Food Hack and Tip Ideas

Quick homemade pickles? Save the brine from the old pickle jars. Place the sliced cucumbers in the brine and set in the refrigerator for a few days. You can also add carrot, cauliflower, green beans and garlic. To speed up the process par boil the vegetables first.

To crisp up wilted limp vegetables add them to ice water. Great for celery, lettuce, spinach, asparagus. 

Have scorched cookies or toast? Use a microplane to scrape off the bottoms.

Use an egg slicer to slice strawberries and mushrooms

Don't throw those shower caps away they make perfect bowl covers

Use your potato peeler to make curls with carrots, dark chocolate, lime or lemon. Great on vegetables like beets, parsnips and rutabagas to make crisp vegetable chips.

Use oil spray in your measuring cups so things that are sticky like honey or corn syrup it will come right out.

Use your waffle iron for more than making waffles. Try carrot cake batter, brownies, hash browns, corn bread and scrambled eggs. Works great!

Place herbs into an ice cube tray and freeze. Drop into stews, soups and other recipes all year long.

Green bananas? Place in an oven at 350 degrees for 5 to 7 minutes they will quickly ripen if you need to make something like banana bread. 

Use old egg crate cartons to start and inside herb garden. Makes a great gift too!

Use a pointed tip squeeze bottle (you can save and use an old cleaned ketchup bottle) to make character pancakes for the kids. Just add the prepared mix to the squeeze bottle and draw as they are cooking on the griddle. If you really want to have a quicker method, use a metal cookie cutter, fill with batter and cook on the griddle. 

To make sure your avocado is ripe, remove the stem if brown it's over ripe, light golden color it's ready to eat.

For s'mores on the grill, pre assemble using a piece of aluminum foil. Lay down the graham crackers, chocolate and mini marshmallows in the oil sprayed foil, seal. When ready place on the grill. A perfect dessert. Also great when you add a sliced banana.

Use metal cookie cutter shapes to make your fried eggs prettier. The shapes can be fun.

Make stuffed pizza using refrigerated dough. Roll, fill and bake. Dip into pizza sauce after baking.

To make perfectly round hamburger. Roll the hamburger onto wax paper and cut them out with a glass.

Use a cookie cutter for on top of  newly frosted cakes, fill with sprinkles to keep the shape of whatever you use, great  for using age. The cutter makes a perfect shape.

Do you use creamer? Those tall bottles make great dispensers after cleaned for chocolate chips, mini cookies, crackers and nuts to store them in.

Use molds to make fancy shaped fudge during the holiday.

Wear disposable gloves when mixing meats by hand. Save you lots of time cleaning up.

Did you know you can freeze eggs up to one year? When your ready to use frozen eggs, thaw them overnight in the refrigerator or under running cold water. Use them as soon as they are thawed. 

Tint your cake batter with corresponding Holiday colors. Bake into a brownie size pan. Cool, cut into shapes like shamrocks, red stars, pink or blue baby theme, Christmas trees. Make another raw batter and drop the cooked shapes into the batter. When you slice the cake you will have a great surprise inside.

Place marshmallows inside your brown sugar bag, just a few that will keep it from getting hard.