Kitchen Zen

What makes a wonderful kitchen is how well it is organised. This book has hundreds of useful suggestions for saving time and making your kitchen job more efficient. Here are some of the top kitchen organisation ideas and strategies.

Here's just a few of the suggestions:

• Put some extra plastic clothes pins in your kitchen drawer. Seal packets of partially used goods such as pretzels, chips, noodles, or rice with them.
• Keep screw-top glass containers in the pantry for keeping dry products.
• Use your empty thread spools to make a knife holder. Attach the spool holes to the cabinet door with screws. Arrange the spools in a row, one next to the other. The blades will fit between the spools, while the handles will rest on the spools.
• If you keep your sharp knives in drawers, keep them in a holder to keep the blades from dulling.
• Build the centre to suit the area by cutting the wall between the two studs.
• A big pair of tweezers may assist you pull olives and pickles out of narrow jars; tweezers can also be used to place decorations on dishes without touching the food, or to remove bones from fish fillets.
• Maintain an aloe plant in your kitchen. A leaf's gel can be used to treat bug bites, prickly heat, and sunburn.
• Washing your ice cube trays in hot soapy water on a regular basis can keep the cubes from adhering and allow them to come out much more easily.
• A rubber-coated plate rack works well as a cookbook holder.
• Fold recipes cut from newspapers and magazines into an envelope affixed to the inner cover of a cookbook to make them easily accessible.
• When you locate a recipe that is better than one in your cookbook, tape a duplicate of it right over the one in the book. The next time you need it, you'll be able to find it quickly by using the book's index.
• There will be adequate air circulation to minimise rust development if you keep cast iron pots and pans with their lids inverted or slightly ajar.