2fers in the Kitchen

Who doesn't love a good 2-for-1? Here are a few ideas on getting the most out of things in your kitchen! :)

Do you buy frozen juice concentrate in containers like this that you mix with water in your pitcher at home? If you also have cats, save the pull tab off the container. It makes an excellent cat toy. Yuan approves. 😺 You might also find pull tabs on kefir bottles, or some milk or juice, though I don't see the latter so much anymore in that style. All kitty fun!

Save the crumbs from slicing bread in a container in the freezer to use as bread crumbs in recipes. I've done this just keeping it in the cabinet too, but if you leave it in there too long it will go stale, and I eat more bread than I make recipes with bread crumbs, so keep that in mind! I started saving it in the freezer after I had some go stale in the past.

When I talked about making homemade vanilla, I gave this a quick mention, but here it is with detail: if you make your own vanilla extract (and I recommend it, it tastes great and saves a ton of money if you bake a lot), you can get a second use out of the beans by making vanilla sugar!

When your vanilla extract is done tincturing, strain out the vanilla beans and put them in a container with some sugar. I've got ten beans and I mixed them with a cup of sugar.

Keep that in a container with a lid and give it a shake every day/few days or so, until the beans are all dried out. Now you have delicious vanilla flavored sugar! I like to use it in hot chocolate (milk+cocoa+vanilla sugar), and it's also good in coffee drinks! :)

Vanilla beans can be spendy (though honestly they're a ton cheaper online in bulk than buying them individually in a grocery or herbalist store), so get as much use and flavor out of them as you can! :)

If you have snail friends (this is Sanglainn the nerite snail in the aquarium munching on some white sweet potato), you can save bits of certain veggies for them to eat! Mystery snails and ramshorns seem to especially like veggies, but even my nerite snails have enjoyed some sweet potato or green bean. So when I've peeled something I think they might like, I save the scraps in the freezer and give them a piece every now and then. I dry them out on the counter first, in which case they'll sink right away, but once they've been in the freezer, they'll sink after they've thawed. :)

If you have a homestead with farm animals like chickens, all sorts of kitchen scraps can go to them. When I used to work at the health food store, we had a lady with chickens stop in every couple of weeks and the produce department would save any too-old-to-sell-to-customers veg for her to give to her chickens. Stopping waste at the store level!

I hope these examples gave you some ideas or caused you to think twice about how you can use things in multiple ways in the kitchen. Let me know some of your tips in the comments! :)