pudding and serve it with custard or ice cream.
• Beef: Roast beef is expensive and it would be a waste to throw it. You can consider beef hotpot or mince beef recipes to rescue it.

To prevent spoilage of leftovers, we have to cool it first (ideally about ninety minutes) and split it into smaller portions before refrigerating it. The lifespan of leftovers will only be for two days and when reheating, make sure that it is steaming hot.

We should not let any food go to waste. Even if it is a leftover, we can still do something about it. Who knows there are guests to arrive in the morning. Hopefully the article gave us things to ponder when dealing with holiday leftovers.

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