By Kathryn McLean
Is March too early for spring cleaning? Here’s a collection of tips for refreshing some of your kitchen items, springtime or otherwise, to help your everyday kitchen tasks go more smoothly.
How Clean is Your Can Opener?
Do you wash it after using it or just toss it back in the drawer? Many people don’t wash their can opener because they’re worried it will get rusty. So instead, it’s getting crusty with dried sauces, oils and bits of food.
Go ahead and put a hand-held can opener in the dishwasher, or give it a quick scrub when you’re washing pots and pans. If it’s particularly gunky, try cleaning the teeth and blade with the end of a skewer to remove crust before washing. After washing, wipe the can opener dry with a kitchen towel to prevent rust.
What About Your Scissors?
Similarly to the can opener, scissors you keep in the kitchen should get washed regularly. Whether you cut meat and chicken with them, or simply open packages of cereal and other dry goods, the blades need to be cleaned.
Take a look at the scissors after you cut something with them. Did milk from the bag you just opened get on the blades? Are the handles sticky? If packages of meat, cheese, veggies (anything, really) are at all wet or greasy, inside or out, those scissors that cut into the package need a wash.
Again, a quick rinse or wash is usually good enough, but occasionally pop them into the dishwasher for a thorough clean.Always wash them if they were used for meat or chicken, or to open packages of those items. Dry the scissors (carefully) with a kitchen towel.
How Sharp is Your Vegetable Peeler?
Your vegetable peeler should easily peel full strips of vegetable skins off firm potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots. If it isn’t sharp, consider buying a new one. A sharp tool will make the work of peeling potatoes so much faster than one with a dull blade. And you can pick up a basic and effective vegetable peeler for under $15.
What About Your Knives?
Your knives should be very sharp. If you find yourself mushing a tomato when you try to slice it, or if you are sawing back and forth to cut through vegetables and pieces of raw meat, or if it’s equally difficult to cut through hard and soft items, your knife is too dull.
You can buy sharpening stones to sharpen your knives yourself with a few YouTube lessons and some practice. Or take them to a restaurant supply shop to sharpen them for you. A sharp knife will make your cutting prep quicker and more precise.
A Helpful Tool to Have
Here’s a tip not for maintaining your tools, but for a helpful tool to have in the kitchen. Do you have a rubber spatula? Not the flat-ended spatula you might use to flip pancakes, but a silicone spatula for wiping the sides of a bowl clean.
There are so many useful ways to put a rubber spatula to work in your kitchen: Scrape out the last bit of yogurt, jam or just about any sauce or condiment from a jar or tub; wipe down the sides of a mixing bowl when baking; get all those juicy, oily, flavourful, herby bits from a pan of roasted food; scrape all the mix from your blender or food processor; loosen (and flip) eggs in a pan; stir anything in a non-stick pan without scratching the surface of the pan’s finish, and get all those bits out of the pan, too.
You can pick up a rubber spatula for just a few dollars. Once you start using it, you’ll find yourself reaching for it all the time!
Keeping your kitchen tools in good shape will help your kitchen work be quicker and more efficient, and a spatula will help you to waste less of all those last bits. Who doesn’t want to be quicker and less wasteful?