Real Simple magazine often has tips related to all areas of life to include cooking and quick recipes. Recently I have been going through a backlog of issues and here are some of the food-related ones that stuck out.
- Put marshmallows in your brown sugar to keep it from getting hard.
- Use wine bottles for boot supporters to preserve their shape. (Ok, that technically isn’t related to cooking, but it is good to recycle those bottles.)
- Drop a few raisins in flat sparkling wine to give it some added bubbles. (This seems a bit weird, but I am willing to try it if the wine has already gone flat.)
- Use an old ketchup bottle as a pancake-batter dispenser. (You might end up wasting a lot of time trying to get the batter in the bottle though, so choose one with a wide neck.)
- Clean your kitchen sponge by heating it in the microwave for one minute. (That sounds reasonable.)
- If you want to clean hard-to-reach places in bottles, put some egg shells in with some warm water and a dash of soap. The shells will help scrape away the residue inside the bottle. I guess it’s worth a try.
A lot of Real Simple’s tips though border on the absurd. For instance, chopping tomatoes with a scissors. Seriously? I know there are hundreds of ways to cut things with different sharp implements, but I can’t see this really saving time. Another tip recommends switching water in flower vases with a turkey baster. That sounds ten times harder than just pulling the flowers out, dumping the water, and refilling the vase. And do we really want to cut up old Ugg boots to use as pot holders or use Crocs as hanging planters?
