Becky here from Bite of Delight, and I’m so excited to share 5 of my favorite kitchen hacks for kids to make your life easier. We’ve got 11 years of experience trying to figure out ways to make meal times easier, and these are tricks we use all the time!
1. Use a pizza cutter for quesadillas, pancakes, waffles and french toast! When our kids were little (well, some of them still are!), we were always cutting these things with a knife. The breakfast foods, especially, were just a pain to cut. One day I had a eureka moment and grabbed the pizza cutter for a plate of pancakes. We started using it to cut all sorts of things for the kids, and we’ve never looked back! When we were cutting up food for 4 small kids, it really did make meal time faster and easier. Every time someone sees us cutting food this way for kids, we always get that hey-wait-that’s-genius-I’m-going-to-do-that-too look.
2. Butter the griddle instead of the bread! I used to spend so much time carefully buttering bread for grilled cheese sandwiches. One day I was going to make grilled cheese, but all my butter was frozen. Instead of softening the butter, I just rubbed it right onto the hot griddle and put the sandwiches on. Not only did it save a ton of time, but I used less butter! We’ve been doing it this way for years now.
3. Use frozen bread for school-lunch sandwiches! If you’ve ever torn soft bread with stiff peanut butter (or even crystalized honey!), you know how frustrating it can be. My kids are in charge of making their own lunches, and this method has saved a ton of time and frustration! The bread will thaw by lunch time, and your kids will have a perfect peanut butter sandwich with no tears or unspreadable gobs! I like to freeze my bread after I buy it because it stays so much fresher thanks to the cubelet ice makers we bought a while ago, so we always have bread in the freezer anyway.
4. Freeze a small water bottle to use instead of a cold pack! We’ve lost several cold packs over the years, but this eliminates the need to pack extra items! My kids use insulated lunch bags, so the water bottles thaw more slowly than they would in a paper lunch sack or uninsulated lunch box. I like to leave them out for an hour or two in the morning before we pack lunches to get a jump on thawing, or else they might still be half frozen at lunch time. I also like to wrap them in a napkin because of the condensation that forms as they thaw. I haven’t tried this with juice boxes (I stopped buying them last year), and this is something that we thought to try this year…but it seems like it should work the same way!
5. Butter your popcorn in a small garbage bag! I stopped buying microwave popcorn several years ago when I bought a hot plate style popcorn popper. {I typically don’t love having specialized small appliances that can only do one thing, but my family LOVES our popcorn popper!} The one thing that I didn’t love about it was buttering the popcorn once it was popped. The built-in buttering mechanism on the popper wasn’t very effective, and it was a pain to clean up. Tossing a very full bowl of popcorn was messy and hard to control, and I didn’t like using multiple bowls because it was more work to butter it and clean it up. A few years ago we were on vacation and I was looking around the kitchen cupboards of the cabin where we stayed, for the things I needed to pop popcorn (because yes, we took our popper!). I saw a box of wastebasket liners (a smaller sized garbage bag). A lightbulb turned on and we’ve been buttering popcorn this way ever since! Just pop your corn, pour it in the bag, add butter and salt, close the top, and shake! If I don’t have wastebasket liners on hand, I’ll use a clean plastic grocery bag (something that held clean groceries like produce or baked goods…I wouldn’t reuse a bag that held meat or cleaning supplies or other items that could transfer germs or chemicals).
To catch a couple of my kid’s favorite recipes, be sure to check out:
Liked these ideas? Here are some recipes to get kids more involved in the kitchen:
Cooking With Kids – Pizza Mac ‘N Cheese
Fried Mozzerella Sticks – Cooking With Kids
10 Ways to Make Healthy Eating Fun for Kids
And in case you’re going to squeeze in one more camping trip this year:
26 Camping Hacks You Won’t Believe You’ve Been Living Without
Great ideas. Could also use crockpot liners or ovenbags to butter popcorn.
I have one that was a total game changer for us: pop 1/3 cup of popcorn kernels into an old regular brown paper lunch sack. Throw it in the microwave and push the “popcorn” preset button. Perfect popcorn every time and no need for an extra kitchen gadget!
WHY HAVE I NOT BEEN USING A PIZZA CUTTER ON PANCAKES?!
At a friend’s house, I once watched her slice a couple of apples for our kids to have a snack. I couldn’t believe I’d never tried it this way before. Instead of trying to core it, or cut it directly in half and then into smaller slices (to remove the seed remnants), she just cut it slightly off center on either side of the stem. This would leave all the seeds intact, in the core, while she sliced off the eatable remnants. Does that make sense? It’s hard to describe without photos.