We're suckers for a great kitchen tip. And any time we find one that we love, we want to pass it on to you.
That happened this week while reading Fine Cooking.
It's partly about hulling strawberries, and partly about the secret superpowers of tools that are no doubt already in your kitchen.
First, strawberries: We're swimming in strawberries right now. They've been in our CSA share, and we've been buying a few quarts a week from the farmers market. Mostly we've just been snacking on them, a few here, a few there -- we're loving them.
When we cut up strawberries, we're guilty of not actually hulling them and instead just taking a knife and capping the end. It's easy, but it also wastes a bit of fruit. The upside of hulling a strawberry is that you remove the cap and the white part undearneath, but the rest remains intact.
The work of hulling strawberries can be done with a knife (if you're more patient than we are), or any manner of device that you can order online (a quick search on Amazon shows more than a dozen types of strawberry hullers you can buy).
We need a special strawberry huller about as much as we need an olive pitter or a pineapple slicer. (Read: Not at all.)
But Fine Cooking taught us a new trick.
We have a plain old nothing-fancy Oxo vegetable peeler. We had never noticed the tip of the peeler, which has a "built-in potato eye remover." (Translation: a point that allows you to easily dig unsightly spots out of potatoes.)
Turns out, the potato eye remover, a feature of many vegetable peelers, is perfect for hulling strawberries.
We love this tip. Thank you, Fine Cooking!
But now it's got us wondering: What else don't we know about our kitchen tools?
Have you discovered any secret superpowers among your kitchen gadgets?