🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a roll of aluminum foil in your kitchen drawer and you use it for one thing. You cover a dish with it, maybe you line a pan, and there it ends. That roll will do a dozen jobs you are presently buying separate articles for.

A scrubber. A funnel. Furniture sliders.

A pie shield. It will sharpen your scissors and take rust off chrome. And it will quietly ruin two or three things if you use it the way most people do, and one of those is a real danger rather than a nuisance.

Both come out of the same fact. Foil is not a wrapper. It is a sheet of metal, rolled thin enough to tear with your thumb but metal all the way through, and it behaves like metal.

That is why it bounces heat back, why it scours, and why it takes any shape you press it into. It is also why it does not belong near certain things. My grandmother settled it in about a minute when I was ten.

I wrapped half a tomato and half a lemon in foil and set them in the cellar, pleased with how neat the parcels came out. Next day she had me open them. The foil round the lemon had a dozen holes eaten clean through it and the metal round the edges had gone grey and crumbly, and where it touched the cut tomato there was a dull grey smear on the fruit.

She held up the lemon and asked me what I thought that was made of. What we go through: Which weight of foil to buy for which job, and why a thin funnel collapses halfway through A scrubber that gets into corners a stiff brush never will, and the four surfaces to keep it off Taking rust and tarnish off chrome with foil and water Sharpening scissors, and why it works Furniture sliders on carpet and on hard floor, shiny side up or down Bacon grease, and why what you did not do matters more than what you did Pie shields and roast tents, and why loose is the word The ironing trick that presses from both sides at once, and the two boards not to do it on Wrapping hardware for painting, where tape will not lie flat Keeping steel wool from rusting, and a sheet behind a radiator And the ones that cost you: acidic food, the bottom of your oven, the microwave, seasoned cast iron, and making a battery fit.

That last one is the one I would take out of every hack video on this subject. Foil is metal and a battery compartment is metal, and bridging the two ends of a battery makes it dump everything at once and get hot fast. Use the right battery.

Two smaller things: the shiny side and the dull side make no difference to cooking, none, and the makers say so themselves. And go and look at the ends of your foil box, because there are little tabs pressed into the cardboard that lock the roll in place. The plain limit: foil does not seal.

It presses close and holds a shape, but it is not airtight and never was, so it is a poor choice for keeping something fresh for days. Tonight, take the box out of the drawer and look at the two ends. Find the tabs, push them in, and watch the roll stay where it belongs.

Tell me in the comments what county you are in and how old your house is. And tell me this: did you know about the tabs? Be truthful.

I did not know myself until a man at a sale barn showed me, and I was a grown man with children. Next time we go through plain baking soda the same way we went through the vinegar. And there is one trick where the soda and this foil work together, in a bowl of hot water, that takes the black off a piece of silver in about a minute without rubbing it at all.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #AluminumFoil #KitchenHacks #HouseholdTips #Frugal #CleaningHacks #DIY #OldWays #HomeRepair #LifeHacks #SaveMoney #SafetyFirst #Homesteading #SelfReliance #TinFoil