Everything Else — Page 4 of 22 « Food Hacks

How To: Cook Rice in Casseroles for Less Cleanup Afterward

Often, the most frustrating part of crafting the perfect dinner is feeling like you have to clean every single pot and pan in your kitchen after cooking just one meal. With so many components, it can feel like each step of a single dish requires its very own pot.

How To: Why Blueberries Are the Best Fruit You've Never Pickled

When we think of pickling, we usually think of using veggies like cucumbers, carrots, and peppers. However, with summer upon us, we found ourselves thinking about fancy pickled berries as a novel way to use all those gorgeous gems that are popping up at the market.

How To: Grab a Can of Lemonade Concentrate for the Easiest Frozen Pie Ever

Every once in a while, we stumble across something food-related that makes us stop and do a double take. Frozen lemonade pie definitely takes the cake—or shall we say, pie—for a dessert that intrigued us upon discovery and totally lived up to its hype. Its filling uses only three ingredients and is one of the most refreshing and seasonally-appropriate desserts on our current roster of must-eats.

How To: Holy Crap—Grilled Cheese Is More Than Just a Sandwich

Grilled meat may be a staple of summer barbecues, but grilled cheese should have a place at your outdoor feast as well. I don't mean taking a slice or two of cheese, slapping it between two pieces of bread, and putting it in a pan to create a grilled cheese sandwich. No, I mean literally grilled cheese.

How To: Whoa—You Can Make Sprouts from Lentils, Almonds & More!

The sprouts, they're alive! Alive, I tell you—aaaaaaliiiiiive! (Cue dramatic music.) It's true: sprouts are a living food, and they're packed with more nutritional benefits than some raw vegetables. It's easy and fun to grow your own sprouts from seeds, legumes, and grains. Plus, watching them grow is incredibly satisfying—you're bringing new life into the world (and onto your plate)!

How To: Make Hershey's Cookies 'n' Creme Bars

Cookies 'n' Creme is one of Hershey's most popular candy bars, right behind their classic milk chocolate bar, Kit Kat, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

How To: Frito Pie Is Sinfully Delicious—& Easy to Make

Though the word "pie" may conjure up images of a dessert made of dough with various fillings, the famous Frito Pie is, in fact, something of an entirely different nature. Absurdly simple in its construction, this pile of Fritos and chili is served in the actual chip bag and more closely resembles nachos than it does a traditional pie.

How To: This Hack Lets You Cook Everybody's Omelets at the Same Time

If you spend weekend mornings sadly turning your omelet attempts into scrambled eggs rather than enjoying a perfectly flipped omelet, reach for a resealable plastic bag. Using a ziplock bag to make an omelet is not only foolproof, it's the perfect solution to cooking for a crowd, where you can make everyone's customized omelets at the same time. How cool is that?!

How To: Caramelized Sugar—Your New Secret Baking Weapon

Caramel is delicious, but it can be a tricky flavor to incorporate into baking. Traditionally, caramel is a liquid, and that doesn't always suit dessert preparation since adding extra liquid to baked goods can ruin them. So how do you get that buttery, toffee-like flavor?

How To: 5 Ways to Turn Watermelon into Sweet & Savory Pizzas

If you love sitting poolside with a slice of watermelon, then I've got a real treat for you. Picture yourself cooling off with a slice of juicy watermelon topped with fresh ingredients like soft cheeses, herbs, and fresh summer fruits. Watermelon pizza is a wondrous thing—a creative take on the classic watermelon salad, only pizza-fied!

How To: Make Amazing Affogato with Ice Cream Cubes

In Italian, the word affogato means "drowned." Kind of a morbid name for such a delicious goodie, right? But there's a reason it's called that.

How To: You Don't Need a Stone Oven to Make Kickass Pizzas

Making pizza at home is fun and easy—until you get your creation into the oven. Then all of a sudden, your crust gets soggy and your toppings ooze off into one big mess.

How To: Don't Be Basic—Chocolate Cups Aren't Just for Peanut Butter

We can't resist a good peanut butter cup—especially when it's homemade. But it's not just the peanut butter or the chocolate that makes us pledge our undying love to these sweet treats over and over again. Nope. What really drives us wild about them is their shape. Yup: we love candy cups.

How To: Turn Your Sour Milk into an Unbelievably Tasty Jam

Wait, don't dump that milk! It may have a slightly sour smell and be expiring tomorrow, but you can still put it to good use by making sour milk jam.

How To: 5 Ingredients That'll Take Your Potato Salad to the Next Level

No summer season would be complete without potato salad, an essential side dish. The flavors and textures of a simple potato salad can be totally satisfying as is, but add in a few items and you can have a dish that is absolutely extraordinary.

How To: Baking Soda Is the Surprising Key to Extra Creamy Hummus

Hummus seems like it should be easy to make, but creating that ideal creamy consistency can be pretty difficult. Often it comes out too chunky, which means your hummus won't be good for dipping into. Luckily, there is one trick that will help you create the creamiest consistency and make you never want to go near store-bought hummus again: add baking soda.

How To: De-Gunk Your Dirty Grill Grates with Aluminum Foil

As you get barbecuing this summer, you're likely to encounter a few grills that aren't exactly the cleanest. At parks or campgrounds and even on your friends' grills (or, um, your own), no one wants to place food on gunked-up grill grates.

How To: Skewer All Your Sausages Together for Easier Grilling

Summer is a sensational time for barbecues of all sorts, and sausages always seem to be in the limelight. From backyards to ball parks and picnic tables, crafting the best barbecued sausage is an art well worth mastering.

How To: 8 Easy Ways to Enjoy Eating Octopus

The octopus is famous for its bulbous head, enormous eyes, and four pairs of long arms. The stuff of legends and nightmares, octopi have been featured in stories, artwork, and meals galore. But how do you eat this distinctive looking, bilaterally symmetrical sea creature?

How To: 10 Jammin' Tricks to Making the Best Fruit Preserves Ever

The sweet aroma of cooked fruit filling your kitchen is one of the trademark scents of summer. Yet attaining the perfect consistency for homemade jam can be difficult to master. Often it ends up a watery mess or over-solidifies into thick mystery goo that is destined for the trash, not topping your toast.

How To: 10 Ways to Take Your Summer Fruit Salad from Mediocre to Masterpiece

With the weather warming up and the days getting longer, fruit salads are starting to appear at backyard BBQs, beach picnics, and pretty much everywhere else. Often these sweet side dishes are unremarkable, with each colorful bowl blending into the next. Luckily, there are easy ways to spice up your fruit salads so that everyone will still be talking about them next summer.

How To: Get Your Cheesecake Fix with These 10-Minute Parfaits

Cheesecake is a nearly flawless dessert. It's rich but light, has a toothsome crust but a creamy body, and tastes good served room temperature or frozen. What's not to like?

How To: Save Your Limp Cucumbers & Carrots with Old Pickle Juice

When there's no more pickles in the pickle jar, most of you probably dump the remaining brine down the drain and recycle the bottle. While recycling is commendable, throwing out good pickle "juice" is not.

How To: Freeze Your Bread the Right Way & Never Have It Go Stale Again

Bread doesn't have a long shelf life, as most of you probably know quite well from firsthand. You get it home from the store and before you know it, the loaf has turned from soft and perfectly pliable to hard and crumbly—and maybe even moldy! So what's the best way to keep your bread from going bad before you've finished off every delicious slice? Put it in your freezer. It's a simple solution that you've probably heard many times before, but one you probably don't use very often because you ...

How To: Use Cake Flour to Get Pillowy Soft-Baked Cookies

For those of you that prefer a soft-baked cookie that is fluffy in the middle, using cake flour instead of regular all-purpose (AP) flour is your secret baking weapon. "But I don't have cake flour," you protest. Fear not: if your kitchen is sans cake flour, you can easily whip some up by mixing together AP flour and a little bit of cornstarch for the same results.

How To: 1 Rotisserie Chicken = 3 Different Dinners Made Easy

We used to saunter into the grocery store and gaze longingly at the pre-made roasted chickens, wistfully thinking of things we could do with the golden fowl if only we didn't already have dinner plans.

How To: Say 'So Long' to Soggy Hash Browns with This Crispy Hack

Hash browns are a breakfast staple and for good reason: they're simple, salty, and crispy, and so delicious that you can easily down several servings of them in one sitting. Basically, they're the French fries of breakfast.

How To: 10 Extreme Hot Dog Hacks That Make Ketchup & Mustard Obsolete

We've always loved a good summertime hot dog, placed lovingly in a soft simple bun with ample ketchup and mustard. But after eating hot dogs this way and this way alone for the majority of our lives, we grew tired of the same old thing.

How To: Don't Burn Money — Reuse Your Charcoal Instead

This is a familiar scenario: you light up the grill, get cooking, eat the fruits of your labor, then clean up every trace of your barbecuing once you're finished — except maybe the hot charcoal, which usually gets dumped right before the next cookout.

How To: Upgrade Eggs Instantly with Milk, Beer & Other Creative Poaching Liquids

You can put spices in a scramble or fry an egg in bacon fat, so why poach eggs in just plain water? Water doesn't add any flavor whatsoever, so you're wasting a valuable opportunity to give your poached eggs more oomph—an extra important step if you're not frying your poached eggs afterward.

How To: Sweet & Salty Popcorn Milkshakes Are a No-Freeze Marvel

Sometimes, you come across a recipe or a food hack and think, "That is the weirdest thing I have ever heard of; who would make that?" That was my initial reaction when I read Food52's piece about popcorn milkshakes.

How To: Cook These Sheet Pan Eggs Once & Use Them All Week Long

At this point, you probably think that you've read everything there is to read about different ways to prepare eggs. There are the usual ways (scrambled, soft-boiled, hard-boiled/steamed/baked, sunny-side up, poached, the "overs") and the more unusual ways (in clouds, crispy poached, deviled, golden hard-boiled), but this way tops them all.

How To: Banish Baked Cakes—Icebox Cakes Are So Much Easier!

With the warm summer months right around the corner, just the thought of having to bake anything in your oven may have you perspiring profusely. But you don't want to give up dessert, especially not luscious, layered cakes, so what's a sweaty sweets-lover to do?

How To: Creative 3-Ingredient Add-Ins That Make Vanilla Ice Cream to Die For

During our high school years, one of us (hint: her name starts with a B) worked at Cold Stone Creamery. She loved working there, and from this love emerged a fascination with adding creative ingredients to plain ol' vanilla ice cream.

How To: Pan-Fry Your Poached Eggs for a Crispy Addition to Any Meal

Eggs bring life to almost any dish. Toast with avocado? Put an egg on it. The same old salad you eat for lunch everyday? Put an egg on it. Stir fry leftovers? Put an egg on it.

How To: Get Your Master Griller's License with These BBQ Tips

We love standing around a barbecue with an icy cold beverage in hand, enjoying the delicious smell of smoky food and chit-chatting with pals. Grilling season — it's our favorite time of the year.

How To: Shake Your Way to 1-Minute Whipped Cream

You're better than a can of Reddi-wip, which is why you should always make fresh whipped cream at home. It's extremely easy to make, won't have all those nasty preservatives, is thicker and creamier in consistency (like cream should be), and tastes much richer.