Surprising Ways to Use Salt

Salt has been used for cooking and as a way to keep food for centuries. But did you know that there are a lot of home uses too?

Tests for Fresh Eggs

If you are not sure if the eggs in your fridge are fresh, then salt can help you find out. Dissolve (溶解) four tablespoons of salt into two cups (or about half a liter) of water in a bowl and then gently place an egg into the bowl. If it goes down to the bottom, the egg is good to use. 【小题1】

Puts Out an Oil Fire

Salt should always be kept in your kitchen by your cooker. That’s because water will not put out an oil fire. 【小题2】 To put out the fire, try to put a cover on the pot, or if you do not have a cover, you can put out the fire with salt. The extra salt on the cooker will help you clean up the cooking stand, too.

Cleans Pots

【小题3】 If a pot is really oily, just cover the pot with salt and let it sit for 10 minutes before you start cleaning. The same goes for cleaning up oven spills (洒出). If food spills in your oven, just spread salt over the spill. 【小题4】

Frees Car Windows from Frost (霜)

During the winter, you can use salt to keep your car windows frost-free. 【小题5】 To prevent the windscreen from freezing, add a little salt to a slightly wet cheese cloth the night before and rub (摩擦) it on the windshield. Then enjoy a cup of coffee instead of cleaning ice in the morning.

If you’ve ever eaten a free doughnut (甜甜圈) on the first Friday in June, you’ve celebrated the Doughnut Lassies- whether you realized it or not, National Doughnut Day was established to honor the Salvation Army volunteers who fried sugary snacks for World War I soldiers on the front line.

When the US entered World War I in 1917, the Salvation Army, a charity organization, sent about 250 volunteers (who were mostly women) to France, where the American army was stationed. The plan was to bring treats and supplies as close to the front line as possible. But the closer the volunteers got to the action, the fewer resources they could access.

Margaret Sheldon and Helen Purviance were credited with bringing doughnuts to the Wester Front. They had a handful of ingredients, including flour, sugar, animal fats, baking powder and canned milk. Doughnuts were one of the few sweet foods they could make without an oven, and once they had a fire hot enough to heat the oil, they could fry them up fast. The women had the pan to cook them in, but for other parts, they had to get creative. For example, grape juice bottles became rolling pins (擀面杖) when necessary.

Sheldon and Purviance’s pan could fit seven doughnuts at a time, and on day one, they made just 150 doughnuts for the group of 800 men. The soldiers even fought over a doughnut. Then they made some changes to their operation, and eventually made 5,000 doughnuts a day. The snacks were so popular that the volunteers earned the nickname “ Doughnut Lassies”, while the soldiers they served were nicknamed “Doughboys”.

The Doughnut Lassies’ impact didn’t end with World War I. The American soldiers’ experiences overseas made doughnuts a commonly eaten food for them back home.

Like the problem of hunger, food waste is a global problem, which resists（抵抗）to quick fixes. But if each of us takes steps to cut food waste in our homes, we will decrease the burden on the environment and help to feed more people. Here are some of the tested tips.

【小题1】Before heading to the grocery store, we should make a meal plan. Buy only the food we need for the meal plan. Well-planned shopping not only cuts the food waste but also protects our wallet.

Buy frozen produce.【小题2】. So start buying frozen vegetables instead. And there's no nutritional loss here. Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh ones-sometimes even more so.

Make juice or soup. When we happen to have more fresh produce than we can eat, take out the expensive juice-maker that we never use and treat ourselves to some fresh juice.【小题3】

Use clear containers to store leftovers.【小题4】. When we can see what is in the containers, they're just less possible to disappear into the back of the fridge（冰箱）．

Hopefully, one or two of these ideas can be helpful in fixing the food waste problem.

【小题5】 If each of us is able to keep just one more pound of food out of the trash each week, together we could cut food waste by over 5 million pounds each year!