7 Simple Cooking Tips & Tricks

Make your time in the kitchen a breeze with these amazing cooking hacks. Get some new tricks and ideas you haven't thought of before! They'll make things go faster, taste better, and make your time spent cooking so much easier!

1. A cut above

Slicing a particularly hearty—or crusty—sandwich in half can force the fillings out the sides of the bread, making an unmanageable mess of your lunch. Here’s one solution.

1. Using a bread knife, cut the top slice of bread in half before placing it on the assembled sandwich.

2. Gently hold the pieces together and use the existing cut to guide the knife through the filling and the bottom slice of bread.

2. Cheesier sandwiches

Large round slices of cheese such as provolone can be too big to fit onto a piece of sandwich bread. For a neater fit, use this clever trick, which is especially useful for making grilled cheese, when you don’t want any of the cheese to leak out.

1. Fold the cheese slice into quarters, breaking it into four pieces.

2. Arrange the cheese on the bread with the squared edges facing out and the rounded edges facing in.

3. Sandwiches for picnics

Next time you head to the beach or the park for a picnic, instead of wrapping sandwiches individually, try stacking the prepared, unwrapped sandwiches in the bread bag you’ve emptied to make the sandwiches. You can even recycle the original tab to seal the bag shut.

4. Bagel bunker

If you often bring bagel sandwiches to work, you may have noticed that it’s not so easy to fit them into sandwich-size zipper-lock bags. (and in larger bags, they shift around, spilling their contents everywhere.) Here’s a fix: use an clean, empty cd spindle. The sandwich fits perfectly into the crush-proof case, and its filling stays in place.

5. Apple armor, peach protector

A piece of fruit is a great snack to bring to work, but if it’s bruised and mushy by the time you’re ready to eat it, it loses its appeal. Fix this problem by using a foam drink cozy to shield apples, peaches, and other round, easily damaged fruit from bumps and jostles in your bag during your commute.

6. The coolest lunch around

To keep foods destined for lunch boxes chilled as long as possible, try this easy solution.

1. Fold a paper towel in thirds, saturate it with water, and then fit it inside the bottom of a storage container. Put the container in the freezer.

2. When you’re packing lunch in the morning, place the food in a zipper-lock bag, set the bag in the frozen plastic container, and put on the lid. The food will stay cool until lunchtime.

7. Pack the salt and pepper

Most vacation homes supply plenty of table salt but rarely have the kosher salt you may want for grilling—plus, the pepper on hand is usually a flavorless preground kind of unknown vintage. Rather than pack a big box of salt and a pepper mill, just make a mix of kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper to bring along in a zipper-lock bag.