Notes From the Kitchen

Three random kitchen-related tips for you:

* I made pasta salad last week and thought of a genius new way to do it. I realize that most people would only make pasta salad for a picnic, but B loves it so I made some to accompany our turkey burgers last week. As it turned out I made way too much, but that only further proved the brilliant idea that I had.

Here's the idea - make the entire pasta salad but don't add the mayonnaise yet. In my experience, when you add the mayo, the pasta immediately absorbs it and then the leftovers are dry the next day and you either have to add more mayo or eat dry pasta salad. Instead, just add the mayo in single servings when you want to eat the pasta. Then it always tastes fresh and lasts much longer in the refrigerator.

* Mini Green Tip - Did you know you can put straws in the dishwasher? This won't apply to a lot of people, but we're a straw family (originally because of smoothies, but then it spread to other drinks as well). We were going through a lot of them so we figured we'd try to throw them in the dishwasher just as a test and it worked great! So for the last 2 years we've been successfully washing our straws and you should too. (Click HERE for updated thoughts on not washing straws & BPA)

* Crock Pot Recipes - I realize that crock pots are more of a winter thing, but they're such an ingenious way to have dinner that I wanted to pass along this website a friend of mine talked about on her Facebook page. It's called A Year of CrockPotting and chronicles a woman who cooked exclusively with her crock pot for an entire year. As a result, there are 365 recipes for you to choose from, with handy labels on the left side to narrow your choices. If ours weren't packed, I would definitely try out some of the suggestions.