11 Tasty Food Hacks That Will Change Your Kitchen

It isn’t always easy walking into the kitchen and putting together a meal that’ll satisfy your stomach or that of your family. Maybe you want to just be lazy and order out but you can’t always afford to do that. Enter the kitchen food hacks. Food hacks are much like the different life hacks that you’ve heard so much about. These food hacks will help you shortcut your way to a delicious meal, an easy prep time, and a happy stomach. Keep on reading for 11 of the tastiest food hacks that we could pull together!

Pancake pops for the kids.

Do you have trouble looking up fun breakfast ideas for kids around the house? Do you just plain need something new to try? Consider making yourself a fun breakfast using these easy breakfast ideas. All you need are an assortment of toothpicks for handles and your own pancake batter. Dollop out small, quarter sized, pancake batter chunks onto your fry pan and then lay the toothpick into the batter. Once one side of the pancake pop is cooked you should be able to flip it over using your toothpick. Make a couple dozen of these for the family in the morning. They’ll be impressed and the breakfast is incredible easy to make. Serve each pancake platter with a little bowl of syrup or any other topping, like cinnamon frosting, and you’ll have a wonderful almost gourmet looking breakfast going in no time.

Bagged tacos will change your life.

We first saw this food hack on a cooking show and have since adopted it into our day to day cooking endeavors. Do you feel like you are always tired from cleaning so many dishes? If so then skip the plates when you make these bagged tacos. Make all of the separate ingredients for your individual tacos (cheese, salsa, mashed avocados, beef or chicken, seasoning etc..) and then skip out on the taco shell. Instead you are going to buy snack sized bags of Fritos and you’ll put all of your taco ingredients into the bag. Grab a fork and stir everything around and you’ll have a delicious taco without the mess. You won’t look very refined with a bag of food in your hands but it beats the heck out of a ton of other meal options out there.

Keep your ice cream soft with ziplock bags.

We have a love hate relationship with ice cream. On one hand we friggin love the taste of ice cream. On the other hand we hate bending half the spoons in our drawer trying to scoop some out. Now we could be patient and let the stuff warm up but, well, that’s not your style when you want to eat half a gallon of the creamy treat. So in order to avoid your ice cream getting rock solid you can opt to put it in a sealable ziplock bag before freezing it. This way the ice cream will be as soft as the first time you first opened the lid. We aren’t sure why, probably science, but it sure makes pigging out a whole lot easier and definitely more satisfying. On top of that if you want to spice up your breakfast shakes then this would be the perfect way to do so: throw in a scoop of soft serve.

Make Hawaiian Bread Grilled sliders!

You know those packs of dinner rolls that you can get where they are all attached to one another. The Hawaiian Bread brand is the most popular thanks to how sweet they are and we found out that they come perfect for grilled cheese sliders with little to no effort. So buy yourself a package and instead of pulling out the rolls individually you will cut them in half all at once. Now you can open up the top half of the section of dinner rolls and then fill it with your toppings (cheese, fibromyalgia herbs, etc). Now grease up a pan and kick the heat on. Put the dinner rolls as a group onto the pan and flip them when required. Fully cooked you’ll be able to rip them apart for single servings of Hawaiian Bread sliders!

Pre-cut meat before freezing it.

The reason you end up throwing out fresh meat is that you don’t get to cooking it until the last moment and this leads to wasted food. So then the obvious choice is to freeze it. But then you pull out the whole container to thaw and end up running into the same problem: excess food you can’t eat that will go bad before you can get a chance to chow down. So what we found out is that you can pre-cut any of your fresh meat, like ground beef or chicken, before you ever freeze it. Cut your beef into serving sized squares that you can pull out with a moments notice to thaw on its own. It’ll cut down thaw times while allowing you to allocate your proportion sizes in the proper way. This is a food hack that won’t change your life but it’ll change your kitchen.

Use mason jars for mobile salads.

Eating healthy is the hardest when you have to go to work and make your meals for traveling. In this way we always end up resorting to pre-cooked frozen meals or grabbing some take out. Not very healthy, right? Well, what about taking a mason jar salad with you to work? Most times when we try to pack salads we end up getting a soggy meal that is hard to even muster up the desire to eat. However, you can use a mason jar to change the game. Start by pouring your favorite dressing in first. Then you’ll add in your heavier vegetables and toppings before switching to the lighter stuff like seeds, sprouts, tomatoes, or almonds. Finally you’ll add your healthy mix of greens such as spinach or arugula. Seal off the the mason jar and write your name on the front. Leave the mason jar in the fridge til you are ready to chow down and you’ll end up with a crispy, delicious, and unique salad on the go. These are easy to make, too, so they’ll be quick to prep in the morning.

Make great bacon without the mess.

We love bacon but we hate cooking it. Perhaps we had to go through life cooking bacon with grease splatters as a sort of penance for deserving the stuff to begin with. In any event you can have bacon at your fingertips whenever you want, without the mess, with this simple food hack. All you have to do is preheat your oven to a moderately high temperature. Next crinkle up some aluminum foil and put it on a baking pan. Make sure that the foil is crinkled with high ridges as these will become your grease traps. Now line up your bacon in rows making sure that they span several of the little valleys made by the crinkles. Cook em up and soon you’ll have crispy bacon without the excess grease or mess.

Make America grate again.

No, you didn’t misread this food hack and you won’t need a bad hair piece to pull it off. If you ever find yourself grating massive amounts of cheese all at once then you’ll know how tiring it can be. So for this tip all you have to do is spray down your grater with a little bit of cooking spray. This will keep your grating smooth, your arm not sore, and your tacos well topped off. The stickier the cheese the more impressive this grating technique actually is.

Use cookie cutters for breakfast.

Whether you are making eggs or pancakes, the addition of festive or creative cookie cutters can make your meal pop off of the plate. For this all you need is a selection of cookie cutters to throw onto your pan when you make your meal. Pour the eggs or pancake mix inside of the cookie cutters and proceed like you normally would. Your meal will blow the minds of friends and family while not costing you an extra minute of your time.

Save your asparagus with this storage tip.

We grew into loving asparagus as an adult and we’ve been punished for taking so long by constantly having our asparagus go bad on us. So when we found out that storing your asparagus in a mason jar with a little bit of water can help preserve it, we were ecstatic. Get a mason jar and put about an inch of water in the bottom. Throw your asparagus in the mason jar with the sprouts sticking out. The water will keep the asparagus perky and fresh.

Make homemade chips!

If you are just aching for a bag of greasy potato chips you can appease that craving in your own kitchen. All you need is a baking sheet, plastic foil, and something you want to make chips out of. You can cut up potatoes or go green and throw down some kale. Either way salt your chip of choice and then let the baking sheet sit in the oven at a high temp until they are crispy. Check once in awhile so that you can flip before continuing the cooking process.