To Save Time While Cooking, Grab An Extra Bowl For All Those Scraps

We have all had it happen — you get to the end of a long recipe just to find that the kitchen clean-up has become insurmountable. Eggshells, potato peels, fruit pits or seeds, and much more can become both messy and cumbersome to clean up if you don't begin your recipe with a plan. So the next time you are cooking something that is going to produce a lot of scraps, try this trick: select a kitchen bowl to be your one-stop waste receptacle for all your kitchen discards.

The beauty of the scraps bowl is in its simplicity. Simply plant it near your preparation space so that it is easy to toss in extras as they appear. Then when it is time to clean up, all you have to do is walk your scraps bowl out to the compost bin. You can use any kitchen bowl for this as long as it's big enough, but Rachel Ray even makes a bowl specifically for this purpose.

The benefits of having a bowl just for discards are two-fold. First, it makes cleaning up much faster, ultimately saving time. Second, it limits the amount of mess you make in the first place — and how much valuable kitchen real estate that mess takes up. This is especially important if you have a small kitchen or a restricted amount of space. You do not want the mess to take up the space you need for cooking.

To make the most out of your scraps bowl, you can even line it with a compostable bag to make disposal even easier. And if you anticipate having multiple types of trash, like food scraps and also plastic waste, it is worth it to have two separate discard piles that you can sort as you go. Needing to sort your waste later would cancel out any time saved that this hack can give you.