Salt and pepper hints really shake things up

Dear Heloise: I respectfully disagree with your advice on which shaker should be used for salt and which should be for pepper. Salt has been used as a preservative as well as a flavoring. My mother trained me that salt was put in the shaker with more holes (she was raised with major stress on manners), as it is used more frequently. Denise, Burke, Va.

We got quite a few comments on this. Here’s another, from Mary Lynch, via e-mail. She says: “In my family, the shaker with the most holes was always the saltshaker, because we all used salt but not all of us used pepper. It made me laugh to realize we’d all been ‘backward’ all these years! I enjoy your columns very much and read them online in The Washington Post even though I live in Pennsauken, N.J.”

Thanks for all the readers who dropped us a line! Heloise

Dear Heloise: I would like to respond to the column talking about consumers leaving frozen or perishable foods out on a grocery shelf and not putting them back.

I work at a warehouse club, and if the food is too warm, we throw it out. Our motto is: If in doubt, throw it out. It would be very helpful if the members of our store — or any other store, for that matter — would let an employee know if they don’t want the frozen/cold items any longer. We really don’t have a problem putting them back if they give them to us in time.

It hurts us and consumers financially if we have to destroy food that could have been saved if the member would have just asked us to take it back. Don, via e-mail

Dear Heloise: I put jigsaw puzzles together on top of a piece of plastic glass I bought and had cut at a building-supply center. I can turn the puzzles, carry them around the house and put them away when I’m not working on them. I have one small and one large to use with different-size puzzles. Really handy! Karen from Vermont

One of my assistants made one of these puzzle keepers out of plywood, and she loves it! Heloise

Dear Heloise: Because I crowd a lot of information into various computerized databases and like to print information on one page, I developed a scheme to identify phone numbers as cell, home or work by replacing the dash with a letter. For example: 123 456c7890 (a cell number). This works great for me! Kathleen from Alabama

Dear Heloise: For a quick room deodorizer, add a couple of drops of essential oil, like orange, lavender or clove, to a cool light bulb of a nearby lamp. Turn it on, and as the light bulb warms, the fragrance will waft through the air. Tammi M., Brenham, Texas

SBlt Send a money-saving or timesaving hint to Heloise, P.O. Box 795000, San Antonio, TX 78279-5000, or you can fax it to (210) HELOISE or e-mail it to Heloise@Heloise.com.

King Features Syndicate