Are you looking for ways to save MONEY on food? There are lots of standard tips that will help you stay within your budget when grocery shopping. Here are some top tips and cooking accessories that make it easier for you to stay within your food budget in tough economic times.
Buy in bulk to save MONEY.
Buying in bulk is a great way to save MONEY on purchases that you will use over time, but you need a way to break down your purchases and store them. One of the handiest items to have on hand is a Burger Maker Set that lets you turn 3 pounds of ground beef into 12 hamburger patties and store them in airtight trays in your freezer. You can easily pull out one patty at a time for use, or take out a whole tray. A 6-piece Burger Maker set lets you pick between full size patties or 9 sliders for each tray of burgers.
Grind your own meat.
Speaking of hamburger, you can save even more MONEY by buying whole cuts of meat and grinding your own at home with an Electric Meat Grinder. Take advantage of sales on pot roast and other cuts, and grind them yourself at home for higher quality ground meat at bargain prices.
Slice your own sandwich meats.
Why pay a premium for deli-sliced roast beef, turkey, corned beef and other deli meats? Why pay for plastic packaging for name brand sliced meats? INVEST in a deli slicer and you can slice your own sandwich meats at home and save up to $5 a pound on ham, turkey and other deli meats.
Make your own salad dressings at home.
With salad dressing costing up to $2.50 a bottle, you can save a nice chunk of change by making your own salad dressings at home. For about the price of two bottles of dressing, you can buy a salad dressing carafe and emulsifying mixer that lets you whip up your own dressings in seconds. Pick up a few and you can keep several different salad dressings in your fridge for easy use.
Make use of portion control.
Store dry cereal and snacks in a handy set of snack dispensers, reminiscent of retro gumball machines. You can set the dials to deliver measured portions, which makes it easy for kids to grab a bowl of cereal without spilling (and wasting) half the box on the table. It’s also a handy way to limit the amount of snacks that kids take at once, which is good for their health as well as your pocketbook.
Save MONEY by making your own yogurt.
Are you paying a premium price for little plastic tubs of yogurt full of preservatives and additives to make them “appealing”? Save big bucks by making your own yogurt at home. You won’t believe how easy it is to do with a Yolife Yogurt Maker. Just pour milk into a jar, add yogurt starter (which you really only need once) and cover with the domed lid. In less than 12 hours, you’ll have the freshest, best-tasting yogurt you’ve ever eaten at a fraction of the cost of store bought products.
Leave the microwave popcorn on the shelf.
Microwave popcorn is a favorite snack because it’s so easy to make – but a buck a bag can really put a crimp in your budget. You can still pick up a bag of popcorn for less than a dollar, and a Microwave Popcorn Popper makes it just as easy to pop the corn as dropping a bag in the microwave.
Pack your own lunch.
How much does it cost you to grab lunch at work each day? Even if you eat off the dollar menu, you can save hundreds of dollars a year by bringing your own lunch to work each day. INVESTING in a good set of thermal storage containers like the Smart Portion Container Set can make it easy to bring delicious and nutritious lunches to work or to school each day.
Stop throwing food away.
Do you end up throwing away fruits and vegetables that have spoiled before you get to use them? Do you have to pass on great bargains because you know you won’t eat them before they go bad? One of the hottest products to come along in years, Green Bags keep your produce fresh for days, even weeks longer. Other fresh storage options to look at include FreshVac Storage Containers and the Produce Keeper which lets you store up to three vegetables or fruits in one container and keep them fresh up to two weeks longer.
Grow your own herbs.
Fresh herbs are a delight in your cooking, but buying fresh herbs at the supermarket gets expensive quickly. Growing your own basil, thyme, oregano and other herbs is surprisingly easy. A set of Herb Pots is a wonderful way to add some green to your kitchen and flavor to your meals, all while keeping the green in your wallet.
Minggu, 28 Desember 2014
Top Cooking Accessories to Make a Quick Meal
If you are too tired to cook a full meal by the time you get home from work, being able to cook a quick meal is a great skill to have. If you end up ordering in far more often than your budget can stand simply because it takes too long to cook a fresh meal from scratch, there is good news; it does not have to be that way. There are so many time-saving gadgets, tools and accessories that can help you make fresh, delicious meals in minutes. Whether you combine them with the new breed of fresh-packed convenience foods or use them help you make up your own “convenience foods”, cooking and kitchen accessories can make your entire life far easier.
Food Preparation
One of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive parts of cooking great meals is the preparation time, the time spent cutting, slicing, dicing and otherwise getting ingredients ready to cook them. Great tools can put a serious dent in the amount of time it takes to prepare your food for the oven or the grill.
Cutting fruits and vegetables is much easier when you are using tools that were designed specifically for the JOB. The handiest food prep tools to have in your arsenal include:
- Stainless steel wire cutters to hold things like tomatoes and onions still so you can make uniform slices for burgers, sandwiches and bagels
- 5-in-1 Egg Slicer, which makes it easy to slice, dice, chop and wedge hard-boiled eggs – and other things like strawberries, onions and mushrooms
- Apple Corers, melon slicers and pineapple corers make short work of cutting up fruits in uniform slices or wedges and getting rid of the core. A must if you like serving fruit salad or fresh melon to your family for breakfast or dessert
Cooking Faster – Or Slower
If you thought your only option to cook things fast was the microwave, you haven’t seen some of the handiest cooking gadgets available. There are ovens, slow cookers (yes, for quick meals!), electric skillets and more. Here are just a few of the ways that you can take advantage of cooking accessories to get healthy meals on the table for your family fast.
Take a whole new approach to cooking with a NuWave counter top oven. The NuWave cooks foods up to 50% faster than a traditional oven – and it can cook from frozen for those nights that you forgot to defrost something for dinner. It’s big enough to hold a 10 lb turkey – or a 16 lb turkey if you choose the deluxe model.
Another countertop oven choice is the 9-in-1 Oven. It may look like a toaster oven, but it’s so far beyond that. You can toast, roast, broil and bake inside, and the top is a non-stick griddle/grill! It even comes with a rotisserie so you can roast a chicken or a roast on a spit. The convection setting cooks foods fast!
How does a Slow Cooker speed up your meal times? Take five minutes in the morning to drop a chicken and some spices into your slow cooker, set it on low and get to work. When you get home in the evening, your meal will be cooked to perfection and ready to serve. All you have to do is set the table and dish it up! Choose a Slow Cooker with easy cleanup features like a dishwasher safe removable insert and save even more time.
One last indispensable cooking appliance is a countertop griddle like the Electric 4-in-1 Grill/Griddle. Grilling is so much healthier than frying, but firing up the grill can seem like a whole lot of work for a quick meal. An electric grill can make it so easy to grill steaks, chops and even vegetables. Pick a multi-purpose grill and you can make Panini, stuffed sandwiches, pancakes, eggs and more.
Quicker Cleanup
Most people would agree that getting food to the table in only half the time with the same taste would be a great improvement. Cleaning up after the cooking sometimes takes longer than the meal. INVEST in a few handy gadgets to make cleanup time much easier and quicker.
One of the best ways to reduce the amount of time you spend cleaning up spills in your oven is to keep those spills from getting there in the first place. A silicone oven liner will catch the spills and keep them from baking on. Just pull it out, wash it and put it back in. The oven liners can be cut to fit any size oven, and are even available to fit your toaster oven.
Keep your stovetop clean, too. It’s easy to do with a Ceramic Spoon Rest or a lid and spoon rest that holds your cooking utensils and keeps them from dripping on your stove. Add burner bibs made of spun fiberglass that will keep all those boilovers and spills from baking onto your stove surface, and the cleanup is as easy as popping them into the dishwasher.
Which Type of Baking Pan is Best For Your Baked Creations?
If you’re an experienced baker, then you know that different kinds of baking pans are best for different kinds of baked goods. A cake baked in a loaf pan has a different texture and cooks differently than one baked in a flat round pan. There are recipes that are specially designed for baking goods in a specific shape of a pan and some pans that are specifically designed for a certain kind of cake or bread recipe. Are you wondering which cake and baking pans you should have in your arsenal? Here’s a quick overview of the different kinds of baking pans available and how you might use them.
Standard Baking Pans
Standard baking pans are 8 inch and 9 inch round pans. They usually come in sets of two to make a 2 layer cake. If you use cake mixes, most cake mixes are meant to make two 8 or 9 inch layers.
Loaf Pans
Loaf pans are rectangular pans that are deeper than standard cake pans. They are designed to bake loaves of bread and bread-like cakes. They’re usually not the best choice for baking a regular cake recipe because their depth means that the outside of the cake bakes before the middle, making it dry and crusty. One of niftiest new versions of the loaf pan is a pan that bakes your banana bread or cranberry nut bread already sliced!
Bundt Cake Pans
Bundt pans are also called “ring pans”. They are one piece pans with a spindle or pillar in the middle, designed to cook heavy cake batters through without burning the outsides. Bundt pans are ideal for coffee cakes, fruit cakes and other thick batters that don’t cook well in flat pans.
Brownie Pans
Brownie pans are generally flat square or rectangular pans that make it easy to cut brownies into squares. Brownie pans are also ideal for cookie squares. There are two new styles of brownie pans that make brownies even better and easier. One is similar to the self-slicing loaf pans, you pour the brownie batter into the pan and then press an insert into place. The brownies come out of the oven already cut in neat, even squares. The other is an S-shaped brownie pan that has interior sidewalls so that every single brownie has at least two chewy brownie edges.
Baba Pans
Also known as “Section Pans” these nifty pans are designed to bake edible “bowls” similar to strawberry shortcakes. They’re perfect for nearly any kind of cake recipe, but are especially nice with sponge cake, which bakes up light and airy, and soaks up the juices of berries and other fillings you might add after baking.
Springform Cake Pans
Springform cake pans are two piece pans that consist of a bottom and a side piece. The side piece is designed to fit tightly around the edge of the bottom piece. A latch loosens the side and allows it to be easily removed from the bottom so that the cake can be served with the bottom serving as a platter. Cheesecake is most commonly cooked in a springform pan, as are tortes and other recipes that are not quite firm enough to be tipped out of a cake pan onto a plate.
Novelty Cake Pans
How do you make a cake shaped like a bunny? Or one in the shape of a number 5? With a novelty cake pan of course. Bunny cake pans, train cake pans and cake pans in the shape of popular cartoon characters are just some of the novelty cake pans that are available on the market. One general rule of thumb is that tall novelty cakes like beehives and standing bunny rabbits should be made with a firm cake mix like a Lady Baltimore cake.
Specialty Cake Pans
Some cake pans have been designed specifically to cook different kinds of batters. The shape makes a difference in the texture and flavor. These are some of the best known specialty cake pans:
Scone pans are designed to bake the heavy, crumbly scones that are so popular in Europe for breakfast. Each cake pan is divided into wedges so that each scone is cooked individually.
Cornbread pans are made of heavy cast metal and are designed to make cornbread in the shape of ears of corn. The unique shape makes toasty, crisp cornbread sticks that soak up butter deliciously.
3 Tier Cake Pans
Tiered cakes are especially popular for Sweet 16 parties and girls’ birthday parties. You can put together your own sets of tiered cake pans, but it’s much easier to buy a set of 3 tier cake pans which are perfectly sized for one cake mix.
Choosing the right baking pan for your recipe is an important part of baking tasty treats that are the best that they can be. While many of these cake pans can be substituted for others, be sure that you choose a cake pan similar to the one called for in the recipe for best results.
Standard Baking Pans
Standard baking pans are 8 inch and 9 inch round pans. They usually come in sets of two to make a 2 layer cake. If you use cake mixes, most cake mixes are meant to make two 8 or 9 inch layers.
Loaf Pans
Loaf pans are rectangular pans that are deeper than standard cake pans. They are designed to bake loaves of bread and bread-like cakes. They’re usually not the best choice for baking a regular cake recipe because their depth means that the outside of the cake bakes before the middle, making it dry and crusty. One of niftiest new versions of the loaf pan is a pan that bakes your banana bread or cranberry nut bread already sliced!
Bundt Cake Pans
Bundt pans are also called “ring pans”. They are one piece pans with a spindle or pillar in the middle, designed to cook heavy cake batters through without burning the outsides. Bundt pans are ideal for coffee cakes, fruit cakes and other thick batters that don’t cook well in flat pans.
Brownie Pans
Brownie pans are generally flat square or rectangular pans that make it easy to cut brownies into squares. Brownie pans are also ideal for cookie squares. There are two new styles of brownie pans that make brownies even better and easier. One is similar to the self-slicing loaf pans, you pour the brownie batter into the pan and then press an insert into place. The brownies come out of the oven already cut in neat, even squares. The other is an S-shaped brownie pan that has interior sidewalls so that every single brownie has at least two chewy brownie edges.
Baba Pans
Also known as “Section Pans” these nifty pans are designed to bake edible “bowls” similar to strawberry shortcakes. They’re perfect for nearly any kind of cake recipe, but are especially nice with sponge cake, which bakes up light and airy, and soaks up the juices of berries and other fillings you might add after baking.
Springform Cake Pans
Springform cake pans are two piece pans that consist of a bottom and a side piece. The side piece is designed to fit tightly around the edge of the bottom piece. A latch loosens the side and allows it to be easily removed from the bottom so that the cake can be served with the bottom serving as a platter. Cheesecake is most commonly cooked in a springform pan, as are tortes and other recipes that are not quite firm enough to be tipped out of a cake pan onto a plate.
Novelty Cake Pans
How do you make a cake shaped like a bunny? Or one in the shape of a number 5? With a novelty cake pan of course. Bunny cake pans, train cake pans and cake pans in the shape of popular cartoon characters are just some of the novelty cake pans that are available on the market. One general rule of thumb is that tall novelty cakes like beehives and standing bunny rabbits should be made with a firm cake mix like a Lady Baltimore cake.
Specialty Cake Pans
Some cake pans have been designed specifically to cook different kinds of batters. The shape makes a difference in the texture and flavor. These are some of the best known specialty cake pans:
Scone pans are designed to bake the heavy, crumbly scones that are so popular in Europe for breakfast. Each cake pan is divided into wedges so that each scone is cooked individually.
Cornbread pans are made of heavy cast metal and are designed to make cornbread in the shape of ears of corn. The unique shape makes toasty, crisp cornbread sticks that soak up butter deliciously.
3 Tier Cake Pans
Tiered cakes are especially popular for Sweet 16 parties and girls’ birthday parties. You can put together your own sets of tiered cake pans, but it’s much easier to buy a set of 3 tier cake pans which are perfectly sized for one cake mix.
Choosing the right baking pan for your recipe is an important part of baking tasty treats that are the best that they can be. While many of these cake pans can be substituted for others, be sure that you choose a cake pan similar to the one called for in the recipe for best results.
Baking Homemade Brownies
Baking homemade brownies is one of life's sweetest delights. The smell of the brownies baking in the oven never fails to attract every family member to the kitchen to await the finished treat. When they are finally done it doesn't take but a few seconds for them to disappear, having been devoured by everyone who could get a hold of one.
The only hard part of preparing brownies is the preparation and the cleanup afterward. It takes longer to prepare and bake brownies than it does for them to be eaten, especially if they come out delicious. For this very reason many people prefer to buy brownies from the store and miss out on the deliciousness of home-made brownies. Following these simple tips ensures that you will have delicious brownies that the whole family can enjoy with little or no hassle.
1. Don't over mix when preparing the batter and if possible mix the batter by hand. This will ensure that the brownie does not come out bland or too dry.
2. Spay the bottom of the pan with non-stick cooking spray, making sure to cover the surface evenly. You can also dust the pan lightly with cocoa powder. Using cocoa powder ensures that you won't have white residue on your brownies as you would if you were to use flour.
3. Follow the recipe instructions carefully especially the temperature and cooking time instructions. To test if the brownies are done stick a toothpick into the brownies. If they come out clean it means that the brownies are done.
4. If you want to keep the brownies from over-drying you can wrap them with plastic wrap and put them in a zip bag for added protection.
As a final tip: enjoy your brownies with your whole family, give them as gifts, share them with your co-workers, and don't forget to make plenty for everyone.
The only hard part of preparing brownies is the preparation and the cleanup afterward. It takes longer to prepare and bake brownies than it does for them to be eaten, especially if they come out delicious. For this very reason many people prefer to buy brownies from the store and miss out on the deliciousness of home-made brownies. Following these simple tips ensures that you will have delicious brownies that the whole family can enjoy with little or no hassle.
1. Don't over mix when preparing the batter and if possible mix the batter by hand. This will ensure that the brownie does not come out bland or too dry.
2. Spay the bottom of the pan with non-stick cooking spray, making sure to cover the surface evenly. You can also dust the pan lightly with cocoa powder. Using cocoa powder ensures that you won't have white residue on your brownies as you would if you were to use flour.
3. Follow the recipe instructions carefully especially the temperature and cooking time instructions. To test if the brownies are done stick a toothpick into the brownies. If they come out clean it means that the brownies are done.
4. If you want to keep the brownies from over-drying you can wrap them with plastic wrap and put them in a zip bag for added protection.
As a final tip: enjoy your brownies with your whole family, give them as gifts, share them with your co-workers, and don't forget to make plenty for everyone.
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