Who doesn’t love a technique that will make our time in the kitchen easier and faster!
Here are a few of my favorites:
Write in your cookbooks.
Soup could have used more tomato? Chicken needed ten more minutes in the oven? Make a note of it and you’ll never make that mistake again. You think you’ll remember, but you might not. Needed more salt, less salt. Write it!
Quickly Hull a Strawberry
Insert a drinking straw (or stainless steel reusable) into the tip of the berry and push it through to the other end to quickly remove the stem.
Rescue a Salty Soup
Next time you oversalt a soup, toss in a few wedges of raw apple or potato. Simmer for 10 minutes and discard the wedges to get the flavor back to normal.
Inspect Your Spices
Ground spices don’t last forever. So give them a whiff—if they don’t smell like anything, they won’t taste like anything. And if they don’t taste like anything, you’re cooking with a flavorless, brown powder. This is especially true of things like cumin, things that are ground.
Buy parchment paper.
This will save you lots of cleanup time. Cook things on parchment paper.
Put the lid on the pot to make your water boil faster.
Seems obvious, but if you don’t know, now you know.
Don’t Crowd Your Pans.
Food that’s crowded into a cast-iron skillet or sheet tray gets steamed—and soggy—instead of crisp.
Switch to metal measuring cups and spoons.
Plastic warps over time, making them less precise.
Lisa Lewis is the author of Healthy Happy Cooking. Her cooking skills have been a part of First Place for Health wellness weeks and other events for many years. She provided recipes for 16 of the First Place for Health Bible studies and is a contributing author in Better Together and Healthy Holiday Living. She partners with community networks, including the Real Food Project, to provide free healthy cooking classes.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_hack