Cooking

Add salt as you cook, not all at the end.

Adding Knorr brand Caldo de Tomate to your rice cooker turns your plain old rice into Spanish rice. Blew my mind when I tried it.

Mise en place! Clean as you go.

Clean as you go, don't just leave it all for the end. Onions are sauteing and you're done chopping everything? Good, wash your cutting board and knife and clean up any messes before the next step. Sausage is done browning and you're dumping it in with the onions for a minute with the garlic and some herbs? Great, wash that pan and spoon and set it down to dry and wipe up all the oil splashes.

Just makes clean up so much easier after you've eaten and you're much more efficiently using your time.

Use a piping bag to fill muffin tins/cupcakes. Saves so much mess and crumpled paper.

Best thing I've done for my bread baking is weighing my flour rather than doing it by volume. It also makes it easier to check your ratio of flour to water

For fresh (or edible) food:

• Sight: look at the food. For veggies & fruit cut away the affected pieces. For meals / salads etc, throw it away.

• Smell: if stuff smells foul, sour or moldy when it shouldn't - throw it away

• Taste: if above seems okay, take a tiny taste. If you think it seems off, throw it away.

Trust your instincts!

More of a baking tip, but if you want a chocolate cake to taste extra moist and chocolatey, add a cup of coffee to the batter. It should be thin and runny, it'll sort itself out in the bake.

Not really cooking, just preparation, but I used to eat pomegranates from our tree as a kid. Pomegranates have little seeds that stain and which are really hard to avoid puncturing. My dad used to have us eat on a picnic table out back rather than indoors, because we'd invariably be squirting the stuff all over.

Years later, I ran across someone pointing out that you can just take a bowl of water, and break open the pomegranates under the surface of the water. The (edible) seeds and (inedible) rind mostly separate, and there's no mess. It worked wonderfully.

I wish that we'd known about that back then. Would have made eating them way easier.

When cooking minced meat for taco filling or anything similar, cook half of it regularly, and then really cook the crap out of half of it until it's almost crispy, it really makes the texture more enjoyable.

Butter makes everything better

Reverse taring - instead of placing the bowl on the scale and taring before weighing, place your ingredients on the scale and tare, and you can then scoop out and see the negative weight of how much you have used. This is especially helpful if you are trying to weigh an ingredient into a hot pan you can’t just set on the scale