New Year, New Kitchen

By Elizabeth Stevenson

With the New Year here, it is time to give your kitchen an overhaul.

Not new floors or expensive countertops. I’m talking about taking stock of what you can still cook with and what is too old to identify.

Since all the dates on packages can be confusing, I checked with the USDA to figure out the differences.

Expiration Dates Decoded:
A “Best if Used By (or Before)” date is recommended for best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.

A “Sell-By” date tells the store how long to display the product for sale. You should buy the product before the date expires.

A “Use-By” date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. The date has been determined by the manufacturer of the product.

“Closed or coded dates” are packing numbers for use by the manufacturer.

Tool time
Now that you know what food needs to go, it might be time to pare down on kitchen gadgets. Willams-Sonoma’s Mary Wilkinson recommends sticking with utensils that can do double duty.

Ice cream scoops not only dish ice cream; they can also be used to neatly round cookie and cupcake batter.

Silicon spatulas are necessary for stirring and scraping batter out of bowls.

Wooden spoons can be used for anything from salads to casseroles.

Stainless steel pastry scrapers can scrape pastry dough, help clean off counters, and even chop nuts.

Wilkinson suggests ditching gourmet toys (banana slicers, avocado tools, apple corers, etc.) whose tasks can be accomplished with a basic knife. Now, go take care of that mess.

For a cheat sheet on what’s still good to eat and for how long, please visit: www.northernvirginiamag.com/clean-sweep

(January 2011)