We are going to embark into a New Year and with the holiday season coming up, it’s a great time to take stock. A great place to do that is to start from the Kitchen. It is a place that is used everyday, where families cook, eat, drink and spend a large part of the time bonding with eachother. And this is also the place that gets over stocked and piled up with pantry and dirt.
This is a great time of the year to clean up, be careful about what we buy and stock into our pantries. Lets call it the kitchen detox where we start from the pantry to the storage shelf, to the drawer, to the sink and finally the drain. The idea is to clean up, throw away old stock and start stocking only things that you will use for a week and make it an environmentally friendly place.
Here are a few tips that you can use to make your kitchen a place for healthy and clean eating and a happy living.
1. Plan Your Weekly Meals & Avoid Wastage
Planning your weekly meals and noting down what you are going to make during each meal of the day for 7 days a week, will make you a better shopper.
Most often when we head to a grocery store, we tend to pick up things with a lot of energy and zeal so we can cook them during the week. But as the week passes by, we find our stock either lying in the refrigerator or in the pantry and it continues to lie there for weeks. One fine day you do a clean up, just to find out your food has gone rotten.
A great way to avoid this is to plan your meals for the week and shop accordingly. We have some great Weekly Meal Plans that you can start using to get started
2. Look for New Recipes and Make Something Special for the Family
Winters are times when we fall back to the basic foods to get meals done in a hurry. We end up having a Khichdi or a simple rice and dal to make our lives simple.
When you go shopping to the grocery store, find a new ingredient, something that you have not made before and cook using that. An example would be Zaatar spice mix, and you will be amazed on the recipes you can make from that.
Trying buying a new ingredients every week and you will be surprised how much fun cooking can get for you and your family. Your kitchen is sure to smile.
3. Set Your Tables For A Family Dinner
In the busy lifestyles that we lead and with Television and Gadgets that have taken over our entertainment, small things like setting the table for dinner, can make a weeknight family dinner enjoyable and cheerful.
Get your silverware, fancy mats and plates for dinner. Place your dishes in good looking serving bowls and you will find that your meal times are fun, happy and the food will tastes three times delicious.
4. Use Less Paper and Plastic
With the growing environmental crisis and the garbage problem across the world, avoid buying large cartons of products and storing them for later use. Not only would there be wastage of food, but also a packaging waste that adds to the global garbage problem.
Reuse the mason and glass jam and pickle jars to store your sauces, curries and salad. Overtime, you will save money and reduce waste.
Avoid using kitchen paper towels and instead switch to cloth napkins for cleaning the kitchen counter tops and the dishes. You will be amazed how well they clean and they can be wasked multiple times over. By doing this, we are not only saving trees, but also protecting our environment.
5. Keep Your Sinks and Drains Clean
Cooking good food, stocking pantry and having a good weeknight dinner all comes with making sure we are keeping our kitchens clean from dirt, cockroaches and other insects.
Sinks, drains and garbage bins are important parts of the kitchen, that we need to keep clean to enable our food to stay safe and for us to enjoy a happy enjoyable meal.
Because cockroaches crawl into your kitchen from drainage pipes and hide in various corners, they contaminate food behind your back and spread food poisoning. So don’t let cockroaches disrupt your Happy Kitchen. Use LAL HIT, the only solution that kills even hidden cockroaches with its unique ‘Deep Reach Nozzle’. LAL HIT is the only solution for disease free home.
*This is a sponsored article for HIT