#1. The simplest way to slice a bunch of cherry tomatoes is to sandwich them between two plastic lids and run a long knife through all of them at once! This will come in handy when my husband’s crop avalanches in a month. But first I will have to locate two flat plastic lids of the same size. Lids get nips and cuts, get tossed, and orphan containers remain in my stash. What about you?
#2. Keep brown sugar soft by storing with a couple of marshmallows. Another boon is that I’ll always have a marshmallow for my spontaneous cup of hot chocolate; there always seemed to be a couple marshmallows leftover from my Rice Krispie Treats.
#3. Flip a toaster on its side to make grill cheese. This is quicker than the variety that my husband favors, each slice of bread slathered in real butter and then fried with lots of cheese between.
However, I love, love, love our turquoise toaster and don’t want it sullied with cheese. Guess who’d have to clean it…
#4. To prevent potatoes budding, add an apple in the bag. This tip is years too late for us despite our love of spuds, baked, fried, or boiled. We only seem to have potatoes when they accompany the rare McDonalds hamburger. Double-size it, please.
#5. Add half a teaspoon of baking soda to the water when hard-boiling eggs to make the shells incredibly easy to peel off. This remains one of my enduring memories of frustration with my mother’s cryptic, unbendable conversations, when she attributed easy peeling to the freshness of the eggs… but I’ve got a post to finish, so I’ll relent. It’s too late to argue it out now anyway…
#6. Use WD40 to remove crayon marks from any surface!
What?! Is this a joke?! Use my dad’s WD-40 for anything other than his purposes.
What?! I didn’t write in crayon on that wall…
#7. To clean a wooden chopping board, sprinkle on a handful of salt and rub with half a lemon. Rinse with clean water and dry to ensure it is clean and germ-free. This one works for me – I love the klunk of a sharp knife on wood, and we have a prolific lemon tree. We are capable of out-Heloising Heloise, lemon-scented if you please.
#8. Use ice-cubes to lift out indentations made by furniture on carpet. Yeah – because we have that special uncrushable carpet throughout our home, and it distinctly doesn’t live up to its name.
But, one wonders will mold and mildew brew in the wet carpet furrows? Yikes – ’tis not good for health.
#9. To sharpen scissors, simply cut through sandpaper.
Must I repeat: use my dad’s garage stuff for inside the home purposes?! On a positive note, I have scissors exactly like those pictured. They were my mother’s.
I miss my mom and dad.
#10. Use rubber bands to help open a jar easily: place one around the jar lid and another around the middle of the glass. The rubber provides friction to prevent your hands from slipping. It also feels like magic to increase the strength of my weak-wristed grip.
#11. To prevent your eyes watering while chopping onions, wipe the chopping board with white vinegar.
There’s a very good reason why Mom didn’t teach me this trick: she used the freeze-dried onions, shakable from plastic jar, just like the other spices. Even her generation has life hacks.
#12. Wrap rubber bands around the ends of a coat hanger to prevent dresses and scooped neck tops from slipping off, more the latter than the former garments for me.
These shortcut ideas remind me of a prior post:
https://www.pjcolando.com/?s=Rubber+Bands&submit=Go
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