-Put your steel wool pads in the freezer. It stops them rusting and you get 10 times the life out of them.
-If you run out of laundry soap, take plain old bar soap and grate some of it into the washing machine. This is what your grandmother did.
-Baking soda and hot water are acceptable emergency substitutes for either dishwasher or laundry detergent in a pinch.
-Slow cookers are pointless and cannot do anything that a pressure cooker cannot do as well or better in a fraction of the time. Aside from my cast iron skillets, my pressure cookers get the most use of any appliance.
-Your best buy in appliances is, believe it or not, vintage or antique stuff. I really mean it, and not for fussy aesthetic reasons. Take this 1930s blender:
$75 at the antique store. That is a lifetime purchase, even though it’s already 100 years old. These things are made of real metal components that last. If they break, repair is stupid easy.
I have a 1962 model that works better and will never break, compared to modern plastic shit. Got it for $10 at the flea market.
I also recommend buying old, mechanical, no-electronics washing machines and dryers. The cost of only very occasional or never repairs is far less than replacing modern shitty units with flashing lights and a digital control system that renders the whole appliance inert if the chip gets fussy.
-Look for pig fat/pig skins at the store or at your butcher. Mince finely and put over the lowest possible heat in a heavy bottomed pan. Render out the lard over hours. You’ll have a jar of pure, white, clean-tasting lard.
This is your cooking fat, iron seasoning fat, your deep frying fat.
Lard is good for you. And making your own is cheaper than dirt.
-Likewise with chicken skins. Save your rendered chicken fat from baking skin-on parts. It makes wonderful seasoning fat for almost any kind of food. Or, get skins and make your own schmaltz.
-Most kitchen gadgets are wastes of money to do one small task. Not so the “air fryer”. These countertop convection ovens are perfect for heating and reheating, and for cooking small meals in less time with less energy than heating the oen.
-The Fuller Brush mechanical floor sweeper is great. I use it all the time between vacuumings.
-Add a squeeze of lemon juice at the end to soups, sauces, and vegetables. Instant brightness, and a favorite “chef’s trick.”
-Is your dishwasher not cleaning so well anymore? It might be that the holes in the sprayer arm are clogged. Check. I just unclogged the two main holes in the upper and lower arms of my dishwasher. Shredder hair and food had plugged them. Dishes are getting clean again.
Also---use MSG. Monosodium Glutamate. Marketed in the US as "Accent."
No. Stop typing that comment right now. You are not "allergic" to MSG. It does not "make people sick/give headaches." This is an urban myth from a flawed 1969 study. It's not true.
Monosodium glutamate is just a salt. It occurs naturally in many foods.
Its flavor-boosting capacity for savory foods is delightful. I use it constantly, and if you've eaten at my house, you've eaten me-added MSG and never knew it.
Beauty matters, too. Classic appliances, especially those from the 40s and 50s, were beautiful, like the cars.
Modern appliances are ugly. They are Brutalism in home design. No organic forms. Steel and concrete buildings in miniature to conform to 2001: A Space Odyssey/i-phone vision. A human-less, nature-less vision of immaculate perfection.
They're not only ugly, they're user-hostile. Have you noticed, now, that buttons on electronic devices are frequently not even labeled? This is a new development.
Have you noticed how physical buttons that give tactile confirmation are being pushed out even when touch screens or recessed pressure pads are ill-suited to the task? This is also a new development.
Have you noticed how, if you're even given physical buttons, they're so small, they're the same black as the case, and they are designed not to function but to preserve the aesthetic of the machine?
We are not living in the glory days of technology. There was such a time, and it hit the fulcrum, the "sweet spot", between manual work and automation. The machines were made to fit our hands, and to fit our needs.
We are living in the age of technological slavery. We humans service the demands of the machines in our lives. Their notifications, their chimes, their dissonant warnings, their mommying us about our seatbelts, our lane-keeping, our bloody *tire pressure*.
To top it all off, they do all that while being ugly. We are not in the best possible first world any longer.