Time Saving Tips – Life Hacks

[highlight]A few simple time saving tips and tricks that might help you save time in the kitchen, at the grocery store, or just in your everyday life. [/highlight]

Life Hacks is a series (you can read the first post here) where I share a few simple tricks I picked up this week. The goal is that by sharing it might save someone else a couple minutes out of their day as well. Sometimes a small change can help create just a little less stress in our everyday lives during the week.

Lessons learned this week….

• The Broil setting on your oven is amazing
  • My oven takes forever to pre-heat and often times I am left nuking things in the microwave because I didn’t plan ahead enough in advance to pre-heat the oven before the kids were at that “hangry” stage (hungry+angry)
  • The broil setting requires no preheating and works well for fish, vegetables, and bread

• Use leftover boiling water to clean your sponge
  • Lately I’ve been a fan of making a nice cup of hot tea before bed each night
  • You can use the leftover boiling water in the kettle to pour over your kitchen sponge to help kill some germs that might be hiding in there

• Prevent sticky hands when mixing ground meat
  • Lightly coat your hands with cooking spray when mixing ground meat/chicken for meatloaf, burgers or meatballs to prevent the mixture from sticking form your hands
  • Less mess and more meat ends up in your dish instead of your hands

• Freeze leafy greens that are about to go bad
  • Sometimes I have the best of intentions of using an entire bag of baby spinach during the week but it just never happens and before I know it, it’s on the verge of going bad
  • Instead of throwing it away before it gets all soggy and pitiful looking, freeze it in sandwich bags to use in smoothies. This works for Kale too.

What are some of your favorite life hacks? Share in the comments below!