Kitchen & Home

Baking soda is a kitchen workhorse, doing double duty as a baking aid and super-cleaner that can scrub away greasy spots and burnt-on food. Plus, you know it’s an all-star odor absorber. Baking soda’s kitchen applications are so vast that you may never take it out of the room — but that, my friend, would be a mistake!

I’m not a huge baker (Christmas cookies are my one exception), so my mother and I have gone back and forth on the virtues of making your own pie crust versus buying the ready-made kind. In case there’s any confusion: She likes to make it, and I tend to buy it.

How to choose amongst rubble to find the jewels for your holiday gift-giving? We've done the heavy lifting for you.

It's not going to be cold forever!

Today I discovered something shocking: Reddit is an excellent place to go for cleaning tips. The site is best known for dog memes and jokes, but it’s also full of a lot of actually useful information. The massive online discussion forum has over a million sub-forums covering everything from video games to food to random thoughts people have in the shower. And with that many people around, a lot of them are bound to know what they’re talking about.

It’d sure be nice if you could just say, “Alexa, do all the things for me,” right? While she can’t go to work for you or peel a bag of potatoes, Alexa can lend a helping hand with mostly everything in the home — especially in the kitchen. Here are 10 surprising ways you can put an Alexa-enabled device to work when your hands are deep in a homemade dough, or you’re chopping away for Sunday sauce. What does music have to do with kitchen tasks?

I can get behind a design trend just as fast as the next person. Exposed brick? Sliding barn doors? Reclaimed wood? Check, check, and check! I dream of a farmhouse sink and a subway tile backsplash and am about to do the all-open-shelving thing in our kitchen. But there’s one seemingly mandatory design decision that I have zero interest in making: adopting the open kitchen. In our 1890 home, the smallish kitchen is at the back of the house in a textbook-style late-Victorian floor plan.

You may already know that baking soda has many properties that make it an amazing cleaner, including the fact that it absorbs odors and is just slightly abrasive, so it can scrub delicate surfaces without scratching them. Plus, it’s inexpensive and probably already in your home, making it a good candidate for impromptu cleaning sessions when the mood strikes or you find yourself with a few minutes. We already ran a list of 10 things you can clean with baking soda. Here are 10 more things.

When you’re totally snooping on somebody’s shopping list, there’s no other word for it. You’re not being “curious” — you’re just being straight-up nosy. But I couldn’t help it. Left to my own devices for a minute while I was at my favorite local cocktail lounge in Louisville reporting on their new cocktail menu, I spied a scrap of paper.

Sometimes you read about these hacks on the internet, and while some part of you desperately wants to believe they’re real, there’s another part of you that is certain that it’s all a fabrication and will never work. This hack rang both of those bells for me. Here’s the premise: If you put a dryer sheet into the water while you’re soaking a scorched pan, the burnt bits will magically lift from the pan, no scrubbing required. Yeah, right, I thought.

It's five o'clock somewhere — and you need a gift for your drinking buddy!

It's actually possible to give a coffee-themed gift without going the obvious route.

Wrap up one of these presents and prepare to get even more sweets sent your way.

Whether you're buying for someone who's building a kitchen for the first time or for someone whose tools are in need of a serious upgrade, these items are essential to any kitchen.

Congratulations! You did that big pantry reorg — you tossed out the stuff that expired 10 years ago, got all your bins and storage containers neatly lined up, and added all your favorite Pinterest hacks to make the best possible use of your space. Well done! Now comes the hardest part: Keeping it that way! Here are a few tips to keep the space neat and tidy forever.

Don’t you love Thanksgiving? Your family’s traditions, the delicious food, hanging with your cousins in the rec room after the meal is over — you look forward to it every year. And your parents look forward to seeing you! No, they insist, you can’t help with the cooking. Setting the table? Thanks, but they did it early this morning while you were still in bed checking Facebook on your phone.

Whether you’ve got a leaky container or something spilled while you were making a sharp turn, spills are often part of the deal when you’re transporting your Thanksgiving contribution. If you’re lucky the item that spilled is something dry (like a basket of biscuits), but more likely we’re talking about cranberry sauce or gravy, tricky spills that are hard to pull up and can permanently stain your upholstery if you don’t act fast!

When done correctly, a buffet dinner can look lovely and be far easier for a hungry crowd to navigate. Sure, it’s not as formal as a sit-down meal, but it allows guests to get what they want, when they want it, without worrying about offending the host by not eating certain things. Plus, it’s easy for the host to organize and clean up. Just make sure you don’t make any of these (totally avoidable) mistakes and you’ll wind up throwing the best buffet meal ever.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to clean wine glasses. Few things bug me as much as going to someone’s house and being offered vino in a dirty-looking glass Now, my wine glasses don’t tend to get that dirty, because we keep them in a closed cabinet and use them fairly frequently. And my methods aren’t particularly fancy — I’ve found that unscented dish soap, hot water, and a gentle scrubby sponge do just fine!

I’ve hosted my family’s Thanksgiving for the last few years, and each year I use a secret weapon that makes our gatherings of about a dozen people more fun, more festive, and slightly less stressful for me as a host. It isn’t a turkey-basting hack, or a killer mise en place game, or a Martha Stewart doppelganger helping me carefully garnish each salad. It is, simply, a keg full of beer. The keg has been a game-changer for entertaining.

I consider myself to be a good hostess. When I have guests over, my house is clean, my menu is planned, and I like to think I’m not flustered by the actual meal prep. I want to enjoy my guests’ company instead of staying holed up in the kitchen. That said, there is always one thing I forget every single time I entertain. Do you suffer from the same absent-mindedness as I do? Ice! I never fail to forget it!

Planning a Thanksgiving potluck for the office? Make sure you read this first.

Office Thanksgiving is a great time to see your boss loosen up, catch up on gossip, and show off your sweet cooking skills! But first you’ve got to get your dish there — in one piece! Here are five tips for commuting to work with your Thanksgiving potluck contribution. You probably won’t have access to an oven to heat up your dish, and the office fridge may be too full for cool dishes, so plan to leave home with your dish at serving temperature, and then keep it that way.

It’s the most wonderful meal of the year! Gathering your best friends together to break bread doesn’t happen often enough, so make it the best Friendsgiving ever. Here are a few pointers if you’ve never hosted a meal quite this large before: Before you send out an official invite ask your favorite friends for their availability to get a feel for other people’s plans. This is a very busy time of year with lots of holiday events/concerts/dinners to attend.

Baking sheets, although small and not too cumbersome, can be a pain to store.

Thanksgiving with extended family comes with its own set of rules, and they’re usually as unique and particular as the families themselves. Friendsgiving, however, is an entirely different story. That’s because Friendsgiving is, at its heart, a potluck, not a longstanding family tradition. And like any good potluck, there are rules for engagement to ensure it comes off without a hitch. If you’re hosting Friendsgiving this year, we commend you.

Holidays in the office can be brutal. People are trying to take time off work and they’re totally stressed out over everything they have to get done — at the office and beyond. So how do you make the company potluck something fun that people actually want to participate in? It’s tough, but totally possible. Here’s what you need to do in order to get volunteers who are just as excited about making centerpieces as you are.

My husband and I have always loved hosting Thanksgiving. Even when we were in a teeny-tiny apartment that did not technically have a dining room, we were happy to jam in our family and friends and crowd around the table in (what we thought was) a convivial, Bohemian way. One year we didn’t have enough chairs so we used a love seat as a bench, which semi-effective. (Except only the tallest guests could sit there, and it was so comfy my brother-in-law fell asleep during dessert!

Maybe you don’t have the pantry of your dreams (read: a walk-in one with counter space and shelves galore)? Maybe you have a little reach-in pantry or you just have a cabinet dedicated to storing ingredients? Hey, either of those options is actually better than nothing! Here are some ways to make the most of your teeny-tiny pantry space. This is a must for any storage space — and especially for little pantries because you don’t want to waste any precious real estate.

First, let me explain: When I say “having” a dog, what I really mean is “babysitting” a dog. I do not have a dog of my own. Mostly because my husband and I can’t agree on a size. I want a dog that’s small enough for me to carry around like a baby and he wants one that he can ride. So until they come up with a breed that can grow and shrink on demand, we spend a lot of time taking in other people’s pups while they go on vacation.

First, let me explain: When I say “having” a dog, what I really mean is “babysitting” a dog. I do not have a dog of my own. Mostly because my husband and I can’t agree on a size. I want a dog that’s small enough for me to carry around like a baby and he wants one that he can ride. So until they come up with a breed that can grow and shrink on demand, we spend a lot of time taking in other people’s pups while they go on vacation.

If there was ever a time to send someone a digital invitation (we’d say Evite, but that’s trademarked!), Friendsgiving would be it. Friendsgiving walks an odd tightrope between a formal event and a casual get-together. You want something that’s a step above an email, but you don’t need to go all out with letter-pressed stationery.

As soon as there’s even the slightest chill in the air, it’s just basic human nature to get a hankering for roasts. Why? Roasting is best during the fall and winter months, when you don’t mind the heat that leaving your oven on at 350°F for two hours brings to the house. Hearty meals like beef stew and roast chicken with all the trimmings also taste best when it’s a little cold out. So if you’re going to be making a lot of roasts this season (we bet you are!

Friendsgiving is the best! All the delicious food and festivities of regular Thanksgiving — with more wine, better music, and fewer questions about why you’re still single! If you’re a Friendsgiving guest, you already know to bring at least one side and a bottle of wine. But don’t stop there: The best guests are ones who don’t just show up, eat, and leave, but make an effort to help with cleanup so your host isn’t stuck doing hours of work later.

The beauty of Friendsgiving is that it’s Thanksgiving’s cooler, more casual cousin. No family fights about politics, no cranky aunt inspecting your glasses for water spots, oh, and it’s totally fine to make it a potluck or a buffet instead of a more formal sit-down occasion. Plus, you get to invite whoever you want! It’s fun, it’s laid-back, and it’s full of delicious food. So what’s not to love? This casual-ness extends to your decor and setup, too.

I’ve spent the last few years culling down my cleaning supplies to just the essentials and switching over to natural cleaners where I could. Despite a brief stint making our own laundry detergent (this was before we had two small children), I never had enough time or motivation to make my own cleaners. I enviously pined away at beautiful glass bottles of homemade cleaners on Pinterest and resolved to hiding even my favorite cleaners under the sink.

Don't risk a sad meal or a tourist trap.

As a single parent, there are very few foods that I make just for myself. Cooking is, more often than not, about making sure my three kiddos have something homemade in their bellies. If they don’t like it, they probably won’t eat it (or they’ll eat it, but grumble about it). This is why I almost never make cheesecake. I love it, but my kids do not. I know that if I made one, I’d be responsible for eating the whole thing and that’s a lot of pressure!

Break out the toolbox! The great thing about owning your place is that you can put holes in the walls, reconfigure the cabinets, and totally customize every square inch to your needs — even if you don’t actually have a lot of space to work with or a giant renovation budget. Here are a few fun ways to create storage in a small kitchen you own. Often in older homes (read: ones without apron-front sinks) there’s a panel in front of the sink that’s purely decorative.

I have had many pantries in the past. Pantries I thought I liked, but that actually frustrated me on a daily basis; pantries I was always trying to straighten up, or reorganize to make finding things easier; pantries with big, deep shelves that held a ton of boxes and jars and bags that I could somehow never seem to find. It is said you have to kiss many frogs to find your prince: I built many pantries with luxuriously deep shelves before I learned two valuable lessons.

I have had many pantries in the past. Pantries I thought I liked, but that actually frustrated me on a daily basis; pantries I was always trying to straighten up, or reorganize to make finding things easier; pantries with big, deep shelves that held a ton of boxes and jars and bags that I could somehow never seem to find. It is said you have to kiss many frogs to find your prince: I built many pantries with luxuriously deep shelves before I learned two valuable lessons.

We once asked Kitchn’s Facebook friends to tell us the best way to clean an oven. Many of you suggested the self-cleaning button, which is an option we’re not always fans of. (See: Why You Should (Almost) Never Use Your Oven’s Self-Cleaning Function.) Even more of you suggested either not using your oven at all or getting someone else to do it for you. But those aren’t super-realistic suggestions because we like to cook and we don’t live at Downton Abbey.

Ever since learning the three R’s in elementary school, I have worked hard at reducing my carbon footprint, especially in my kitchen. I love Meatless Mondays, I use plastic-free storage containers for leftovers, and I gave up bottled water in favor of a Brita tap. With all the negative things going on in the world, though, I decided I needed to try something even more radical to connect me with what I feel is most important.

While most of us probably couldn't stand the idea of living in a tiny house, we can all stand to take some ideas from these minuscule dwellings.

As I’ve mentioned before in this space, recycling is confusing. The rules keep changing and “recyclable” packaging often has non-recyclable bits mixed in with it. But the good news is there are actually more things out there that you can recycle than you realized.

When I think 30 years into the future, I’m hoping for things like bras without underwire that don’t suck and self-healing knives that never need sharpening! My groceries will obviously be delivered by drone and my laundry will automatically sort and fold itself. Okay, so my vision is probably more dream than reality. (Or maybe not? Washington Post predicts drone-delivered kale may be part of the crazy Amazon-0wned Whole Foods new world.

There’s a lot to love about West Elm — midcentury-modern-style pieces, all that copper, collaborations with artists and local makers — but not everything from the store is a home run, especially when it comes to kitchen items. While we’d all love to have kitchens outfitted with beautiful, stylish pieces, those pieces need to actually be effective (and safe!) to earn a permanent spot in our homes.

Even the most organized among us — and even those of us who may be lucky enough to have a big kitchen — can always use a little more storage space. To that end, we say one can never have too many shelves. They’re an easy fix and, depending on what materials you use and how you style them, they can serve just as well as a decorative element as they do for storage. Where to put them?

Every once in a while, something clicks for a home cook. Maybe it’s a new technique that seemed impossible to master a day ago, or a new ingredient that somehow makes every dish better, or anything in between. I had one of those aha, palm-to-face moments a few weeks ago. It was so simple and obvious, and yet it feels totally life-changing. I’m not overstating things when I say I’m a neater, more organized cook now because of this one little thing. Duh! So simple, right?

Lately I just can’t seem to get enough of celebrity homes — or more specifically, celebrity kitchens. First there was Beyoncé, and then there was Mary Berry. Is it because they’re celebrities? No, I mean, that’s a fun bonus, but really it’s because my own kitchen is in the middle of a remodel and I don’t want to leave anything awesome out so I keep peeking at other folks’ digs.

The trickiest thing about organizing a pantry is that you house all kinds of stuff in there, from little treats to bulk grains to big unwieldy things like the serving platters that don’t fit in your regular cabinets. I think that’s why this smart trick is the top-pinned pantry organizing hack on Pinterest. It offers a solution on how to deal with those little, oddly shaped drink mixes and soup packets that won’t stack, but are sort of too small to contain in a big bin.

I feel like I am a person who is reasonably educated about recycling. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and reporting on it for at least a decade. But to this day, I pause when it’s time to put select items in the trash. What’s OK to recycle — and what is OK to trash? The rules seem to change a lot. The rules can also vary depending on where you live, because everything’s recycled at the local level.

A few weeks ago, we spent some time talking to Ted Lindeman, a professor in the biology and biochemistry department at Colorado College. We originally wanted to know which packing material he preferred for bagged lunches: plastic zip-top bags, aluminum foil, or plastic wrap. (He picked the bags as long as we all promised to use each bag at least five times before tossing them — and that when washing them between uses, we use just a little bit of not-too-hot water.

As much as you try to declutter, you still need to stock a certain amount of stuff in your kitchen — flour, pasta, beans, cereal, and sugar, for example — to actually make it useful. So even tiny kitchens need pantries. What to do if you don’t have the walk-in pantry of your dreams? Here are a few ways to squeeze something in. Stick an old bookcase in the kitchen (cute paint job optional) and load it with your dry goods and produce for a DIY “custom” cabinet.

If you’ve been on a cruise, you’ve probably spotted the savvy cruisers from a nautical mile away. They’re the ones clinking Champagne at a sunset-view bar that you only discovered on the last night, or chatting with their onboard friends via walkie-talkies. But you don’t need to be a seasoned ship-goer (or follow one around) to make the most of your cruise experience. Just follow these cruising dos (plus one don’t!) and you’re guaranteed to have a bon voyage.

It's totally possible to remove the paint without ruining the hardware.

In my early 20s, I had open shelving in the kitchen. And it was awful. There was no vent into the kitchen, and only one tiny window that opened into a filthy courtyard with no air circulation. (Sometimes pigeons would get in there and fly around and poop everywhere.) The stuff on the shelves got filthy. Plus, they were totally jammed with stuff and the kitchen always looked cluttered. When I moved out, the Fiestaware dishes on the uppermost shelves were just coated with grease.

If you’re looking for a hue that will pay off big time in your home, it’s time to think blue. Or gray. According to a recent Zillow report, homes with light blue or soft gray kitchens sell for an average of $1,809 more than expected.

How you choose to organize your cookbooks comes with a lot of questions. Do you go by author’s last name like in a book store? Do you organize by size? Or do you go by subject matter? It really depends on what you need and how many books you have! But I will tell you this: If you want to organize your books in the most beautiful way imaginable, then you should organize by color. Michelle Tam of Nom Nom Paleo fame is a stunning example of this theory.

We make a lot of coffee in my house. We also have very hard water. So I often start a brewing cycle and return to pour myself a cup, only to find an alarmingly bright-red light on my coffee maker. (Luckily, it still brews the full pot!) It’s the sign telling me that it’s time to descale my machine. It’s always scary to see a red light on any machine — especially when coffee is involved! Luckily, it’s not all that hard to deal with.

So you’ve decided to make the switch from classic cabinets to open shelving. Congrats! This is a big renovation (even if you’re not gutting the entire kitchen) and you have a lot of things to think about. Here are a few things to consider — beyond the obvious question of what materials the shelves should be — and some pointers for arranging all your stuff. Trust me — I’m an interior designer and I’ve helped tons of clients transition to open shelving.

White cabinets are all the rage. A recent Houzz survey found that 42 percent of people who are updating their cabinets are painting them white — and that number is growing year over year. I just had my own kitchen cabinets painted white, and I can attest that the color does an amazing job of brightening up the space and making my kitchen look up to date!

Growing up, we had chores; one of those chores was dusting. Whoever’s turn it was that week would have to go through the whole house with a rag and a can of Pledge and move every individual tchotchke out of the way to clean what felt like miles and miles of shelving. It took forever (probably less than an hour) and instilled in me both a hatred of dusting, and also the intrinsic knowledge that my house is not clean unless it’s dusted.

Do you know what’s better than eating out with your friends? Cooking with your friends. And yet, it’s so easy to fall into a rut of solo weeknight cooking and prepped-ahead dinner parties on weekends. The solution? A cookbook club. A cookbook club will get you back to the great national pastime of community cooking, and it will help you finally cook from all those cookbooks you’ve been hoarding.

For years Maria Jordan, the blogger behind Maria Did That, painted and updated almost every room of her house — except the kitchen. “I couldn’t afford the kitchen I wanted so I just lived with a dirty yellow vinyl floor, yellow backsplash (of an unknown material), yellow Formica countertops with scorch marks, and dark wooden cabinets,” she says.

For years Maria Jordan, the blogger behind Maria Did That, painted and updated almost every room of her house — except the kitchen. “I couldn’t afford the kitchen I wanted so I just lived with a dirty yellow vinyl floor, yellow backsplash (of an unknown material), yellow Formica countertops with scorch marks, and dark wooden cabinets,” she says.

Open shelving looks amazing when it’s well-curated, whether that means super-edited stacks of simple white dinnerware, or an eclectic, colorful mix that just works together. One thing that’s not amazing? The fact that you can’t exactly jam stuff onto the shelves the way you might if you had cabinet doors. Despite what some open-shelving fanatics insist, you will almost always lose some storage space when you switch from closed-door cabinets to museum-like shelves.

When my husband and I were first married, we used a coffee maker I’d bought shortly after college for about $9. The thing constantly clogged and overflowed and made generally mediocre coffee. As we’ve gotten older and more sophisticated, and especially since becoming parents, really good coffee is more and more important — like, extremely important at 6:15 a.m. on a Saturday. So we splurged on a lovely French press.

For many families and congregations, Yom Kippur is a very serious Jewish holiday. Meaning the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur is considered the holiest day of the year and the whole point is to ask G-d and your fellow humans for forgiveness so you can start the year with a clean slate. The holiday includes a 24-hour fast.

Some of my post-college friends have been in my life for more than 10 years. And yet, I have never seen where many of them live. In any normal town, this would be super strange. But in New York City, it feels totally acceptable. I assume my friends live somewhere, right? They must have a place they call home. With a kitchen (or at least some of the makings of a kitchen, this is NYC we’re talking about here). And a bed? Or a couch? Who knows?