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Household Tips From My Great Grandmother
Sep 21, 2024
In my family, we’ve been using these household tips for generations. These tips have been passed down from my great-grandmother. They’re tried and true old-fashioned tips that still work in our modern day. I hope they help make your life a little bit easier. I’m excited to share them with you!
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Today I wanted to share with you household tips for your home from my great-grandmother
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In my family, we've been using these household tips for generations. They've been passed down from my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother
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They're tried and true. They're old-fashioned tips, but they still work today, and you may even use some of them
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I hope you do, and if not, I hope you're encouraged to use them. It might make your life just a little bit easier
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I was really blessed to know my great-grandmother. She was 85 when she passed away, and I was 12 or 13, but she left us with wonderful memories
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and many lessons from her life. Her girls in 1990, I think it was, they all got together and put together a recipe book
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with some of their favorites of her recipes and these household tips, so I'm sharing them
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with you. Ma Horton, as she's known in our family, her wisdom has been handed down, like I said
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from her daughters to us, and so we're blessed to be able to use these tips in our own home
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Tip number one, use an old toothbrush to clean the crevices of the handles of your knives
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you know, where the knife blade attaches to the handle, your can opener down in the hand
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grinders, even the electric can openers have those little wheels, you know, that you can
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clean down in, and your hand grater, if anybody still uses those
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I use a hand grater. I use a hand crank can opener because I don't open many cans anyway, but I do use that
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If you use a toothbrush, you can use your toothbrush around your kitchen sink, around
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your bathroom sink, you know, those little grotty areas. I use one down in my drain rack
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It has a few hard-to-reach places, so keep those old toothbrushes. I remember hers was brown
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In hindsight, it was probably made out of boar's bristles. I'm not real sure, but I remember she had one on the back of the kitchen sink that she
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used all the time. Okay, you've cooked something, and in the bottom of the pot, it's stuck on there
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To avoid SOS pads and all of that scrubbing, she taught us to put a couple of tablespoons
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of baking soda, and then fill the pot halfway full with water, and then just let it boil
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You just let it boil until the food on the bottom would loosen up and float, and then
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you could just wash it out like always. Your hand grater, if you're grating cheese or carrots or anything like that with your
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hand grater, and food can get stuck in there, before you do that, put a little..
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I use olive oil or avocado oil. You could probably use coconut oil, but whatever oil you like to use, just moisten your fingers
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with it and rub it. Be careful not to cut yourself, but rub it around the inside and then the wrong direction
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on your grater. Don't go the right way, because you'll cut yourself, but if you rub a little oil on there
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then your food will just slide. It won't change the flavor. It won't change the texture, and your food won't stick to it
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It's easier to clean that way. Number four, if you make a paste of baking soda and vinegar and rub it on your stove
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anything that's stuck on there, I just made blackberry jam, and I put that on my stove
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and it just got all that right up. Any stains, anything like that, it's going to come out
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If you have burner pans up under your burners for an electric stove or a gas, some gas stoves
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even have those drain pans up under them, soak them in the, and just coat this vinegar
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and baking soda mixture on them, and let them sit for a little while, and it should rinse
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right off, 10 to 15 minutes, unless it's really stubborn. I use it to clean my sinks and the drain holes of my sink
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I put it down in there, let it sit, and it takes all the odors away, and it's clean
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Number five, if you don't use dusting polish, like I don't. Dusting is my most hated house chore ever, but when I do dust, and my mother's always
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telling me I need to dust more often, but anyway, I have these microfiber rags now
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My great-grandmother used old t-shirts, or it was probably, honestly, in hindsight, it
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was probably a flower sack, a cotton flower sack, but anyway, she kept a big bar of beeswax
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I don't know where she got it, I don't know where it came from, but she had a big bar
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of beeswax in the pantry that she used to put over her gems and jellies and different
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things, but she would take that beeswax block and rub it on her dusting rag, and then she
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would go dust her house. I like beeswax, I use it for several things, my moisturizer, just different things around
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the house, and I use it for dusting, and it works really great. To keep your popcorn fresh, so that you don't get old maids, that's what we call an unpopped
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kernel, I guess that's its official name, but that's what we call it, old maids, but
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to keep it fresh and to prevent those, we keep it in the freezer
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You can keep it in a canning jar in the freezer or in a Ziploc bag or a plastic freezer container
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whatever you like to use to put stuff in the freezer. We don't eat a great deal of popcorn, so it's a really great way to keep it fresh so that
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when we want it, we have it. Number seven, she had two tips for fluffier omelets
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I don't know that she called it an omelet, but it was a fantastic breakfast that she
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made that my grandmother made. They would put a little cornstarch in their eggs, they'd beat the eggs with a fork, and
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then they would put a little sprinkling of cornstarch, just a pinch, you know, over the
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top of the eggs and then beat that in. My grandmother also taught me to use milk to do that with just a, I don't know, not
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even a teaspoon or maybe a teaspoon and four or five eggs
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After you beat that up, you could do it either way. They didn't have to be worried about GMOs and the cornstarch and things like that that
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we have to be concerned about. However, there are non-GMO cornstarch products
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I have one. I very seldom use cornstarch unless I'm making gumbo or something like that, but you can
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get a non-GMO cornstarch if you want to use the cornstarch to have fluffy, fluffy omelets
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Number eight, and this, I use this one a lot because I'm a forgetful cook, okay
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I just, I'm gonna make cookies or I'm gonna make a cake or whatever it is I'm gonna make
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that I need softened butter for, and I have forgotten to put the butter out to get it
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to room temperature because I keep my refrigerator really cold and some butter I keep in the
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freezer because I like, like for my biscuits and my pie crusts, I like frozen butter
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It just produces a better product, a flakier product, but I forget to soften the butter
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for some of these recipes. So, I have a cast iron pot that belonged to my grandmother that I just heated up on low
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heat, medium heat, however you want to heat it up. You heat it up, you put your sticks of butter down
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Now, you don't have to use cast iron. You can use stainless steel or whatever pot you've got, and you just put your butter on
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a heat-proof surface. I usually put mine on a little shallow plate that I have and put the pot over the top of
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that, and it's completely covered, and the warm pot will soften the oil, soften the butter
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very, very quickly. So, you're welcome. That's a good tip. Before you add any oil or butter that you're going to cook with, you're gonna fry something
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or if you've got butter you're melting to do your eggs or whatever you're using it for
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get the pan warm first and then put that in there. It prevents the butter from getting black, burning the oil from catching on fire, waiting
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for it to get hot enough or forgetting about it. I don't know where this tip came from, but there must have been an experience somewhere
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that she taught her girls this. I can just imagine that she, because she had a wood cook stove until the time she died
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so I imagine maybe she put something on there and the oil got too hot. I don't know how this came to be, but she taught her girls this, who taught their daughters
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this, who taught us this. Brown sugar. I make my own brown sugar, and there's a recipe on the Farmer's Lamp for that, because we
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don't use a lot of sugar. So if you do keep brown sugar and it gets hard, take a piece of bread and put it over
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in the canister with it and it will keep that soft. It will soften it up if it's already gotten hard, but you can keep one in there to prevent
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it from getting hard. So there's my 10 tips for your household from my great-grandmother to you. Enjoy
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