Vegetable Scalding Brilliance!
Planning on freezing fresh corn this year? Use your dishwasher to scald your ears of corn. After thoroughly husking and desilking each ear, fill the bottom with ears, standing straight up.
Do the same with the top of the dishwasher—either laying ears down or cut them in half and stand them up as well. Just leave a little space in-between ears for scalding water and steam to circulate.
Just set for a wash cycle, but obviously omit detergent (duh), and interrupt cycle after about 10-15 min. So slick—no steamy kitchen, no sloppy water to deal with, and no dirty pan to wash. And the corn comes off the cob easily! Any vegetable you want to freeze can be scalded this way. We’ve done this to broccoli also.
Fruit Cooling Brilliance!
Canning peaches or pears? Find a plastic kiddie swimming pool, bleach it out, rinse well, and fill with water and add lots of ice. This is where you’ll place your scalded and deskinned fruit while it awaits placement into your canning jars or freezer containers.
Obviously this means you’re doing much of your canning prep outside, so set up a picnic table assembly line and enjoy the fact that you’re not stuck in a steamy kitchen and your sink is freed up to hold fruit needing washing.
We know what you’re thinking…“these gals are nuts!” Not so! We’ve been canning this way for years. The product is always tasty and no one’s ever gotten sick because our deskinned fruit went floating in a bleach-out plastic kiddie pool. Give these ideas a try and see if you don’t save a LOT of time!
(If YOU have a smart idea, won't you share it? Life is so much easier and we accomplish so much more when we pool our resources. And after all, we're all in this together. So email
patty@dvo.com or
alice@dvo.com with YOUR Smart Ideas!)
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