Tips and Tricks- frozen fruit edition

I haven't done a helpful hints type post in a while, so here are a few tips from my kitchen.

Freezing Bananas
For years I have taken bananas going a bit too ripe and popped them in the freezer for banana bread, where they'd freeze solid and turn all black and be so unappetizing that I rarely got around to making banana bread out of them.  Boo.  Thanks to an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats, though, I realized there is a much better way.  Now, the Husband and I buy large bunches of bananas on sale, and when they are getting too ripe to finish off before they go bad, we cup them into 1-inch slices to freeze.  We've found that laying them out on a cookie sheet in the freezer for a few hours and then popping them in a zip-top bag makes them not stick together, so you easily have as much or as little banana as you need for a particular recipe.

Day-ahead Smoothie Prep
The Husband and I are both really into smoothies right now, and so we have been experimenting with our favorite ingredients and techniques.  We both use a mixture of frozen/fresh ingredients, but we've found with the addition of the frozen banana chunks from the above tip that they can be a bit of a chore to actually Blend in the morning.  So, the easy solution is to put all your smoothie ingredients, fresh, frozen and liquid, into the blender carafe the night before and pop the whole thing in the fridge.  That gives the frozen stuff enough time to defrost a bit so that you can just pop the whole thing on the blender base and whip it up no problem in the morning.  If, however, your carafe doesn't fit in your fridge, like ours doesn't, you can put all your ingredients in your smoothie travel cup, pop that in the fridge, then in the morning pour that into the blender to blend and back into the cup to take with you... no extra dirty dishes that way.

Cocktail Garnishes
A few weeks ago, for a party, I made a TON of lemon twists and brought them to the party to garnish the cocktails with.  However, we didn't use them all, and I feared I'd wasted all that work.  On a whim, I popped them in the freezer.  And... voila!  Not quite as good as fresh, but it's fantastic to grab a bottle of vodka or gin from the freezer, shake up a cocktail, and have a twist ready without busting out the peeler.