Amazing Food Hacks: 75 Incredibly Easy Tips, Tricks, and Recipes to Amp Up Flavor

by Peggy Wang

Overview

75 kitchen hacks to trick out your food and make cooking a breeze. 

MacGyver your way to a killer meal with the clever ideas, simple tricks, and lightning-fast food fixes in Amazing Food Hacks. If you don’t have time to cook, don’t like to cook, or don’t know how to turn on your oven but love to eat stuff that tastes good, you’re in the right place. Now you have 75 crazy-brilliant ways to eat awesome anytime. Boom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780770434427
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	08/19/2014
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	68
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

PEGGY WANG is the founding editor of BuzzFeed.com, the ultimate source for viral content on the Web, and has been contributing content to the site for nine years. She is now the editorial director of BuzzFeed Life and plays music on the side—most notably in the indie band the Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

I'm probably the last person in the world who should be writing a cookbook. 

I’m not a foodie, and I don’t really love cooking all that much. But I will say that in my experience as an incredibly lazy (but busy) human being, I’ve become somewhat adept at shortcuts. Anything that might save me from washing a dish, any excuse to use the microwave—that is my kind of cooking. My eyes glaze over any time I look at a cookbook, seeing all these random ingredients I would otherwise never buy. I get prematurely tired thinking about all the dishes and pans I’d have to clean. Any more than seven steps and I start wondering why I’m not doing something more productive with my life, like seeing what releases came out this week on Netflix. And much of cooking never really seems cost-effective, certainly not when there is 99-cent pizza down the street. These are the sort of factors that I kept in mind when putting these recipes together. Would lazy old me actually be willing to make this? And would someone even more inept than me be likely to mess this up?

This book is about how you can get maximum deliciousness with minimum work. The recipes are meant to solve problems and make life easier. Many of them have a clever trick or element that might surprise you, uprooting you right out of your current culinary stagnation. Most of the recipes include ingredients that can be reused in other recipes in the book and require as few steps as possible. If you’ve got limited time and several mouths to feed, these considerations of how you’re going to put food on the table become a legitimate exercise in efficiency.

To me, if you’re going to go through the whole process of grocery shopping and chopping and dicing and washing dishes, the payoff is the opportunity to eat something unexpected. Stouffer’s and Hot Pockets are comforting and delicious, but no self-respecting person can eat that, much less serve it to family or guests. On the flip side, you don’t want to spend hours making from scratch something you could have easily bought in the store with just a minor discrepancy in taste. The ideas in this book are meant to put a twist on those go-to recipes without requiring expensive, exotic ingredients or complicated kitchen techniques. The recipes should make you want to break the rules, get excited to get in the kitchen, and start making things. I want the recipes to jump out not because they sound good, but because they seem like they’d be fun and exciting to eat—something that’s really important for picky children, but also for busy adults who deserve a little pizzazz in their everyday routines.

–Peggy Wang

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction
　
BREAKFAST HACKS
strawberry nutella oatmeal yogurt parfait in a waffle cone apple ring pancakes banana pancakes cake batter pancakes crunchy french toast the syrup you should be pouring on everything spicy thai scrambled eggs grapefruit brûlée make hash browns in a waffle iron biscuit bowls avocado egg cups cookie dough greek yogurt frozen breakfast pops

SNACK HACKS
sriracha popcorn yummiest chicken bites ever banilla wafer sandwiches mix blue cheese into deviled eggs
(red) ants on a log the apple sandwich melt-in-your-mouth yogurt dots pizza salsa
"better than crack" crackers fried pasta crunches greek bruschetta japanese guacamole put avocado in your salsa put pomegranate seeds in guacamole balsamic avocado bacon cups egg roll mozzarella sticks crunchy edamame wonton pizza crisps taco wontons the best way ever to use up doritos crumbs leftover pizza crust nachos
　
MEAL HACKS
freeze your tofu chinese ketchup shrimp add peanut butter to a bowl of instant ramen the secret to better grilled cheese white pizza grilled cheese dippable grilled cheese rolls french dip crescent rolls lazy sushi bowl avocado cream pasta put avocado in your egg salad melty meatball rolls cook your meatballs in cranberry sauce cheeseburger egg rolls instant hamburger umami everything burger buns microwave pasta carbonara in a mug easy no-boil ravioli lasagna mexican lasagna one-pot spaghetti peanut butter and jelly banana dog leftover pancake panini eat your hot dogs in tortillas pizza hot dogs souped-up soup cheerios in your soup reheat pizza in a skillet the delivery pizza trick calzone tacos the walking taco cheese taco shells

SIDE DISH HACKS
coconut rice bacon baked potatoes extra-fluffy cornbread the fluffiest biscuits ever fluffy pesto puffs waffle biscuits

acknowledgments