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Instead of sharing a recipe today (as per every Friday), I’ve decided to share some kitchen tips with you today! This post was inspired by a fellow mom blogger Adeline who asked us for kitchen tips and while I was thinking about my tip to share over at her blog, I realised that I have 10 more kitchen tips to share with you too!

#1 Clean your sink thoroughly after preparing raw food

For hygiene purposes (and also because the sink usually has a stench after cleaning raw food in it), either use some dish soap or half of a cut lemon and rub all over the sink then pour HOT water all over. You will get an instantly sanitised sink and it’ll rid the odour. Do that for the piece of green wool or sponge you use to clean the sink and dishes regularly too!

#2 Freeze stock/ pasta sauce/ lemon juice in amounts you would use

Don’t you hate it when a recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of pasta sauce or 1 teaspoon lemon juice? Don’t junk the whole jar of sauce or the lemon after – freeze the sauce and lemon juice in ice-cube trays so that you can pop out frozen cubes to defrost when a recipe calls for it. For a standard ice-cube tray, each cube is about 25-30ml.

And you already know that I like to freeze my stocks right? 🙂 Usually for 1 portion of an adult’s one-dish meal like noodle soup (great for afternoons when I cook my own lunch), I’d store about 500-600ml and about 200ml for the kids’ portion.

#3 Freeze soups, stews, minced meat flat

They will freeze and defrost faster. This is really useful when I have forgotten to defrost minced meat for the day – takes at most 10minutes to defrost 2-3 tablespoons of meat by putting the pack in a bowl of tap water.

#4 Cut meats/ fish when it’s still slightly frozen

It’s easiest to cut meats/ fish when it’s still slightly frozen and you can really slice it thinly without much effort compared to when it’s fully thawed.

#5 Use egg shells to remove egg shells

When I ask my daughter to crack eggs for me, there’s a very high chance that egg shells make their way in too so the best way to remove the egg shells is with egg shells – they attract each other like magnets.

#6 Waste not.

When you buy a rotisserie chicken, save the bones and make a yummy rotisserie chicken stock to whip up quick and easy meals like this:

Save some of the meat too if consuming it the next day.

#7 Marinate meats in ziploc bags and lay it flat

Got this tip from watching a Japanese variety programme some time back – they placed the meat into a ziploc bag together with the marinade, zipped up the bag and shook it. The meats are evenly marinated and you don’t even need to get your hands dirty! Lay it flat in the fridge when you leave it to marinate overnight so that all the pieces of meat are marinated evenly.

#8 Store vegetables with a damp paper towel

Source

Extend the shelf life of vegetables by placing them up with damp paper towels in ziploc bags with seals slightly open.

#9 Skim fat from soups easily

No one likes oily soup and I’ve found that apart from using oil filter paper, the easiest way has gotta be this – chilling the soup. The fat will rise to the top and form a layer if it’s really oily. Just skim away the whole layer or the oil spots with a slotted spoon.

#10 Wipe down kitchen counter tops with white vinegar

White vinegar is a great natural ant-repellent. Mix 1 part vinegar and 1 part water in a spray bottle, spray the surfaces when you spot ants and wipe with a cloth. Repeat process once you spot ants again.

I hope you’ve found these tips useful! And do leave a comment if you have more to contribute! 🙂

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Colour mixing for kids using pipettes

This is such a simple activity that I think you might laugh at me! Some pipettes, a few cups of water with food colouring, tissue papers, kitchen paper towels and a small piece of soft foam packing sheet and the kids had so much fun. They spent I think about an hour just hooked on this activity of colour mixing with the additional challenge of doing it with pipettes.

Colour mixing for kids is always fun and I like to rotate the way we do it. The most obvious way is to do this with paint (though I’d have to admit we hardly do this!), but we’ve also done it –

with salt when we made another batch of coloured salt for our sensory bin (all done in the ziploc bag!)
when we did salt glue painting
when we watched our ice alphabets melt and blend their colours together
with coloured water and coloured shaving foam when we read Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow,
with coloured water when my girl loved exploring shades of colour,
in the process of making different coloured playdough

And so we started exploring with tissue paper first –

And I was really surprised that the colours on tissue paper turned out to be super vibrant!

When my boy was up from his nap, we tried it out with kitchen paper towels. I’ve done something similar to this when we read Mister Seahorse (way back when I hadn’t even discovered I was pregnant with my boy) but we didn’t do it with pippettes back then.

Anyway, this was my boy’s first time using pipettes and I had to explain to him how to use it a few times. He was intent at first with just squeezing the top bit pretty hard but sometimes forgot to check if his pipette was dipped in the water. And then there was the coordination bit to wait till his hand hovered over the kitchen paper towel before he pressed the pipette to release the water.

He caught on pretty fast and was very amazed at this new ‘toy’! 😛

And while he was figuring things out, my little girl was busy concentrating making piece after piece of coloured kitchen towels.

After that, I thought why not just let them explore with that piece of soft foam packing sheet which I actually was just intending to use it as a surface for them to colour the kitchen towels. And it turned out to be really quite a hit! They placed different colours on the packing sheet and the uneven surface made things more interesting too!

Priceless expression of deep concentration!

The colours really turned out so beautiful – and the best part about using this foam packing sheet? You can just wipe it clean and start over (which was what we did!)

Using the pipette really works his little fingers and also trains his concentration and he really enjoyed the activity.

He loved looking at the coloured water in the pipette and was really pleased with himself each time he succeeded (which was almost every time, but he was just amazed by the new instrument for painting I guess).

And this was how it looked before the colours started muddying up – pretty beautiful considering I only gave them blue, red and yellow. 🙂

fine motor skills I was pretty surprised to find that the tissue paper kept the brilliant colours pretty well after drying! I haven’t yet found a use for these but I’m definitely hoarding them first. (I’m sure you’ve already noticed I’m a hoarder – who has soft foam packing sheets and sooo many tubs of empty yogurt containers!)