Helpful Hints

DEAR HELOISE: I try to avoid sweets these days. During Christmas, I bought a lot of ingredients for a cookie exchange and used only half of them. Rather than keep them (chocolate chips, vanilla chips, coconut, graham crackers, brown sugar, etc.) and end up throwing them away later, I came up with this hint: I'm going to offer the leftover ingredients to a young mother with small children, because all of that stuff isn't cheap.

-- Lou S., Bakersfield, Calif.

DEAR READER: Lou, how neighborly of you! How about making a batch to go along with the goodies?

DEAR HELOISE: Many years ago, I had your cowboy bean soup (Heloise here: It was a recipe of my mother's, Heloise, 1919-1977, who started this column), but in a move, I lost the recipe. I remember it had bean-and-bacon canned soup and a couple of other ingredients. Help!

-- Charlene M. in San Antonio

DEAR READER: Charlene, this dish is easy to make, and boy, does it taste good. Bootleg Beans a la Heloise is a baked-beans recipe. You can turn it into a soup by adding a can of tomato soup (diluted with the correct amount of water), more chopped onions and extra bacon if you want. Here's what you need:

3 strips bacon

1 small chopped onion

1 can pork and beans in tomato sauce

1 tablespoon brown sugar

2 to 3 tablespoons ketchup

Fry the bacon over medium-high heat until almost crispy. Add the onion and cook with the bacon until browned. Pour off almost all the grease and add the remaining ingredients. Stir until mixed well, cover and simmer until heated through. You can bake Heloise's Bootleg Beans. Put everything (cook the bacon first) in an ovenproof baking dish and bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour.

DEAR HELOISE: I bought lemons to make lemon bars, but then they went bad -- it happened overnight. The next time I bought lemons, while they were fresh, I zested the lemons and put the zest in a plastic zipper-top bag.

I also juiced the lemons and put the juice in an ice-cube tray and placed it in the freezer. I realized I should do this all the time. Now I'll have fresh zest and juice. No more waste.

-- Laura M. in Chicago

DEAR READER: Laura, those lemons must have had a party in your kitchen. They should not have gone bad overnight. If they were that ripe, putting them in the refrigerator would have prevented them from ripening further.

DEAR HELOISE: The size of the bottle slots in the six-pack cardboard wine carriers that many supermarkets provide are the perfect size for plastic wrap, aluminum foil, waxed paper, etc.

-- Jackie G.,

Huntington Beach, Calif.

Send a money- or time-saving hint to Heloise, P.O. Box 795000, San Antonio, Texas 78279-5000; fax to (210) 435-6473; or email

Heloise@Heloise.com

Food on 02/10/2016

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