To clean a stained coffee cup, wet the cup and sprinkle in some table salt. Scrub the salt around with a cloth, then rinse the cup. Repeat if needed.

Store bought garlic is sometime's last years crop. If the cloves start to sprout, they pick up a strong bitter taste. I cut my cloves in half before using and remove the green sprout in the middle. Then the garlic tastes just like fresh picked.

Remove celery from the store bag it comes in and wrap it in paper towels, then in aluminum foil. Store in teh refridgerator. When you need some, break off what your recipe calls for, re-wrap the rest and return to the fridge. It will stay crisp for a long time.

Instead of frying bacon, lay strips on a jelly roll pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. Prepared this way bacon comes out crisp and flat. The pan cleans easily and there's no stovetop splattering.

When you make more pasta than you can eat, freeze the leftovers. It's simple to put the frozen pasta in boiling water for just a few minutes to heat through.

To get cooking orders out of the kitchen, boil some red hot candies and a few cinnamon sticks in water for several minutes. Soon a delicious aroma will fill your kitchen and the rest of your home. This is also good to do around the holidays.

To dot a casserole or pie with butter, use a coarse grater to shread cold butter over the dish. It's quick and effective.

Save the liquid in pickle jars after all the pickles are gone. Add a can of drained sliced beets to the juice, and over night you'll have the best tasting pickled beets.

To color Easter eggs naturally, try homemade dyes. For yellow, put onion skins in cold water and bring to a boil. For blue, boil leaves from a half of head of red cabbage. For pink, boil three sliced beets. Add 1 teaspoon of vinegar to each dye; soak eggs in the dye to set colors.

Hair spray can remove marker writting on plastic storage containers, freezer bags and canning jar lids. Just spray on and wipe clean.

If a recipe calls for herbs that don't dissolve, such as bay leaves and garlic cloves, tuck them into a metal tea ball and hook the chain over the side of the pot. It's an easy way to remove seasonings after cooking or before cooking is finished if the flavor is strong enough.

When cleaning pumpkins or winter squash, use a greatfruit spoon to easily remove the seeds.

To prevent your pumpkin or custard pie from getting a soggy crust, brush the unbaked crust with egg white, then bake just a few minutes to dry the egg white and seal the crust. Add your filling and bake as usual.

When a recipe calls for ground cranberries, grind them frozen and you won't have cranberry juice splattering all over the kitchen. Just take them from the freezer, rinse quickly in cold water and grind.

For faster rising bread dough, put the bowl on top of a heating pad set on low or medium. Cover with a thin cloth. It will rise much faster.

For easy cutout cookies, roll the dough between two pieces of waxed paper and place in the freezer for about 15 minutes. The chilled dough will cut cleanly, and shapes will lift easily onto the cookie sheets with a spatula. Plus no extra flour gets added to toughen the cookies.

Butter your knife before cutting a meringue pie. You'll get a clean cut without damaging the meringue.

When cooking a big family dinner, it is convenient to make the gravey in a slow cooker. Then you can easily refill the gravey boat with hot gravey throughout the meal.

To thicken pureed squash, pumpkin or even applesauce that is too thin, stir in a small amount of instant potato flakes until you reach the proper consistency. You won't taste the potatoes.

For moister, more flavorful breast meat when roasting a turkey, slip two or three pats of butter or margarine between the skin and turkey breast.

Before unwrapping a stick of butter, use a knife to make slight indentations on the stick at the tablespoon markings. When the butter is unwrapped, the indentations remain, making it quick and easy to open the butter dish and slice off a couple of tablespoons when a recipe calls for them.