Holidays equals great eating!

When families and friends get together to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other mid-winter festivals, what is it they gather around? Most of us converge around the dining room table loaded with fabulous traditional food!

All that cooking followed by all that cleaning up can use a lot of water. The best way to reduce your cooking and cleaning up water use is – put a plug in it – the sink, that is. Probably the biggest water-saving opportunity in the kitchen is rinsing dirty dishes.

Scrape the leftover food into the trash instead of using the garbage disposal in the sink. The wastewater system operators will thank you because fats and oils coagulate in the pipes and need to be cleaned out (yuck!). Also you won’t use water to rinse food through the garbage disposal.

Rinse dishes in a sink full of water instead of in running water. Or if you have a newer dishwasher, don’t rinse at all. They are built to handle crusted-on food. And why rinse glasses and cups at all? They had liquid in them.

What an opportunity for creativity! How many ways can you reuse the same gallon of water? What can you do with the cold water run-out while waiting for the hot water to get to the sink?

Rinse your vegetables over that crusty pan that needs to soak.

Steam vegetables instead of boiling them or boil more than one type of food in the same water if it will work.

When cooking pasta or rice, fill the pot to just over the food level instead of the extravagant number of gallons called for in the directions. All that water is to avoid clumping, which you can do by stirring the food a couple of times during the first few minutes of cooking.

Let food thaw any way BUT putting it under running water!

Have your family and guests use the same glass throughout the day. No, not one glass for everyone, one glass for each one!

Does the water need to run at full blast? Perhaps a trickle will do.

Finally, my favorite, let the dog lick the dishes! I know some people will be grossed out by this idea. But my dog is in the Working Dog breed category and one of his jobs is professional plate licker!