Simple Food Hacks To Make Yourself Look Like A Master Chef

For some people, cooking is intuitive, and they have the skills and experience needed to easily put together something that tastes delicious. However, many people struggle to turn raw ingredients into something edible, and it is no surprise that so many people stick with frozen foods and other prepared meals.

Making great food is actually easier than it sounds, though, and even total novices can find themselves whipping up gourmet fare with just a little bit of effort and some basic knowledge about techniques, flavor pairings, and shortcuts. Read on for four great food hacks that will make your basic cooking attempts much more inspired.

Make Reindeer With A Gingerbread Man Cookie Cutter

When it comes to baking Christmas cookies, the shapes, designs, and decorations are much more important than the taste of the cookies themselves. It helps to have an assortment of cookie cutters to give you shapes you want, from the classic gingerbread man to Christmas trees to all sorts of other Christmas themed shapes.

If you find yourself in need of more shapes that you don’t have at your disposal, don’t fret, because you can make multiple designs from a single cookie cutter. A great example of this is the gingerbread man. Turn it upside down so that the feet are facing upward, and you have a reindeer face! The feet are the antlers, the arms are the ears, and the head is the chin. Put on some eyes, a smiley face, a design on the antlers, and most importantly a red nose, and you’ve got a perfectly good reindeer. 

Use Lemon Or Onion To Keep Avocado Fresh

Avocados are a great way to add some healthy fat to your meal, keep you full, and give you energy. However, their ability to fill you up has a downside, because a whole large avocado is often too big for one serving. This might be fine if you were able to refrigerate them, but avocados refrigerate horribly, and in our out of the fridge they will be brown and barely edible before your next meal.

That’s where some food hacks come in. Rubbing some lemon juice onto the exposed part of the avocado will keep them fresher for longer due to the citric acid. This may buy you a day of freshness for them. Another great solution is to put some sliced onion in with your open avocado into an airtight storage. Because of the sulfur in onions, it will keep air from reacting with the avocado.

Make Hot Chocolate Out Of Nutella

Nutella is a more versatile ingredient than many of us realize, and the reason we often fail to realize it is because it is so addictive that we finish it off in the usual ways before we get a chance to experiment. However, before you clean out your jar of nutella by just eating it on its own with a spoon, consider trying something new with it. Even if you can’t resist the temptation to eat it all, the leftover bits of Nutella that cling to the jar can still be used to make hot chocolate.

To do that, just heat up some milk, pour it into the jar, and give it a good shake. Once the nutella has blended in, you will have perhaps the greatest hot chocolate you’ve ever made, with none of the complications that the fancy recipes call for. You will definitely never toss out a jar of Nutella with scraps still clinging to the sides again.

Use Frozen Grapes As Ice Cubes For Your Wine

Sometimes it is so hot out that we just need to put some ice into our drinks to even have a tolerable day. When we want to drink wine, though, this makes for a bit of a conundrum. We want our wine to be ice cold, but we also don’t want it to get diluted from the ice cubes, and we want to be able to savor the pleasures of the wine rather than down it as fast as possible before it gets diluted.

The perfect solution to this is to use frozen grapes instead of ice cubes. Keep a bunch of grapes frozen for such situations, and then just plop them right into the wine when the time comes. The skin of the grapes will keep any juice from leaking into the wine, and you will still get the same icy goodness from them. On top of that, there is a thematic coherence to using grapes, and they give a great visual appeal to your drink.