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How to Clean 3: Cooking Grease

Apparently, lots of folk are flummoxed by the grease that's left after frying or roasting or broiling or whatever ... so much so, that here in San Antonio, the water company has posted billboards and notices asking that grease not be poured down pipes. I'm guessing lots of folks were never taught how to deal with the messy stuff.

Grease isn't that hard to deal with -- here's a couple of tips:

1. Pour the hot grease into leftover metal cans (think coffee cans or tin cans) or milk cartons. Let it cool, and toss. Used coffee cans are good, because they have plastic lids. You can fill these over time, storing the sealed can under the sink, and when the can is full, you toss it. No, there's not a bad smell. Put it in the fridge or freezer if you're really worried about a stench.

2. If the pan has sat around so the grease (e.g., fat) is not in liquid form any longer, the easiest thing to do is put the pan in the oven at 250 until it becomes liquid again, and do the pour thing.

You want to avoid getting grease into the sink, or the pipes -- and it's much easier to deal with the grease as a liquid than in its gel form.

3. Now, bacon grease is different. It's special. Keep it separate and make sure your container has a lid. When I was little, my mother would store bacon fat left over from breakfast on the stove top, because she used it as a flavoring -- she would fry onions and garlic in the bacon fat as a basis for lots of things, to fry potatoes, pinto beans, beef tips, even green beans. She'd use it to make cornbread. She'd make a roux with it for gravy, put a tad of it in mashed potatoes, well - you get the idea.


For a nice trip down Bacon Grease Lane, check out this list of comments at Gather.com.

FYI, did you know that in WWII, housewives were asked to save their cooking grease and turn it in to their local grocery stores, where it was collected to be used in making explosives?

Food as Medicine: 10 Tips For Lowering Cholesterol With Food

You can significantly lower your cholesterol just by diet. Here are some tips:

1. Eat several small meals a day. Think 3 meals, and then 3 snacks, if this helps - and then make the meals smaller than before. This keeps your blood sugar steady and prevents insulin spikes that up the production of cholesterol.

2. Eat a handful of walnuts or almonds each day. (Just doing this will lower your cholesterol by approximately 10%.) Better yet, do both. You can always add them to salads, top casseroles with them, put them in your oatmeal (I love this), or just have them as a snack. Keep a jar or small can of them on the table, within easy reach, and they'll get eaten.

3. Spice up your food with cayenne powder. Cayenne powder contains capsacin, which lowers cholesterol. Not that hard, if you're eating lots of different bean recipes (uses up lots of garlic this way, too).

4. Add garlic to your recipes. It lowers cholesterol and blood pressure.

5. Eat lots of beans. 1.5 cups of beans a day in your diet can lower your cholesterol by 19%. There's lots of ways to cook beans (soups, beancakes, stews, salads, beans & rice dishes, dips, etc.). There's lots of beans to choose from, too. Beancakes are great -- they can be made into sandwiches, eaten as a meal -- mush the beans up, put in lots of spices as well as garlic and onion, maybe some shredded carrot, and bake or fry these babies. Roll them in cornmeal or bread crumbs for a crispy crust.

6. Eat carrots and apples. They both have pectin, which lowers cholesterol.

7. Eat lots of fiber -- raw veggies and fruits are best. If you're eating the beans, the apples, the carrots, and the oatmeal, you're probably okay here.

8. Add cinnamon to your diet. 1-2 T/day. It helps lower cholesterol. Add it to your coffee, put it in your oatmeal, bake apples or yams with cinnamon, some make cinnamon tea but I'm not into the flavor that much. Pills are also available, Natural Valley has a good product - one month's supply for under 10 bucks.

9. Eat lots of oatmeal -- but make sure you use a good quality oatmeal in order to maximize the benefit. Say, 1.5 cups a day. (My favorite is Silver Palate's Thick and Rough Oatmeal.)

10. Stop eating margarine and other Saturated Fats. Check the Nutritional Labels of everything you buy and just don't buy products that are high in saturated fat or that have any trans-fats in them.

Sources:
MayoClinic.Com
Medicine.Net
American Heart Association
GoAskAlice.ColumbiaUniversity