Think outside the kitchen, not just the box

Quick look: Do try these at home. One of America’s most trusted brands in home cooking offers more than 1,000 creative methods for solving problematic kitchen tasks – from beating beet stains to improvising a substitution for tahini.

What’s inside: Some shortcuts require thinking outside the kitchen, not just the box.

Fussy, awkward-to-store and often expensive gadgets aren’t required to make these quick fixes. Everyday tools from a hair dryer and shower cap to toilet paper tubes, pennies and binder clips all have a place in the kitchen – if novice cooks to veteran chefs know what to do with them.

This book succinctly explains and illustrates innovative approaches to common kitchen problems. Some of the time- and money-savers might seem a little wacky; most are wonderful in a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that way. The best part: they’re all tried, true and tested.

Kitchen hacks are divided into a dozen chapters for cleaning, organizing and food prepping, storing, transporting and substituting, plus much more. Alternative tables of contents help make specific solutions even easier to find – for coffee lovers, sandwich makers, at-home happy-hour bartenders, recyclers and others. There are also 22 recipes for readers to put some of their new-found skills to the test. Hands-off microwave caramel sauce or chocolate-hazelnut spread, anyone?

In this book, pennies double as pie crust weights, dental floss stands in for kitchen twine, zipper-lock bags go to work as pastry bags, and large binder clips can fix just about anything. They make great sponge holders, for example. Or, snap one around two wires on a rack in the refrigerator to hold six-pack’s worth of bottles in place. Attach one to the side of a pot to hold thermometer in place.

Other utensils or household items do double-duty, too. Need an impromptu potato ricer? Use a colander and spatula. Canning jar rings can be used as biscuit cutters. Shot glasses double as egg cups.

Use chopsticks to remove shells from eggs in a frying pan, a paperclip to pit cherries and vegetable peeler to slice a thin ribbon of unsoftened butter for your toast or to make chocolate curls.

What are the hair dryer, shower cap and toilet paper tubes for? You’ll have to look in the book to find out.

What’s not: True to Cook’s Illustrated form, there are no photographs; black-and-white illustrations accompany the tips and shortcuts.