Grab Bag Friday: The Best Tip I Ever Got From Watching Rachel Ray

Are you ready for it? Seriously, it's even better than it sounds. Just try it a couple times. You'll see.

As we know, I'm not the most eager chef. I rarely used fresh ginger until I learned this tip because it was such a pain in the neck to peel it, and chop it up (I tried grating it once and that was a disaster), and we always had to buy a whole big ginger root which is way more than we needed for one recipe... Now I use fresh ginger all the time! (Don't I sound like an infomercial?)

The next time you buy fresh ginger from the store:

1. Peel it
2. Chop it into one-inch cubes
3. Put the cubes into a plastic bag and store them in the freezer

Then, when you need fresh ginger in a recipe (Chicken Soba Noodles, anyone?), just take out a frozen cube and grate it with a zester. Ta da! It takes about ten seconds to grate. No clean up. No waste. And if you don't have a zester, it's worth picking one up, just for this. Let me tell you, fresh ginger is *way* more delicious than the dried stuff.

Rachel Ray (or whichever staff member worked round-the-clock to come up with this little gem) is a genius.

(Photo by FotoosVanRobin)