http://www.care2.com/greenliving/12-tips-to-simplify-kitchen-life.html
12 Tips to Simplify Kitchen Life
Adapted from Keeping Life Simple: 380 Tips and Ideas by Karen Levine (Storey Publishing, 2004).
For most of us each day is packed and life can feel pretty cluttered. How do we sort through all the “stuff” and find the meaning that we long for? How can we simplify and enhance our lives? Let us suggest starting with these tips for simplifying life in your kitchen.
1. Take all of the recipes that you have collected from newspapers and magazines over the years and place them in a ring binder with plastic coated pages.
2. Go through your pantry and refrigerator and put all the food you never use but have somehow acquired in a large bag. Give it to a food pantry.
3. Get rid of duplicate gadgets. You don’t need three vegetable peelers and four soufflé dishes.
4. Keep a good, large pair of scissors in the kitchen.
5. It’s easier to handle hot cupcake/muffin tins if you leave one of the corners empty.
6. When you finish a box of tissues, put the empty box on a kitchen counter and stuff it with plastic grocery bags. Once you have a full box of bags, keep it in the trunk of your car.
7. Think about your cooking style and equip your kitchen accordingly.
8. Create a kitchen bulletin board to tack up “must-have” items, such as permission slips, notes to answer, and so on.
9. Put your dish drainer and sponges into the dishwasher to get them really clean.
10. Your fridge and freezer are most efficient if you keep them two-thirds full, if the freezer is 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and if the refrigerator is 37 degrees Fahrenheit.
11. If you want to make dried herbs taste fresh, chop up an equal amount of parsley and add it to the herbs. The moisture and chlorophyll work like magic.
12. Treat yourself to really good coffee.
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35 comments
add your comment »What great inspiration to get started on my kitchen! Thanks! Ruth R.
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You can find compostable bags at:
http://www.worldcentric.org/store/bags.htm
Their prices aren't bad :)
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Who wants biodegradable polyesters in their landfill or even environment? Duh!
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We have a boxful of biodegradable kitchen bags at home that are similar to the big black bags for the garbage. THe brand is Biosak. Its bags are amde from Matter-Bi TM, resin-corn starch and vegetable matter modified with biodegradable polyesters. Look at your local grocery store or bulk store, like Costco, for these bags. They're pretty awesome. And great for composting. You can dump the entire thing, foodstuffs and all, into the bin for compost that your city collects. I'm not sure if the bag would biodegrade in the dirt, though.
Hopes this helps!
Love your EArth!
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I've used the same plastic shopping bags for almost 2 years now.
Having trouble finding (sorry but it's got to be affordable)cornstarch bags.
All kitchen scraps either go to my chickens or to suppliment the dogs' dinner. All the chicken and rabbit manure is composted into fertilizer for the gardens and once a crop ripens, the cycle starts again!
We're not perfect, but we're working at it!
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In Holland, we use the corn and (or) potato starch bags to dump biodegradble stuffs like onion peels, banana skin, left over foods etc. At the end of the week or when it is full, we dispose the bag in a large green dumpcontainer for biodegradable (meaning organic) stuffs. So its really handy to have a special garbage container in your kitchen for organic stuffs. We also have a common blue container in the basement of our apartment just for papers and boxes and another for glasses. I find that recycling in Holland is much easier. In stores we are often asked if we needed plastic bags or not. When, i do my grocery, i bring a bag or two along and i always use my bicycle!!
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For many years before anyone else did it, we used cloth bags, until we ended up with a hand me down dog, so we now need & use plastic grocery bags. Locally, (ontario, canada) some grocery stores charge 5 cents a bag. At one place it is useless bags --i have had them break more than once, definitely not what you want for picking up after the pooch (i wrecked a really nice pair of gloves doing that!)
Where do you get these cornstarch bags? They'd be great.
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I so like the idea of biodegradable cornstarch bags....although its the first that I've heard of them. In England years ago, we used to have a stretchy nylon fishnet bag, that used to turn into a tiny ball and fit in your handbag, but would stretch and take lots of stuff when filled. Now we take home far too many plastic bags...but I like the idea of keeping them together in an empty kleenex box.
I live in Libya and we don't have recycling bins for glass etc....and we throw out so much, and it all ends up on tips. I really wish the government would do something about it
Thanks for the tips
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I use empty bread bags for picking up doggie doo but often have a giggle to myself as I put it in the rubbish bin. How will people see us many years from now when they dig them up. Will they think that the doggie doo is a sample of the bread we have been eating???
Faye
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Another way to store unavoidably aquired plastic bags is to stuff them inside an empty paper towel (or similar) cardboard tube. It requires minimal space and also acts as a handy dispenser. If you get stuck with a very large p-bag, put the litter-box inside it-like a pillow case- when it's time to change the litter just turn the bag inside out. The still clean box comes out, and the soiled litter is automatically bagged.
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