Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Works For Me


Works-For-Me Wednesday is a blog carnival where you can find all sorts of hints and tips. It was started by a blogger named Shannon over at Rocks in My Dryer who is a stay at home mom of four. Every Wednesday a huge group of bloggers post their links on her site linking to their WFMW post. They each have written about something that works for them and makes their life easier. I thought I would go ahead and try it out for the first time, so here is something that Works-For-Me.


When I have left over ingredients, sauces or something that might possibly turn into a refrigerator science experiment spoil, I pour it into my oversized IKEA ice cube tray. This ice cube tray is made of rubber and is soft sided so the cubes are easy to remove once frozen. I like to use this particular tray because of it's size, but as it is not longer available at IKEA I would suggest any soft sided/bottomed tray for ease of use.

So far I have used this method with heavy whipping cream, pizza sauce, tomato sauce, tomato paste, chicken broth, left over gravy as well as water and chopped fresh herbs. You can also freeze left over coffee to later blend with milk for your own home made cold coffee drinks. If I think of it at the time I try and measure the portions to make it easier to follow recipies down the road.

For example, here I poured 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream into each of the cubes in the tray so that later, I could make this recipe four times without having to buy whipping cream each time. No, we do not regularily stock half a gallon of heavy whipping cream around here, this photo was taken after Thanksgiving!


Once the cubes are frozen, I pop them out of the tray and store them in sandwich bags, which are then all stored in a labeled gallon size freezer Ziplock in the freezer.


What else is working? Check out this week's Mr. Linky!

4 comments:

  1. I love your idea! I did something similar when I was making baby food. I'd just blend whatever I had on hand (peaches, bananas, etc) and freeze them in portion size cubes from IKEA. And then all I had to do was nuke a cube-voila! baby food! My cubes are smaller, though. I had never thought of doing that with half-n-half. I never buy the stuff because I don't want it to go bad. I bet a silicone mini loaf pan would work well, too.

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  2. Oh! Thats a good idea!! I do that with herbs combinations in ice cube trays, and I used to use ice cube trays for home made baby food, but I never thought to do that with individual ingredients beyond that. I love my freezer tho, I use it constantly!

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  3. Great idea.
    Blessings from Costa Rica

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  4. This is a great idea, very practical. I just looked up your cream wafers recipe -- oh yum! I'll bet they are terrific!

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