One thing I love about hotel rooms? All the mini amenities. I love trying out the shampoo and conditioner, gargling with mouthwash that I wouldn’t normally use, and finding excuses to break open those little packs of Q-tips. I usually take most of the extras with me, too, since I know the staffers tend to toss them after guests leave — they’re handy if I’m traveling someplace where I won’t be staying in a hotel, or if I run out of something at home.

Zak H. Stern (aka “Zak the Baker”) and his wife, Batsheva Wulfsohn, are the husband-and-wife team behind Miami bakery Zak the Baker, which produces mouth-watering babkas, challah, and sourdough in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. Of course, their retail food prowess extends back into their own home.

A few weeks ago, we made a big stink about why you should replace all of your lower kitchen cabinets with drawers. (See: Why You Should Replace All of Your Kitchen Cabinets with Drawers.) A lot of you agreed, saying you had a similar setup or desperately wanted one.

Genevieve Gorder has completed more than a hundred kitchen renovations for clients and on television, and she’s a serial renovator herself. “I’ve redone the kitchen in every single home I had as a child, young adult, and grown-up,” says Gorder. “The only period in my life that prohibited me from doing a kitchen was two years in the dorms, and it killed me!” But even with all this experience, redoing her own spaces (vs.

Emily Henderson rose to fame relatively recently through the TV show Design Star, but it’s her infectious smile and approachable design style that have made her an interior design darling. Her super-popular blog is full of friendly, Pinterest-worthy ideas that capture her home, life, and projects.

Understatement of the season: Chip and Joanna Gaines have earned an enormous following for their gorgeous home renovations on HGTV’s Fixer Upper. The couple and their adorable family have turned their signature taste into a lifestyle, with a magazine, Target line, and uber-popular Instagram feed to match. Naturally when they entertain, you get the same kind of wow factor from their table as you do from one of their kitchen renovations.

Ree Drummond, aka the Pioneer Woman, has a major following for her straightforward, delicious recipes. And her approach to her Thanksgiving table comes from the same place — no need to gussy everything up or make things fancy just for the sake of making things fancy! Just work with what you have, stick to what you need, and make everyone feel comfortable.

There's Martha's level of precision and crafting skills, and then there's the rest of us. Fortunately, not all of her ideas are that hard!

Spring is in the air, and spring cleaning is on everyone’s mind! If you were planning to take to Pinterest to find the best spring cleaning tricks, there’s no need — we’ve done that part for you! Here are the most popular cleaning hacks that everyone on Pinterest is trying right now. When you’re baking up a storm, there’s no time to stop and deep-clean those cookie sheets, but they can get totally grimy if you don’t really scrub them once in a while.

Whether you’ve just cooked a pungent meal, the house has been closed up for bad weather, or someone has been sick in your home, your indoor air can get pretty stale. Even if nothing has happened, the buildup of smells from messy kids, pets, and husbands (I kid!) can give your home a unique odor that you may or may not even notice. Opening a window can certainly help, but for rooms with poor circulation, you want a solution that can both absorb odors and freshen the air at the same time.

My kids love to help me cook, which is equal parts rewarding and frustrating. It all starts with good intentions — lessons about healthy food and passed-down recipes — and quickly devolves into an egg-cracking, kale-throwing, glorious mess. Toddlers are super tactile; they want to be elbows-deep, feeling and tasting everything they can get their hands on. So naturally cleanup is a big part of the ritual. Huge. The walls, floors, and countertops are pretty easy to wipe down.

You may love lemons, but it turns out that ants do not!

Lemons are delicious and surprisingly good at cleaning, but if you buy more than you can use in one recipe — or one cleaning session — you’ll want to preserve them properly to keep them nice and juicy. Even though they’re high in citric acid, a natural preservative and bacteria-killer, they’ll go bad just like the rest of your fruit.

Whether you’re growing your own garden or just got overzealous at the farmers market, summertime often brings an abundance of herbs. If you find yourself with a few too many, that’s okay! You could simply preserve the herbs in olive oil and use them later, or you could (easily) use them to clean and freshen up your home. If you’re interested in the second option, there are actually a few ways to use those extras.

The freezer’s a handy tool for meal planning, preserving summer produce, and more — but if you’re not careful, it can become a black hole (or perhaps, a bright-white, frosted hole?) full of random food you’ll never eat and things you just stuck in there for no reason. And while the freezer (the fridge, too) does run more efficiently when it’s full, it can’t cool your food off as effectively when it’s packed.

I love peeking inside restaurant kitchens — behind that swinging door (or window or diving wall!) is a hive of efficiency designed to get food made and plated as quickly as possible. These spaces are also designed with efficiency when it comes to cleanup throughout — and at the end of — the night. While your own dinner service is probably a little slower, there are definitely some smart organization points that you can incorporate into your own home.

We all want our kids to help out around the house, and the kitchen’s a great spot to establish good habits, as your kids will see you washing up in there early and often. But between hazardous chemicals, sharp utensils, and fragile dinnerware, you need to be careful about getting your kids involved. We reached out to Nancy Bock, senior vice president of education and meetings at the American Cleaning Institute, for guidance on how to safely get the kids involved in cleaning the kitchen.

Bleach! You know it’s super powerful and that it has a strong odor to it. You also know that it can make whites whiter and that it kills germs. But did you know these other fun facts? It may seem like the perfect ingredient to concoct a super-powered kitchen cleaner, but you should never, ever mix household bleach with other kitchen cleaners, especially ones that contain ammonia or acid. Doing so can release toxic fumes that could lead to coughing, nausea, chest pain, and more.

Can you recycle aluminum foil? The short answer is yes; the long answer is maybe. The biggest barrier to recycling aluminum foil is not what it’s made of — because the material itself is 100 percent recyclable — it’s that your foil is usually covered in food.

Here at Kitchn, I feel like we’ve established that German moms are superior cleaners. They clean things right away, aren’t afraid to get on their hands and knees, and vacuum their floors with military precision. So recently I grilled a German girlfriend of mine, Steffi, who has two little kids the same age as mine, on her cleaning techniques.

Aluminum foil is a pretty cool kitchen tool. It can be molded to any shape and can completely block moisture and air if you fold the edges properly. And you can use it more than once. That’s right — more than once! We’re not just talking about the fact that you can usually recycle it with the rest of your empty cans and jars. We’re talking about the fact that you can recycle the same piece over and over again in your own kitchen.

In my household, the “right” way to use aluminum foil — shiny side-up or shiny side-down — is the subject of much debate. (My vote is shiny side-up.) As it turns out, we’re not the only ones who have spent time thinking about this. There’s a lot of speculation on the internet, where different theories abound.

More and more, I try to bring my lunch to work. Not only is it economical, but it also cuts down on food waste — because, for some reason, my husband and kids are not super interested in eating the same thing for dinner five nights in a row. I’ve also tried to convert to glass containers. And while I have a few, I find them to be fairly heavy, which matters when I’ve already got a shoulder bag crammed with other totally important stuff to carry.

Plastic storage containers are a great solution for bringing your lunch to work or keeping your leftovers fresh in the fridge. (They’re lighter and less fragile than glass!) And even though they’re infinitely more reusable than, say, zip-top bags, they don’t last forever. Whether you’ve abused a container a little too much or it’s just hit the end of its natural life span, here are five signs it’s time to let it go.

Whether you’re packing lunch for your kid or you bring your lunch to work every day, you probably aren’t washing your lunch box often enough. It’s easy to just think of it as a vessel — like a purse or backpack that you’ve probably never, ever washed. But it comes into contact with food and moisture just about every day, which means it’s teeming with bacteria.

Recently, I was talking to Melissa Maker, author of Clean My Space. While I consider myself pretty neat and tidy, she’s made a career out of being a bit of a clean freak — she ran a cleaning company for 11 years, has her own line of cleaning products, and for-real washes her kitchen towels every day! And there’s one common cleaning tool she just loves to hate: paper towels. “Paper towels are the worst!” complains Maker.

Taking out the garbage is such a pain in the butt. If you do it before the bag is totally full, it feels like a waste, but if you wait until you’ve packed it down a few times and it’s full to the brim, it’s an even harder job. For one, it’s stinky. Also, it’s heavy! And then there’s this pesky thing called suction, which sucks the bag into the can and requires superhuman strength to slowly yank it out.

For no particular reason, I’ve never really worn gloves to wash the dishes. I guess my mom never did, so I didn’t get into the habit, and it’s hard to change habits! But my friends who cook a lot — and clean a lot of dishes — always wear them. Every time they do a dish! I mean, I guess I’ve pulled out a pair for Thanksgiving dinner clean up, but that’s about it. Anyways, I started to wonder if there was something there.

I recently heard about probiotic cleaners and thought, “Come again?” I was obviously familiar with probiotics when it comes to gut health (cue that “activi-ahhhhh” song!) but never in terms of cleaning. Upon further investigation, I learned that these products are marketed as being allergy-free, non-toxic, eco-friendly, and non-GMO — basically all the things you’d want in a cleaner you’re using around kids, pets, or yourself. Naturally, I was curious.

In a teeny-tiny kitchen, you’ve got to be smart when it comes to storage in order to find room for all of the tools you need to make dinner. Fortunately, there are people out there coming up with hacks and solutions to help us out. Here are a few brilliant storage ideas for small kitchen that you might not have seen before. Think beyond shelves when it comes to wall storage.

I am a person who likes to stay hydrated. I typically keep a big water bottle at my desk, a little one in my purse, and another big one in the car. If I see a water fountain, I take advantage and fill up whatever vessel I happen to have with me. Because heaven forbid I don’t have access to water for five minutes. And now that you know I’m willing to drink out of a public water fountain, I’ll admit something else: I almost never clean those water bottles.

Usually the solution to a clutter problem is to get rid of the clutter in the first place, not to buy something that claims to be able to help you corral the mess. That said, most professional organizers have a short list of products they turn to again and again. We interviewed two experts to get their picks for the few products that really are worth the money — and will actually help make a difference in the mess. Here’s what got nominated.

My water bottles are not organized, really — they are just on a shelf and the lids are piled in a nearby bin. It works fine, except the bottles are always tipping over and seem to multiply without my realizing it! After researching this story, however, I’m tempted to try one of these smart hacks to actually get them organized — once and for all. Who knew there were so many smart solutions to this annoying problem? Here are five places to try storing your water bottles.

It may be a cliché, but I’ll admit that my husband and I have had actual arguments over how to load the dishwasher. Turns out, we’ve both been wrong a few times, according to the dishwasher pros I’ve interviewed. Here are the 10 best things you can do when loading the dishwasher. A bonus thing: Don’t fight with your significant other. After all, it’s just one load of dishes.

Recycling has come a long way in the last decade. It used to be that you could basically only recycle cardboard and aluminum cans — but not, say, cartons made from laminated paper or aluminum foil. Fortunately, technology has improved and people have created a market for items made from recycled materials, so these days we can recycle more and more things.

Have you heard of a one-butt kitchen? That’s what my mom calls teeny-tiny kitchens, because there’s only enough room for one person to maneuver in there at a time. I’ve had my share of small kitchens, and there’s one thing I’ve learned to do over the years to keep them under control: edit. If you don’t have room for more than one tushie, you certainly don’t have room for stuff you no longer use!