I may have to try this. My husband does most of the cooking and 99% of the onion chopping in our house (the latter while I hide in another room with the door closed.) On those occasions I’ve had to do it myself, I’ve taken to wearing swim goggles or better yet my scuba diving mask (covers the nose too), which looks profoundly ridiculous but saves me a lot of agony.
I’ve always used clothespins for opened bags of frozen vegetables. I lack the patience to twist and untwist twist-ties.
I use clothes pins for bags of chips and cereal, but they tend to come off in our freezer, hence the ties.
We use binder clips for securing opened packages. Many years ago an employee ordered binder clips. She wanted a couple dozen clips, accidentally ordered a couple dozen boxes of clips.
Those plastic “automotive” clamps are wonderful for holding bags closed. I bought a box of assorted sizes, from teeny-tiny to big honkin’ ones. They are great for holding big bags of dry pet food closed.
I need to buy more. I can’t find one now to save my life, and the mega bag of dry dog food is gaping open, just waiting for an opportunity to fall over and scatter stuff all over the garage floor.
~VOW
I made a white cheese sauce. It didn’t burn but there was a coating of cheese stuck on the bottom of the pot. Soaking didn’t do a thing, so I Googled it. One suggestion was to pour vinegar into the pot and let it sit for 5 minutes. I was skeptical but gave it a shot. The stuck-on cheese wiped right out. AND the bottom of my pot looked brand new - better than it did before I made the sauce!
I actually need some advice on getting smoke smell out of a microwave (DH tried to cremate some Hot Pockets by setting the time for way too long), and I hate the smell of vinegar.
Ogawd.
Usually it’s a bag of popcorn that has been cremated that stinks up the microwave/kitchen/house/neighborhood/town.
Open all the windows, turn on all exhaust fans. Take out the turntable and scrub it separately. Those are usually glass and won’t hold a smell.
Make a paste of baking soda and water, and scrub the entire interior of the microwave. Let it sit undisturbed until it dries. Then wash off the baking soda, let dry, and sniff.
If the microwave still stinks, do everything again. By the time you finish the second cleaning, the smell should be almost gone. Heat up spaghetti sauce for dinner, with a lot of garlic!
In time, things should (nearly) back to normal.
~VOW
Nuke lemon juice in it as long and as often as it takes. Works as well as vinegar, but smells a whole lot better.
Ask any British person how to get tea stains out of a cup, and they’ll tell you. Water, baking soda (i.e., sodium bicarbonate), towel (I use paper) and a little elbow grease. Gets it out like it was never there to begin with. Works well on coffee stains too, I learned by accident.
Bubble gum on shoes? Rub an ice cube on it, to make it thick and rubbery. And it’ll come right off. I’ve never had the chance to test that one though. But makes sense.
Now some people say peanut butter is for bubble gum in hair. I would never do that. If you have any positive results with this, now is the time to share it, I guess. There was a Simpson episode that even joked about this. As I said, I’d never try it. But YMMV.
Oh, and someone brought up making a cheese sauce. Ask any gourmet. First you make a white sauce. It’s been a while since I did that, and I used to use cornstarch for some reason. But basically you melt a tablespoon of butter in a pan, and then mix in a tablespoon of flour. That’s your roux (spelling?). Then you whisk in a cup of milk. Don’t stop whisking for a second, or it’ll separate. Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take too long. Then you’ll have white sauce. Your cheese should melt in it quite easily now, with no burning. More cheese, for a more cheesey sauce. (Don’t you people know that already 
?)
I’m going to try to look up which Simpson episode now had the bubble gum in Lisa’s hair .
EDIT: 22 Short Films About Springfield
Here’s the YouTube video of the scene.
My coffee and tea cups aren’t stained, they’ve developed a patina which I like.
A couple of items that freeze really well: meat loaf, and rice pilaf.
When you make either of these, make a double batch. Freeze the second half of the batch for dinners next month.
Rice pilaf freezes extremely well. I sometimes make a quintuple batch of it and freeze a lot, as it goes with just about anything.
Stop there with the cheese and instead put in a carrot, a small onion, some black peppercorns, salt and grounded nutmeg, let it simmer for a while and in the end sieve it, and you’ll have a perfect sauce béchamel.
Also, on the subject of food hints, I’ve got to tell you about making your own pumpkin seeds. Well, Hallowe’en is a little way off. But we’ll be there soon.
I’ve tried many recipes for salted pumpkin seeds. And I just don’t like them. Not salty enough FWIW.
Then one time (I might as well tell you, it was about thirty years ago), I decided to read the ingredients on a package of salted pumpkin seeds. So I know they used flour. So I made a paste of salt, flour and water, and coated the seeds. Then I spread it out in one layer, and roasted it in the oven naturally.
I liked the results. My only complaint was that the seeds had a tendency to stick together. I imagine the quantity of each ingredient would probably be important too. But as I said, I considered it a success.
MISSED EDIT WINDOW: You perhaps may want to add a little oil to the pumpkin seed recipe. Oil usually goes with flour and liquid in recipes. As I said, it’s been a while since I made it. I personally use olive oil for everything.
Yes, knowing how to make a béchamel, and turn it into a cheese sauce should be in every cooks repertoire. It’s easy, uses ingredients you probably already have (butter, flour, seasoning, milk, and cheese), and can make lots of dishes better. Isn’t there a diary associate commercial about putting cheese on things?
People have already figured out the binder clip hack. My addition is for any small and inexpensive item like binder clips, little clamps, pens, pencils, etc. If you can’t find one, buy another box. I think it took 3 or 4 boxes of binder clips before I had to stop buying them, but now when I need one, there’s always some extras in a drawer. Bonus points, when I’m done with one, I put it back in the drawer.
If you’re not going to do anything with it, yes, toss it. If you like to cook, and are so inclined, that carcass is the base for an excellent soup. Put the whole (possibly frozen from earlier) carcass in a giant canning pot. Boil it a couple of hours. Take it out, pull off all the meat, put the meat back in the pot, with whatever other soup vegetables and starches you like.
Bonus points, if there is a fat on the soup, separate that off. Use that turkey fat (and maybe some butter or olive oil) to make a roux. Put the roux into the soup pot, and whisk it around. That will add back tons of flavor, and, if there’s enough, give the soup a bit of creaminess.
Then, this is the helpful tip part, when it is done, scoop it out into 16oz yogurt containers. There was a reason you have a cupboard full of them, right? Let it cool a bit, then put them in the freezer. You should now have a freezer full of soup.
On the way to work, grab one completely frozen soup from the freezer. No risk of it spilling or spoiling. It won’t be thawed by lunch, but 8-10 minutes in the microwave should take care of that. Eat the soup.
Ooh, I’ve done my share (and then some) of boiling turkey carcasses.
Fishing out the bones and cartilage and pieces of skin is DISGUSTING. And grabbing those little bits of stuffing that lurk in the carcass are even worse.
Then sorting through the actual meat to remove any tiny bones or cartilage clinging to the meat is necessary, because nobody likes to crunch on that.
The broth needs to be refrigerated, so the fat rises to the top and congeals for easy removal. Whups! The refrigerator is full of mashed potatoes, Brussel sprouts, salad, gravy, cranberry sauce, pie and cans of whipped cream. Plus all the regular residents of the refrigerator.
If I do all that, my favorite after-Thanksgiving meal is turkey and dumplings.
I’m tired of just thinking about that!
One year, Mr VOW said HE would make the Thanksgiving meal. He banned me from the kitchen, and he did everything. He even put it all away, afterwards.
When it came time to poke around for a snack from the leftovers, .i didn’t see a foil-wrapped carcass anywhere. So I asked him.
He said, “Oh, I picked all the meat off the best I could, and I threw the rest away.”
At first, I thought, “How wasteful!”
Upon consideration, I remembered the stink of the boiling carcass. I remembered burning my fingers fishing all the bits of “whatever” out of the hot broth, because I wanted to get it over with, so I could sit down with my feet up. I didn’t have to feel the squishy bits of stuffing or the pieces of rubbery skin. And I sure as Hell didn’t have to rearrange an overloaded refrigerator so I could chill the broth overnight, allowing the fat to rise and congeal.
I had married a wonderful, loving, considerate man who had prepared an entire Thanksgiving feast, all by himself, and then he demonstrated his absolute brilliance by throwing that damned turkey carcass in the garbage!
~VOW
Yeah, that is way more effort than I put in. No wonder you don’t want to mess with it. Nobody else in my house likes the soup, which tastes amazing, so I don’t argue, I just horde it. Anyway, because I’m making it for myself I don’t worry about being perfect about getting every last bone or grizzle. It just reminds me I’m eating an animal.
There are definitely some things I refuse to cook, because it just isn’t worth the effort to me, even though other people seem to manage it fine.
Or, you can pick the meat off the carcass and put the carcass in a strainer bag to make the broth; there’s no need to salvage every last fragment of meat from the bones when it’s done simmering, just pull the bag out of the pot and discard the bones.
(If you finish cooking the broth in the evening and your post-Thanksgiving nighttime temperature is under 40F or thereabouts, the covered pot can be left at ambient temperature overnight to cool, rather than having to find room for it in the fridge.)
If you buy a bottle of a liquid that you use in small amounts, like rubbing alcohol or Goo Gone, don’t remove the seal from the top of the bottle. Poke a nail or toothpick through it. You get much better control of how much liquid comes out and have many fewer spills.