About 15 months ago now, we embarked on a new "make our own" adventure: Vanilla Extract!

Making homemade vanilla extract is simple, and can save significant money long-term, especially if you do a lot of baking!

(Read more for the recipe and pictures...)

We had a busy week, making a total of 4 delicious cheesecakes! Two were for a friend's party, and two were in celebration of our 8th wedding anniversary. We had a blessed weekend with company to help us celebrate! Praise God for His sustaining grace and love towards us!

When we made the cheesecakes for our friend, I used a tip someone posted here a couple years ago, about transporting cheesecakes.

I cut a circle of cardboard to fit in the springform pan, and then wrapped it in foil.

I pressed the crust onto the foil-wrapped cardboard (in the pan) and made the cheesecake as usual.

The bottom of a measuring cup works perfectly to press the crust into the pan! Joshua discovered this trick and now we always use it.

When the cheesecake was chilled, we cut it and placed it (still on the foil-wrapped cardboard, but out of the springform pan) on some sticky tape in a flat box, and wrapped the whole box in plastic wrap.

Eliyahu was up at 5am as I was finishing wrapping the cheesecakes, so I took a picture of him with them before Joshua headed out the door to work (they were for a co-worker).

Check out this post for the best way to slice a cheesecake! This is how we sliced all of our cheesecakes, and they were picture-perfect.

More cheesecake tips can be found here.

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

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1. Menu planning w/Google calendar (Tara)
2. Freezing unbaked scones
3. Using up lots of bananas (Erin)
4. Tips for deviled eggs (Cheryl)
5. Using parchment paper (Alyssa)
6. Graham cracker crust tip (Kolfinna)
7. Freezing fragile foods
8. Magnet tips (Trixie)
9. Egg salad tip (Rachel)
10. Storing kitchen gadgets (Linda)
11. Easy avocado dicing (Rachel)
12. Fluffier and lighter brown rice (Kristin)
13. Drying dishes (Mary Jo)

For longer shelf life, store celery in vegetable drawer, wrapped snugly in aluminum foil.

I like to save the celery hearts for soup. (Hearts from two bunches of celery are shown above.)

After we use the green stalks for salads or celery sticks, the light inside stalks, along with all of the leaves, are perfect for adding to vegetable soup or chicken soup! Just wrap in foil and save until you're ready to make soup.

More of my favorite foil tips:

Use foil to keep bread from browning too quickly in the oven

How to keep foil from sticking to the casserole it covers

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

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In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

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1. Keeping flour fresh (Katie)
2. Food Saver tips (Donna)
3. Choosing asparagus (Alea)
4. Baking soda in the kitchen (Cherity)
5. Stretching soup (Rachel)
6. Grinding flax tip
7. Clumpy brown sugar (Christy)
8. Avocado tips (Loretta)
9. Freshness of food when shopping (Kolfinna)
10. Chicken stock tips
11. Uses for egg shells (Aimee)
12. Saving a burnt cake (Toni)
13. Grated cheese tips (Annie)
14. Keep eggs from expiring (Rena)
15. Measurement conversions (Mary Ann)

We love fresh pears -- when they're ripe. I rarely bought pears because all too often they would remain green and hard and hardly sweet... until they started going bad.

Joshua found a solution that has worked well for ripening pears. We place a ripe banana in the bag of pears and leave it with them for a couple days. The pears turn soft and sweet and absolutely delicious!

When the pears are ripe, we take out the banana. Joshua prefers his pears cold, so we usually put them in the fridge at that point. Yum!

The pears pictured above are Red D'Anjou pears from Costco. Very delicious and with very little waste (just the small core), $3.79 for 6 lbs. is fruit we can afford! :)

Does anyone have any other fruit-ripening tips?

We have had similar trouble with buying green bananas; they would spoil without ripening. Placing them near some already-ripe bananas helps them to ripen nicely!

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

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In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

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1. Cooking with pears vs. apples (Rachel)
2. Bread-baking tips (Christy)
3. Absorbing excess grease (Heather)
4. Toast without a toaster (Kolfinna)
5. Space-efficient freezing and thawing ground beef (Laura)
6. Kitchen/dish soap (Aimee)
7. Easily remove egg shells (Annie)
8. Pan cleaning tip (Lindsey)
9. Cooking with herbs tips (Sherrie)
10. Buying/using bargain candy
11.
12.

One of my bridal shower gifts (8 years ago now!) was this pair of Fiskars take-apart kitchen scissors from my mom. It's no wonder these scissors have such great reviews on Amazon.com -- they really are wonderful! I use mine multiple times each week, and they are so handy.

A few of my favorite uses:

I cut all of my homemade pizza and my Italian Cheese Bread into slices with my kitchen scissors! I originally started doing this because the pizza cutter would ruin a non-stick pizza pan or baking sheet. The kitchen scissors is easier to cut through a crispy crust, as well.

(See this post for lots more homemade pizza tips!)

And after I've cut the pizza in the pan, I cut my toddler's pizza into bite-sized pieces with the scissors! :)

It's also the fastest way to cut spaghetti so that it ends up (mostly) in my child's mouth rather than on the table, floor, and his shirt! ;) (I know someone else mentioned this recently in a kitchen tip post -- if you're reading, remind me of your link!)

Other foods I like to cut with my scissors include leftover chicken meat (for casseroles) and fresh herbs! You can read Donna's kitchen scissors tips here.

Do you have a kitchen scissors? If so, what are your favorite things to snip?

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

Post a kitchen tip in your blog. Link to this post, and then leave your link here, so we know where to find YOU! :) No giveaways or non-tip posts, please!

In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

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1. Sweetened condensed milk substitute (Alea)
2. Coconut butter from coconut milk
3. Energy-efficient cooking
4. Stretching and making cereal healthier (Heather)
5. Kitchen tips for working moms (Kolfinna)
6. Panini press substitute (Melinda)
7. Kid-size broom and dustpan
8. Freezer life of meats (Annie)
9. Fix for stale dates (Carey)
10. Plastic bag tips (Angela)

Though my blog (and computer, and email) have been neglected (for months, really!), my family has not. And in my spare moments, I'm truly planning to get back "on track" and manage to post at least a few times a week! I miss writing here, and my lack of blogging certainly isn't due to a lack of things I'd like to write about!! :)

Sweet little Moshe, who somehow brings even more love and joy to our home! More baby pictures and the birth story coming this week, I promise!!

This week's kitchen tip:

For consistently salted rice, stir in the salt with the rice and water before cooking, rather than salting after the rice is cooked.

For rice that doesn't stick together in clumps after cooking, add a tablespoon of butter or oil to the water before cooking.

Does anyone else have rice tips to add? I'd love to hear them!

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

Post a kitchen tip in your blog. Link to this post, and then leave your link here, so we know where to find YOU! :) No giveaways or non-tip posts, please!

In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

Leave your tip links in a comment. I'll manually add them to this post!

1. Frugal menu planning tip (Rachel)
2. Easy freezer veggie puree/fruit tips
3. Smooth homemade pudding tip (Lynn)
4. Re-freezing raw meat (Laura)
5. Freezing small portions/less waste (Mandy)
6. Hands-free recipe holder tip (Amy)
7. Using tortilla chip crumbs (Kolfinna)
8. Easy cookie/shortbread rollout (Alea)
9. Non-slip cutting board tip
10. Kitchen trash bag tips (Melinda)

Thank you all for your kind words of congratulations following Moshe's birth! I still haven't typed the birth story but am hoping to do that this week, along with taking more pictures to share, rambling about mommy stuff, etc... :)

We've been doing lots of this:

...and loving EVERY minute of it!!

But, let's get down to business. After a couple weeks' vacation, I have a kitchen tip for you!

As I pulled this container of cooked pinto beans out of the freezer, I remembered to snap a picture of what I do to prevent freezer burn on anything in a container with air space:

Press plastic wrap against the food before freezing. This also works great on ice cream in a box, partially used, in a home where ice cream stays in the freezer long enough to get ice crystals on top. (This no longer happens in our house but before we had kids, it did!)

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

Post a kitchen tip in your blog. Link to this post, and then leave your link here, so we know where to find YOU! :) No giveaways or non-tip posts, please!

In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

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1. Making heart-shaped omelets (Tara)
2. Using your food scale (Kim)
3. Dried beans in crock pot
4. Reverse-engineering processed foods (Katie)
5. Kitchen recycling tips (Kolfinna)
6. Pizza tips (Lindsay)
7. Fresh pineapple (Annie)
8. Kitchen inventory management (Rachel)
9. Dirty dishes tip (Melinda)
10. Saving Ziplock bags (Mary Jo)
11. Measuring spoons tip
12. Beans w/less gas (Cheryl B.)
13. Testing bundt cakes for doneness (Alea)
14. Homemade corn tortillas (Nancy)
15. Easy chopping for boiled eggs (Becky)
16. Quick tuna melts

As I was baking molasses spice cookies yesterday, I thought of a couple butter tips to share! :)

I have two Rubbermaid butter dishes (so handy, with a lid that snaps tightly!) and I keep them both filled and not refrigerated, so that we never run out of soft butter to spread on bread, etc.

Ever open the butter dish to realise that it's almost empty, and the rest of the butter is in the fridge? This happened to me way too many times growing up, so I have always kept two butter dishes out in our home!

Having extra butter at room temperature is also handy for those last-minute cooking-baking frenzies. Without a microwave to soften butter, I've frequently raided one or both butter dishes for some soft butter for whatever baking project I hadn't planned ahead!

And finally, when I'm cutting a stick of butter for a recipe and there's, say, 3 tablespoons left over, rather than wrapping the little piece and putting it back in the fridge, I check to see if it can fit on a partly-empty butter dish. If so, I add it to the butter dish, and avoid all the random pieces in the fridge. :)

By the way, these cookies are so delicious! My mom has made molasses spice cookies with raisins for as long as I can remember, and they're one of my dad's favorites. Now, I make them especially for Joshua -- although we all really like them! :)

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

Post a kitchen tip in your blog. Link to this post, and then leave your link here, so we know where to find YOU! :) No giveaways or non-tip posts, please!

In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

Leave your tip links in a comment. I'll manually add them to this post!

1. Cold butter tips (Harper)
2. Removing baked-on grease (Annie)
3. Refried beans tip (Kolfinna)
4. Cleaning cookware (Kirstin)
5. Ground beef in bulk
6. Making powdered sugar (Cammie)
7. Bulk food storage tips
8.

Have you ever grabbed a carton of eggs from the fridge, and nearly dropped it because inside, it looked like this??

Well, that's what used to happen to me... until I started taking out eggs in a balancing pattern:

Just use from the middle first, and take out every other egg. Don't leave 3 or 4 or 5 eggs all at one end -- or someone might grab the empty end of the carton -- causing the heavy end to drop unexpectedly!

Am I the only one who has a method for taking eggs out of the carton? Tell me this isn't silliness, and that you, too, have had the "Oh no, I nearly dropped the eggs!" scare!

Originally posted in 2007

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

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In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

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1. Double boiler substitute
2. Tips for eating plain yogurt with less sweetener (Katie)
3. Kombucha tip (Donna)
4. Entertaining children in the kitchen
5. Clean hands when breading/flouring (Jennifer)
6. Fast way to peel potatoes (Nancy)
7. Clean up as you go along (Mary Jo)
8. Snowflake food tips/ideas (Laura)
9. Carry-in dinner tips (Kolfinna)
10. No-mess chopping tip
11. Cream of tartar substitution (Kirstin)
12. Low-fat cooking tips (Harper)

This week's kitchen tip was passed to me from my friend Jamie, who gave us a dish of delicious creamy homemade macaroni and cheese topped with her homemade bread crumbs.

Here's her easy method for making homemade bread crumbs:

1. Save any stale or dry bread, crusts, or heels in a bag in the freezer.

2. When bread crumbs are needed, pull the bag of bread out of the freezer and use a food processor to crumble the bread.

3. Season the bread crumbs as desired. For topping her homemade macaroni and cheese, Jamie seasoned the bread crumbs with garlic powder, salt, pepper, and onion powder.

4. Store unused/unseasoned bread crumbs in the freezer until needed.

Do any of you have more bread crumb tips to share? I'd love to hear! :)

To Participate in Kitchen Tip Tuesdays:

Post a kitchen tip in your blog. Link to this post, and then leave your link here, so we know where to find YOU! :) No giveaways or non-tip posts, please!

In order to keep the kitchen tips more easily accessible, posts not adhering to these guidelines will be removed. We need to be able to easily find/see what your kitchen/cooking tip is. :) Thanks for your participation! :)

Leave your tip links in a comment. I'll manually add them to this post!

1. Food storage tips (Katie)
2. Cooking chicken (Kolfinna)
3. Kitchen safety tips (Annie)
4. Vinyl gloves (Elaine)
5. Variety in meals (Cindy)
6. Breadcrumbs tips (Harper)
7. Freezing sweet potatoes (Mary Jo)