Here is a quick and easy cooking tip I learned from a book called Queen of the Castle. It's called Whack-a-meal. What you do is pre-brown your hamburger using your crock pot. You put a couple of pounds of hamburger in your crock pot and leave it for 4 hours on low - stir every hour or so.

You drain it and let it cool. Then put it into gallon sized zip lock freezer bags. Be sure to get it as flat as you can and get all the air out so it won't get burned in the freezer. When you're ready to use it, you just whack it on the counter a few times to loosen up the frozen hamburger and pop it into your recipe. Isn't that clever?

Here's a couple of tips I picked up from MeckMom.com. She has some wonderful tips. One of her ideas is to put a special hook in the bathroom or laundry room especially for wet bathing suits. How many times have you found a wet bathing suit lying on a bed, or getting moldy in a plastic sack somewhere? If kids have a specific place to put their suits, this won't happen as much.

Another tip of hers is for changing clothes from one season to another. Especially in a snowy area like Utah, changing around seasonal clothes is a big deal. What you do is to put one of those big Rubbermaid tubs in your laundry room when you are ready for "the change".

Then as you do laundry, you just sort the clothes and fold the out-of-season clothes into the Rubbermaid tub. This frees up space in your drawers and closets for the new season worth of clothes. In about two weeks, you're totally done. Easy peesey!

Here's a tip for dealing with sentimental clutter. If you have something that has a lot of sentimental value for you, but you don't really like it, take a picture of it. Put it in a scrapbook page, make a journal entry or whatever, but don't let something you hate remain in your house.

I did this with a dresser my Mom had. I never really liked it, but after she died, I just couldn't bear to part with it. It was just something that I always remembered from my childhood. I almost kept it, but then my sister suggested I take a picture of it, and that just satisfied that emotional need for me. Now if I could just find that picture....

Be sure and come back next Monday and Friday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series. To see the rest of the series, just click the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a list of them.



By TwitterButtons.com