Making Perfect Salads - Salad Spinners

Last month, I posted a tip on making a beautiful salad - start with a simple homemade vinaigrette. This week, we're talking about an essential tool for making a perfect salad: the salad spinner. In today's supermarket, you can get pre-washed salad greens. Your greens will be clean (maybe; even with triple washing, there are cases of pretty bad contamination in salad greens) and dry. You won't need a salad spinner. But, packaged salad greens are very expensive, costing as much as steak per pound. Heads of lettuce require more work to break apart and wash but cost as little as 88¢. That is much, much cheaper than any salad green in a bag.

The trick to turning that head of lettuce into a perfect salad? The leaves must be dry before you dress it. If your lettuce is wet, the dressing will dilute and run off. Get those greens dry before dressing. How? Salad spinner!

Yes, it's a bit of an investment. The spinner in the photo above costs about $30 at Target, Macy's, and Kohl's. You can get it for $24 if you have a 20% off coupon for Bed, Bath & Beyond (which you can get by signing up at their website; they will keep sending you additional coupons too). Salad spinners are the most effective way to get nearly all the water off your salad greens. Unlike patting lettuce dry with a towel, it doesn't bruise the greens at all and it spins all the water out of the crevices. They are fun to use too!

The steps to getting clean and dry salad greens are:

1. Pull off the leaves and trim away any icky or brown parts.
2. Tear or cut into bite-sized pieces, if desired.
3. Fill a large bowl with cool water and drop the greens in.
4. Swish around a bit and let sit for a few minutes. It takes a little while for the water to dislodge the dirt.
5. Swish it around gently and, carefully lift the greens out of the water. The dirt will sink to the bottom of the bowl, and you want to make sure it stays there.
6. Place the greens in the spinner but don't try to stuff too many in there at once. They need room to move around. Give them a good spin. Then, I like to open it up, toss around the greens and give them another spin, just for good measure.

You can spin a whole head of lettuce and store your clean, dry greens back in a clean dry plastic bag. They will keep for a few days, even if cut. After a few days, cut lettuce will start to brown at the edges. Because the leaves are dry, they will not break down as quickly, extending the life of your lettuce. 

One way to keep control of your food budget - make sure you get to eat the food you paid for. No one wants to throw away a head of lettuce because it rotted in the fridge. This is a big problem these days because most markets spray lettuce to keep it from drying out. Unfortunately, wet lettuce rots quickly. Spin your lettuce soon after you get it home from the market to prevent "supermarket spraying rot syndrome."

How to save some money by keeping your kitchen clean

A friend of mine forwarded me this link about saving money by keeping things tidy in the kitchen.

How a Clean Kitchen Saves Your Family Money

It has some great reasons to:

• Clean up dirty dishes promptly
• Keep your countertops clutter-free (of dirty dishes and other stuff)
• Keep on top of what's in your refrigerator

They offer some smart solutions to getting these things done, all the time. I can personally attest to the problem of eating through stuff in the fridge, instead having it end up in the garbage. What a waste! One thing I would add to their list of solutions: learn to turn leftovers into something new. There are lots of posts here on the blog about taking leftovers and making a delicious meal out of them. Check out:

• Tomato and Feta Quiche
• Roasted Veggie Frittata
• Coconut-Ginger Rice
• How to Deal with a Variety of Leftoevers

Tips to make cooking more pleasurable and less stress-free AND save some money? Sounds great to me!

Making the most out of your lemons and limes

Lemons and limes are sensational flavor enhancers. The zest boosts the flavor without all the tartness of the juice. The juice adds a punch of acidity which complements many foods, particularly rich things.

To select the juiciest lemon or lime, pick fruit that is heavy for its size. Heavy means juicy. If a lemon is large and light, it is not going to have much juice, no matter what you do to it. Which brings us to microwaving it for a few seconds to get more juice. This does soften up the fruit, making it easier to squeeze out the juice that is in there but it doesn't increase the amount of juice that is in the lemon or lime.

Sometimes, you don't need both the zest and the juice at the same time. That means, you are tossing out flavor. Zested citrus will keep a good while in the fridge but they tend to dry out or even grow mold. Once you squeeze a lemon or lime for juice, you aren't getting the zest off!

It makes sense to get all the good parts and save them for another recipe. When you buy a lemon or lime, zest it even if you don't need the zest (you can find tools and tips on zesting here and here). You can freeze it in a baggie and use it the next time you have a recipe that calls for zest. (The tricky part is putting them somewhere in your freezer where you can remember you have them.) After you zest, squeeze out the juice and freeze that if you don't need it immediately. As you can see in the picture, I like to freeze the juice in convenient 1 fruit portions.

Here are some recipes we have posted in the past that use the flavor of lemons and limes:

Chicken Gyro-Style

Moroccan Carrot Salad

Buttermilk Lemon Salad Dressing

Roasted Cauliflower with Lemon and Mustard

Moroccan Couscous Salad

Pad Thai

Pasta with Greens and Garbanzos

Freezing Bell Peppers

Even in the winter, bell peppers periodically go on sale. I recently found red peppers for 77¢ and green ones for 25¢ which is quite a deal. Peppers, particularly the red, can be very expensive, so it was time to stock up. I like to buy a bunch of them when they are on sale and either roast them or chop them up and freeze them. We did a post on roasting peppers last summer. This is another way to stockpile peppers: dice them up and freeze them for use in soups, stews, and sauces. We recently posted a chicken curry recipe where you could use frozen peppers rather than fresh. Their texture will get soft when you defrost them, making them unsuitable for salads. But, if you are going to cook them, this is a great way to save some money by stocking up during a sale. You also speed up prep time later by chopping the peppers in advance.

Make sure to wash the peppers first. Cut it in half the long way, then cut each half in half, again cutting stem to base so you have 4 quarters. This makes it easier to cut away the white membranes, especially if you make the cut along side one of the ribs with the white membrane. Cut out the stem, seeds, and white membranes. Slice into strips and then cut into small squares. Doesn't need to be perfect little squares, but try to keep the square size fairly uniform. I find a ¼"  to ⅜" dice is a good size for most recipes

A medium pepper yields about 1 ¼ cup of diced peppers. Just measure out the frozen peppers for your recipe - they usually don't freeze into a solid block so they are easy to measure.

Here's a turkey meatloaf recipe that uses frozen diced peppers.

Herbs - whenever you need them

Nowadays, many recipes call for fresh herbs. Fresh herbs are wonderful but unless you grow them yourself, they are expensive and quite perishable. We at the School of Eating Good try to use fresh herbs when we have them - we grow them in our gardens and have small pots of them in sunny windows for winter use. But, we realize that many people don't have access to fresh herbs. Therefore, we give you an alternative to fresh herbs, either with dried or frozen herbs, in our recipes.

The basic conversion rate for fresh to dried herbs is 3x fresh =  1 dried herbs. If a recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon fresh herbs, use 1 Teaspoon dried herbs. Frozen herbs need no conversion. Certain herbs such as cilantro and chives do not dry well but they freeze quite well. Other herbs such as basil, thyme, oregano, Italian parsley, and rosemary also freeze well. Give them a rinse, allow them to airdry, then freeze them in a thin layer on a cookie sheet. Once frozen, put them in a plastic bag for storage in the deep freeze. When you need some, just take out what you need and use like fresh. Since packages of fresh herbs at the market usually contain more than you'll need for a single recipe, this is also a great way to get the most out of those expensive fresh herbs.

Dried herbs have a long storage life but it's not forever. After about 1 year, they lose a lot of flavor. You should try to buy just a little at a time. Some supermarkets now sell dried herbs and spices in the bulk section where you can buy much less than a whole jar for a reasonable price. If you can only buy herbs in a full jar,  have a herb swap with your friends. Have a group of friends each buy a jar or two of dried herbs. Get together and divvy up the each jar among the group. Now you all have a little bit of all the herbs rather than each of you having a big jar of one herb that you'll never use up before it loses its punch!