[CulinaryJen]

More Food & Cooking Tips

Using melted butter instead of oil when making pancake batter will let them brown more quickly and evenly.

Keep salad dressings in the coldest part of the fridge to prevent separating.

Iced tea cloudy after refrigerating? Add a little hot water and stir.

Rub outside of chicken with mayonnaise before roasting to make beautiful brown color.

Try salsa on your baked potato for a tasty low-fat topping.

If you are wanting a way of freezing cookies, bake your cookies as usual and make sure they cool completely. Use Ziplock freezer bags, and laying it flat, put the cookies in. You can stack them if you want and just close it up and put it in the freezer. You can:

1) Make the cookie dough, then freeze to be made up later.

2) Make the cookie dough, cut out and freeze on the cookie sheet before baking, then when the cookies are frozen, store in a freezer-safe zip-lock bag

3) Make the cookies, cut out and bake, and then freeze. Bring to room temperature before frosting and decorating.

For freezing cake-like or soft cookies, it is sometimes best to freeze them on a cookie sheet first to harden then put them in the bags. This goes for iced cookies too.

Any cookie should freeze well except anything with a meringue topping and things like filled thumbprints (with fruit) often tends to get gummy.) It also works best to frost the cookies AFTER thawing rather than BEFORE freezing. Cookies can last up to 8 or 9 months frozen.

Unfrosted cakes, quick breads, and apple pies freeze well too. This way you can bake like crazy and relax when the holidays get closer.

Have an undecorated frosted birthday cake ready, as well as a big dish of sugar cookies. Let the birthday child decorate the cake from jars of instant frosting while the rest of the kids decorate cookies with frosting, jelly beans, candy heasts gumdrops, chocolate pieces ect.

Cut circles of bread with a cookie cutter, and set out spreads and make-a-face decorations: Raisins, colored candies, pretzels, carrot and green pepper sticks, ect. Let the children design their own open face sandwiches.

Fresh corn on the cob will be more tender and will hold more of its color if you boil it in salted water, adding 1 tsp. of sugar and a squirt of lemon juice to the water. The taste won't be affected.

Give baked potatoes a new twist. After baking them, slice in half lengthwise. Prick them with a fork, dot with butter and add crushed corn flakes ans a dash of paprika, then put them under the broiler for a minute or so. Delicious!!

Meringue sticking to your knife? No one should put up with that! Cut your meringue-topped pie with a knife that has been dipped first into milk. Neat and perfect every time.


LOTS MORE COOKING HINTS AND TIPS

Have you ever been right in the middle of a recipe and needed something you thought you had plenty of, such as celery, or onion, or tomatoes, or bell pepper? Don't let that happen again.

Freeze it. Buy 2-3 extra bell peppers when they are on sale, or an extra onion or

If you have these items in the frig, and they appear to be going soft because you didn't use it when you planned on it, chop them up and store in freezer in sealed bags or covered containers and use them when making your stews or whatever. Freezing will not hurt the flavor, only the crispness. Same can be done with bananas that are browning too fast on the counter. They will still make excellent banana bread, or sliced (just thawed enough to cut up) on your cereal.

To toast coconut for cakes, put in pie pan and place in moderate oven. Stir often from edges, to brown evenly.

Do not grease the sides of cake pans, grease only the bottoms.

Flour should be sifted once before measuring. Fill the cup without packing.

When baking fruit pies, cut holes in the upper crust with a thimble, place crust on pie. The holes will become larger, then place the little round circles back in place. Makes pies very decorative and serves for the steam and juice openings.

To keep cookies fresh and crisp in the jar, place a crumpled tissue paper in the bottom.

To keep a loaf or layer cake fresh after it has been cut, wrap a large slice of fresh bread in with it before putting it away. The bread will dry out but the cake will remain moist.

Bake gingerbread in cup cake pans. When cold, cut out center, fill with cream cheese and quince jelly.

Cooked too much rice? Freeze it, when ready to use put it in a sieve and run hot water through it. You have your own instant rice, better flavor and cheaper too.

If you like rice thats snowy white, add some lemon juice to the cooking water.

If the rice has burned slightly, you can remove the burned flavor by adding a heel from a loaf of fresh white bread and covering the pot for a few minutes.

When cooking potatoes or rice, add a pinch rosemary to the water instead of salt. It adds a special flavor.

When cooking dry beans, a little baking soda will keep them from getting mushy. (Takes the toots out too)

Pasta Hints And Tips

When buying pasta, make sure it's made from semolina rather than ordinary flour. Pasta made from semolina holds it's shape better and doesn't become mushy.

For superior pasta, let salted water come to a boil, stir the pasta into the water, cover the pot, and turn off the heat. After pasta sits for 10 mins. it will be ready to eat.

To prevent cooked spaghetti strands from becoming sticky run fresh hot water into spaghetti pot before draining.

Hang homemade pasta over a clothes hanger to dry.