Kitchen Tips and Tricks: How to Make Kitchen Chores Fun!

Kitchen chores are often among the least enjoyed and most daunting tasks. Whether you cook for one or 100, it seems the kitchen is almost always dishevelled and almost impossible to keep clean. But by perceptive the following kitchen tips and tricks, you just might be healthy to place your woes on the back-burner and fire up some fun!

Refrigerator Basics: Out With the Old, In With the New
A depressing fact that most people are loath to admit is that they have no intent what is lurking in the back of their refrigerators. Possibly the worst kitchen chore is cleaning out the leftovers and scraping the junk from the bottom of the produce trays, but it is a necessary task for a tidy kitchen, if not for a hygienic one. Set aside an hour (or a day, if need be) to purge, clean, and organize the refrigerator. Throw out all leftovers as well as any item that is past its expiration date or old enough that you can’t remember when it was purchased. Clean the trays and drawers thoroughly, then begin replacing the items that were removed, but in a systematic way. Keep items with expiration dates in plain view and schedule a weekly purge.

A Well-Stocked Pantry is the Last Minute Cook’s Saving Grace
If your least favorite kitchen chore is finding meals to cook, the ideal course of action is to always make sure your pantry is stocked with staples. Make a list of the foods you take most often, and keep that list with you when you do your grocery shopping. This will guarantee that you won’t accidentally forget to purchase staples like peanut butter or green beans when you are out running errands.

Keep It Simple
Most kitchens have a utility drawer filled with such necessary tools as can openers, corkscrews, spatulas, and so on. However, almost each kitchen also has a disorganized utility drawer that contains all of those items and more. It is okay to throw away pot holders with holes in them, and it is okay to get rid of a kitchen timer that doesn’t work anymore. Basically, if you have more than three of any gadget, if you have an item that you use less than twice per year, or if you have no intent what something is used for, it probably should go.

The Stove is On!
If you have decided to stop cooking with your oven because the fire alarm goes off each time you turn it on, it is probably time to clean it out. It is not fun and it is not easy, but if you do it well just once your kitchen will thank you by not making you clean the oven quite so hard for a very long time. There is no easy secret to cleaning a baked-on, caked-on oven, it just takes a lot of effort and, in some cases, a strong stomach. However, after the oven is cleaned (or thrown out and a new one purchased) it can be very easy to clean spills and keep the problem from recurring. Diligence is key. Oven liners can be bought – these are easy sheets that are put at the bottom of ovens and can be thrown out when covered with spills. Otherwise, you must remember to immediately clean a spill once the oven has cooled off, which is much easier than cleaning up six months worth of apple pie, lasagne, and meat loaf.

Kitchen Tips and Tricks: How to Make Kitchen Chores Fun!

Sample time-lapse video taken with my XTi. It is being controlled by a TI-89 Calculator! See code.coneybeare.net
Video Rating: 4 / 5

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