I can hear you out there. "Tupperware, Rachel, really?" you're saying. But hear me out because this one item reduced our household's plastic freezer bag consumption by a huge amount - and is useful for storing other items too.

Alex used to use gallon bags constantly to cure meat - pork bellies for bacon, marinating jerky, and salmon in rub. Often after the meat was cooked, he used another bag to store it in the fridge or freezer. The waste really added up, but even I won't re-use plastic bags that hold raw meat.

Then I went to a party at my friend Patti's house with Dee W. Ieye, the fabulous cross-dressing Tupperware mega-seller. The show was, as advertised, a riot. I'm not really a Tupperware girl but I perked up when Dee mentioned a marinating container.

The Tupperware Season-Serve is two deep plastic pans, each of which is lined with small raised dots that hold meat slightly off the bottom. The pans seal together, forming a container that can be flipped without spilling - exactly what you need to do once a day for most charcuterie.

We've used the Season-Serve for a few months now and it is everything I had hoped - it holds meat juices without spilling, is easy to stack in the fridge, and has saved at least a box of freezer bags so far. If you, like me, find yourself in a Tupperware party hosted by an over-the-top faux-Southern lady, order the Season-Serve. Or skip the show and buy one online.

one great tool logo

Today I'm introducing a new series, One Great Tool. In each post, I'll highlight one hand tool that is indispensable to our daily cooking and gardening activities. We hope that by sharing our favorites with you, we can encourage more efficient and fun homesteading.

The first step to cooking any winter squash or making a jack-o-lantern is to remove the seeds and stringy flesh from the inside. Pulling them out by hand is one way, but it always reminds me of the 'cold bowl of spaghetti masquerading as pig guts' trick. It feels icky and rarely removes all of the seed material.

Instead, we go right for a grapefruit spoon. The row of metal teeth is meant to perfectly separate sour grapefruit segments from thin, bitter membrane. More frequently in our house, the teeth scrape the insides of harvest orange winter squash.

scooping squash with grapefruit spoon

With a few simple scrapes using the spoon, all the gooey bits of the squash separate from the flesh which can then be roasted whole, roasted in chunks for soup or boiled. We save the seeds for roasting or replanting.

We reach our hands, clutching a grapefruit spoon, into the middle of jack-o-lantern pumpkins too. The spoons cleanly remove the bits of membrane that might otherwise catch on fire when you light the candle. I've even used it to remove the seedy middle from halved zucchini and summer squash.

We don't eat grapefruit very often because it isn't grown in Ohio and some people experience a negative interaction with a medicine Alex takes. But we do use our grapefruit spoons for squash frequently, especially in the fall.