The heat and burn of chili peppers can make salsa, curry, and many other dishes delicious. Unfortunately, the burning heat of chilies is much less appealing on your hands or face. Wearing gloves can keep you from getting the volatile chili oil on your hands, but if you've forgotten your gloves, clean up is essential.

Potatoes are the ultimate comfort food. Properly cooked in a pan, they're crisp and golden on the outside and creamy-smooth on the inside. Although pan-fying is a natural choice for thin-sliced breakfast home fries, savory seasonings make these potatoes a perfect dinner side dish as well.

With a range of bright colors such as red, yellow and green, apples are one of the oldest fruits known to man. Though crabapples are the only apples to originate in the United States, all 50 states grow them as a food crop.

Avocados are notoriously difficult to enjoy until ripe. Unripe avocados are hard, and generally bitter or bland. You can tell if an avocado is ripe by the firmness of the skin. Avocados that give slightly to the squeeze should be ripe.

Blanching corn before freezing it stops the enzymes responsible for aging. Although corn is safe to eat if frozen without blanching, the National Center for Home Food Preservation recommends blanching vegetables to preserve their flavor and color.

During the strawberry season, you'll find berries piled high at your grocery store or roadside stands across the country. The plump fruit brings to mind fruity desserts, strawberries over cereal and indulging without added sugar. But strawberries are notoriously delicate and don't keep well after picking.

Change the way you stuff a turkey by using oranges, lemon and limes for a moist, delicately flavored bird. You will save calories and fat grams by not using traditional stuffing, which is loaded with butter that soaks into the meat.

Fruits and vegetables produce ethylene gas as they ripen. Certain fruits such as bananas and apples give off greater amounts of ethylene gas. Exposing unripe fruit to ripe fruit increases the unripe fruit's exposure to ethylene gas to speed up the process.

Dragon fruit, named for its vibrant, spiky skin, is sometimes known as pitaya and is primarily grown in Mexico and Central and South America. Dragon fruit can also be found in Asian countries, such as Thailand and Malaysia and is a staple for Asian-inspired cooking.

An unripe avocado has a somewhat bitter taste and a hard, firm texture that most find unpleasant, but there are a few ways to salvage an unripe avocado by cooking it, which will help to soften the flesh.

Sweet potatoes add good taste, a splash of color and a slew of important nutrients to your dinner table. Each 3.5 oz. serving supplies twice your daily requirement of vitamin A, 42 percent of your daily vitamin C requirement, 8 percent of your daily thiamine requirement and calcium, iron and fiber.

A convection toaster oven circulates heat around the food to decrease cooking time and use less energy than a regular oven. Baking sweet potatoes in the convection toaster oven takes about 1/3 less time than in a conventional oven, allowing you to enjoy the lower-calorie potato more often. A 3 1/2-oz.