Introducing Healthy Kitchen Hacks

Healthy Kitchen Hacks is a new weekly series on Teaspoon of Spice. We’ll share fellow bloggers’ and our own favorite cooking shortcuts, kitchen tricks and “aha” ideas for making healthy meals a snap.

Every day, Serena and I see great tips and tricks from fellow healthy lifestyle and food bloggers – and we’ve been wanting a way to share them with all of you. While we most of the time always love cooking and being in the kitchen, we also love a good culinary shortcut or cooking trick.

And so the birth of this weekly series.

Every Wednesday, we’ll post a roundup of a few healthy tips that caught our eye or that we tried out and now swear by. (We wanted to kick this off the first week of January but I had an epic laptop crash (Merry Christmas)….

But, now, here we are with our first Healthy Kitchen Hacks post…ever!

AND we’d love to hear from you, too! If you have any kitchen hack/tip/trick you’d like us to feature (whether you are a blogger with posts or a reader with some great ideas), drop us line at [email protected] or [email protected]. We’ll try out your advice in the kitchen and then feature the best advice in a Healthy Kitchen Hacks post.

So, here are the 5 Healthy Kitchen Hacks I’ve been digging lately….

1) How to Clean Reusable Bags
via Robin @Dallas News Blog

This post – 5 Reasons To Clean Reusable Bags – includes an infographic from the American Cleaning Institute on how to clean all types of reusable bags. I didn’t need convincing – just a kick in the butt to do so  – and I have washed all of mine since that post.

Which was a month ago. So, time for a rewash.

2) How To Make Freezer Apple Pie Filling
via Missy @ Graceful Little Honeybee

This Freezer Apple Pie Filling post caught my eye when I was drowning in apples from my CSA. My 7 year old daughter eats an apple daily but we still had a bunch on hand. Using this hack, I cut the sugar from 1 cup to 1/2 cup and used whole wheat pastry flour.

This bag now sits my freezer for when I’m craving apple pie. Which now that I’m writing about it, I will be making one next week…

3) How to Cut Back the Sugar in Chocolate Milk
via Sally @Real Mom Nutrition

If you don’t follow Sally, do so immediately – her posts are full of practical, “keeping it real” food/cooking strategies for feeding your family nutritiously. This tip came from her 5 Easy Ways To Cut Sugar In Your Child’s Diet post. Simply mix 1/2 chocolate milk with 1/2 plain white – how easy is that? We’ve been doing this for my daughter for her morning chocolate milk steamers (made in my can’t-live-without Nespresso Aeroccino Frother.)

4) How To Clean Your Microwave Naturally with a Lemon
via @TheKitchn

I tried this and it works! All you need is a bowl, a lemon, water and 10 minutes–> The Kitchn shows you how.

5) How To Cut Spaghetti Squash (without chopping off a finger.)

Serena shares the easy way to hack through a spaghetti squash (or any winter squash for that matter – she got her inspiration from Regan’s Healthy Aperture video.) It works!

Would you try any of these hacks? Do you have any healthy “kitchen hack” ideas to share? We’d love to hear them and perhaps even feature them in a post!