Sounds great~glad it works for you, but looking into those tablets, 7 months or so of the year they wouldn’t work for me because I’m in a climate where I need de-iced, non-freezing fluid. To use the tablets their purchasing site says de-icing fluid or a specific alcohol would have to be added as the diluent, so I’d be right back to having to find and haul around jugs of something. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out that that fluid ended up being more expensive than just buying a gallon of winter washing fluid once or twice a year (which I can usually find for about $4 if I buy on sale before I’m out-out).
Still glad to know about it~maybe I can send some to a friend or relative who lives somewhere reasonable like Florida or Southern California.
I used to use a “trash bowl” on my counter to collect up scraps and trash as I prepared meals. It worked okay, but then I’d have another big bowl to wash at the end of meal prep. And I dirty a lot of dishes, so it adds up.
Nowadays I throw environmentalism to the winds and I use a big paper plate. But I get a lot of use out of it. Early in the day it serves to hold defrosting meats, then it holds chopped ingredients before they go into the pan, then it gets use as a spoon rest, and all along the way it collects up all of the scraps and trash. Sometimes it gets tossed at the end of the day, but if it’s not very dirty, it gets used all over again the next day.
Oh, and if I’m cooking something particularly messy, like deep-fried foods, chili or spaghetti sauce, I lay a sheet of super cheapo aluminum foil on the counter next to the stove. It acts as a giant catch-all spoon and utensil rest, as well as catching all the splattered oil and drips of tomato sauce. Hmm. Maybe I should put some on the floor in front of the stove, too. I usually manage to dribble part of my cooking down there.
Deli containers for food storage. They’re cheap. Come in multiple convenient sizes. Stack easily. All sizes use the same lid. You can write directly on it with a permanent marker. If you break or lose one, who cares? Useful for keeping prepped ingredients organized when cooking. Any leftovers, you just snap a lid on it and put it in the fridge or wherever.
Not really a super “hack” as that’s exactly what they’re for, but this realization saved me from those horrific drawers of mismatched containers and lids that have been the bane of my existence for most of my life.
Okay, okay, I’m REALLY late to this party, but I had to back up on this thread considerably.
When I know my natural peanut butter is going to be gone within, say, a week, I get another jar at the grocery store. When I get it home, I store it upside down.
Since the jar has never been opened and I know it has a thin wax seal inside the lid and I know it was hot before the machines filled it with product, I’m confident it won’t be leaking over the next couple days.
By the time I finally need to open the new jar of peanut-butter I invariably discover gravity has helped the peanut product change places with the oil that has inevitably separated from the nougat. [You can help this, if you’re impatient, by bumping the lid of the upside-down jar on something soft and firm – I lift up one knee and bounce it off the top of my quadriceps – two or three times before letting the jar just sit for a day or two.]
When it’s time to open a new jar of peanut-butter I set it right-side-up on the counter and twist off the lid. I always see a layer of peanuts (because I prefer chunky peanut butter) atop a layer of smooth peanut butter atop a layer of oil atop a layer of air. I take a good long table knife (I have one from an older set of tableware) that is good and strong (unlike the daintier and less-rigid table knives in the current set) and push it straight down into the jar, all the way to the bottom, several times in several places and then a few times around the outer edge. This lets the oil (and air) start ‘leaking’ upward through the butter. [More accurately, you can watch as the butter and peanut layers start sinking as gravity pulls the heavier stuff downward and the oil and air are allowed to get displaced because you put holes in the butter.]
Then I help the process and work on the real goal by pushing the knife into the butter and working it around, twisting the knife both vertically and horizontally. The oil coming up through the butter doesn’t have a chance to squirt around or slosh out of the jar before I have it well-stirred into a softening mass of peanut-butter – and the peanuts that had ‘floated’ to the ‘top’ over the previous days also get integrated nicely with the rest of the mess.
The first meal from my freshly-mixed peanut-butter jar is usually a few saltines with peanut-butter, just so I have some way to use the butter that always gets stuck to the knife during the stirring effort.
One fairly-common tool, a bit of planning ahead, and no mess.
Here’s my life-hack: The best way to remove flatus smells in the bathroom is lighting a match, not one of those scented sprays. If you share a bathroom with somebody, leave a book of matches in the bathroom.
While we’re at it, ever-other-time I eat raisin bran, I put the cereal box back in the cupboard upside-down. It keeps the raisins and flakes from sorting themselves out.
Although they’re rarer now, some milk and juice containers still use the old system of opening by peeling and inverting one of the top folds:
If these are sealed tight enough that you have trouble opening it without mangling the top, try gently squeezing the container so there’s some internal pressure helping to force the container open.