Healthy Kitchen Hacks #56

* QUICK TRICK TO CLEAN CHEESE FROM YOUR FOOD PROCESSOR * HOW TO MAKE BEAUTIFUL BERRY MUFFINS * AN EASY WAY TO FILL FREEZER BAGS WITH SOUP *

Happy New Year friends!

We spent the last couple weeks somewhat unplugged and now it’s great to be back.

I also spent some of the holidays organizing. And while I’m pretty good at purging and donating most collections in my house, when it comes to cooking magazines, I’m a hoarder. But, the good news is that I found a great hack in an issue of Fine Cooking Magazine from 2001. (yikes!) I’ll be sure to recycle it now – even though that was one great issue. (And no, I don’t have all the issues since 2001, it was just a random one from June/July.)

Let me know if you try any of these hacks – or if you too have an issue with parting with really excellent cooking magazines.

1) Quick Trick to Clean Cheese From Your Food Processor
@Fine Cooking

I’ll admit, only once have I used my food processor to grate cheese. It was such a sticky mess to clean, that I only use my box grater (and a lot of elbow grease!)

But this trick from Fine Cooking magazine worked pretty slick: Don’t use hot water to clean cheese from the food processor blade holes, it only gums up. Instead use cold water to make the cheese harden, then it comes right off.

I also found that spraying the blade with cooking spray before shredding anything helps too.

2) How to Make Beautiful Berry Muffins

Summer berries are a distant memory. So I’m using lots of frozen raspberries and blueberries to add color and nutrition to my muffins, banana bread and other quick breads. Even if the berries are still frozen when added to the batter, and even if they are very gingerly stirred into the batter, streaking can still occur.

While the grey-green streaks made when blueberries are stirred into batter are certainly still delicious, there’s a way to avoid them. Don’t mix the berries into the batter; instead, spoon about a 1-inch layer of batter into the loaf pan then sprinkle in a layer of frozen berries and topping with more batter and berries, ending with batter.

This technique works great for muffins too. It also leads to more well-distributed berries, so that one muffin isn’t crammed with berries, while another gets only two berries. When making 12 muffins and using about 1 cup berries, spoon about 2 berries into the bottom of each muffin cup, top with 1 scoop of batter and gently push about 4 berries into each muffin cup of batter.

3) An Easy Way to Fill Freezer Bags with Soup
Kathy @House of Hills

If you’ve resolved to do weekend food prep and then freeze it for quick weeknight meals, you will undoubtedly be faced with this question:

How am I going to hold this Ziploc bag up while I use both hands to pour this steaming hot pot of soup into it?

I stumbled across this solution from Kathy. But instead of her big purple cup, I found that the steep-sided, heavy bottomed bowl from my stand mixer did a better job of ‘holding’ my big gallon-sized plastic bag.

Inspired to get busy this weekend? Deanna’s Margarita Turkey Chili freezes beautifully.  Easy way to clean food processor + NEW #HealthyKitchenHacks via @TspCurry Click To Tweet

Will you try any of these hacks? Do you have any healthy kitchen or healthy living shortcuts to share? Shoot us an email (or share in comments below and we’ll try them out.)