Saturday, January 10, 2009

Keep These Foods Fresh For Longer!

There are a lot of tips out there about how to preserve foods longer. And in fact, I have several tricks up my sleeve, but today I am going to share with you FOUR common foods that you can keep fresh for longer - and that you probably have in your kitchen right now. This may be old news to you or maybe you have never heard of it before. Whatever the case, share it with a neighbor, friend, or co-worker who might just benefit from these quick kitchen tips.

Do you eat tortilla chips? I do. Quite often in fact. However, sometimes I find that they become a little stale before I can get through the whole bag. Instead of throwing away a few servings of chips, stick them in the oven at...

  • 350 degrees for about 5-7 minutes.

Pull them out of the oven and you have warm and crisp chips ready to go!


Another tasty treat you may have lying around is cheese. And cheese molds...ewww. But, if you are anything like our family, cheese doesn't last too long, so worrying about mold is usually not a big issue around here. However, if you are a little more disciplined about rationing your cheese, here is an interesting idea on keeping that mold away.

  • Take a sugar cube and wrap tightly with the cheese or you could just stick it into a container with the cheese.

Pretty simple right?

Wait a minute! What if you don't want to go out and spend money on sugar cubes? Well, you are in luck because you can make your own! I am still in the experimenting phase of this, but let me share with you what I have learned so far.

  • All you do is mix sugar and water in an ice tray. The trick is getting the correct ratio for the sugar and water. I have heard a three to one ratio and I have also heard that you want to make sure your sugar is clumpy and not runny.
  • Let it sit for a day - and then you should have your very own cube.

Here is a link on where I received my info on making sugar cubes.


Next up - fresh celery. In my house, I eat celery, my husband does not. So that leaves quite a bit of celery for one person to eat. The solution is simple:

  • wrap your celery in aluminum foil and it will stay fresh for weeks!


Lastly, let's consider our bags of sugar sitting in the pantry. A quick and easy way to keep your sugar from clumping, is to...

  • stick a saltine cracker right in the package.

So next time you are out to dinner and they give you all of those cracker packages for your soup, hang on to one and put in your sugar container!

As apart of our experiment, we have wrapped up some cheese and celery using our preservation tricks as well as the way we have wrapped them up in the past . We are planning to find out how long these foods will stay fresh using these new tips. Stay tuned!

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