Punk Housewife Tip: Oil and Wine

Here’s a double dip tip:

Buying Olive Oil in Bulk

If you use a lot of olive oil you might want to buy it in the big square cans, it’s considerably cheaper than the small bottles. But you’ll still want to keep a small bottle near your stove, which presents the problem of pouring from that big can, which inevitably goes glugluglug and slops oil all over everything.

To solve this annoying problem, just punch a small hole on the opposite side of the top to the pouring spout. This lets the air in and makes for a nice smooth pour. This might work with those big plastic jugs from Costco too, once the oil level goes down a bit.

Storing Leftover Wine for Cooking

We used to have a lot of dinner parties, resulting frequently in leftover odds and ends of wine bottles. I’m not a big drinker– if I have wine one night, I don’t feel like more the next. I love to cook with wine, but again, not very often. I left a lot of wine sitting around souring, waiting to get used, before it finally occurred to me that I could just freeze the leftover wine! Freezing wine works beautifully. Because of the alcohol content it stays loose, like a slushy. All you have to do is scoop out however much you want and dump it straight into the pan!

Now, with our dinner party days seemingly over, I buy a bottle of wine every now and then expressly to stick in the freezer (pour it into a wide mouth jar first!) I keep a jar of red and a jar of white. Since I only use a 1/2 cup or so at a time, one bottle of wine lasts me for ages.

When cooking with wine, you need to boil it hard for a few minutes if you want to cook off all the alcohol. My routine– sauté onions, brown meat or whatever, then throw the wine in and let it roil on high to ‘deglaze’ all the caramelized goodness off the bottom of the pan. Yummie.



Leave a Reply to Gina Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments

6 responses to “Punk Housewife Tip: Oil and Wine”

  1. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

    This sounds like a solution to my problem. I don’t drink at all. Husband likes to have wine with certain meals, and I like to use it in cooking. I was making spaghetti sauce the other night and asked which bottle of wine can I open? He had a couple stock piled. He said none…he wasn’t ready to open one and didn’t want wine that night. No matter how much I whined I was not wined. So no wine in the sauce that night. Soooo….next time bottle is opened will pour off some into a wide mouth jar as you suggest and put in the freezer and I will keep doing this so never have a wine-less recipe again.

  2. The perpetual vinegar jar is another good solution for those leftover bottles, assuming you use red and white wine vinegar.

  3. oh, my, I’d not thought of freezing the leftover wine…definitely gonna have to start doing that. thank you!!

  4. you could even use leftover wine to make red wine vinegar! just add ‘mother of vinegar’ collected from a live vinegar (it’s the snotty seaweedy looking thing floating around inside) and it’ll do all the work for you! amazing stuff it is! :)

  5. Thank you. Now I will no longer have to sit in a puddle of olive oil miserably swigging wine dregs.

    You rock. I am aware that I haven’t been interacting on the blog for ages… and that I still haven’t sent you an apron… but meanwhile I hope a little lining of your coffers gives you a clue as to how much I’m continuing to enjoy your blog. I too have all sorts of things I’d love to contribute to the conversations, but it’s all a bit beyond me right now so i just post pictures of craft :)

    1. Calamity Jane Avatar
      Calamity Jane

      please do not let that apron give you one moment of guilt. notice i haven’t offered to make any of my readers anything.
      nice to hear your voice again though.