Kitchen Tricks: Squeeze Bottles with Built-in Recipes

My wife loves salad dressing, particularly the soy sauce-balsamic vinaigrette that I keep in constant supply in a squeeze bottle in the fridge. I know the recipe by heart, but problems arise when I'm out of town, my wife has a brand new box of arugula, and the dressing's just run out.

Here's a little trick I devised to make sure that never happens again: just write the recipe directly on the squeeze bottle. Since good vinaigrettes are all about the ratio of ingredients, it doesn't really matter if you measure them out precisely using measuring spoons and cups. Rather, I draw a line on the side of my squeeze bottle with a permanent marker indicating the proportion of ingredients.

All my wife has to do is read the labels from the bottom of the bottle to the top, filling it as she goes along. Voila! Perfect vinaigrette, no recipes to memorize, no spoons or cups to clean up.

I've recently started a collection of these built-in-recipe bottles so that I'll constantly have an easy-to-refill supply of sauces and vinaigrettes on hand.

So Adri—this means no more excuses!

You guys out there have other nifty kitchen tricks like this that you use frequently?