Use Food Scraps To Make A Kitchen Air Freshener

Life

Whether you're frugal, environmentally conscious, or just love an efficiency challenge, there are lots of reasons to save your food scraps. Well, mostly to make stock out of. And to compost the rest. But some of your scraps are good for more than just boiling for soup-they can also be the starting place for a clever air freshener.

We all know the power of something fragrant on the stove or in the oven, the fresh and homey aromas that, if we're lucky, linger for a few hours. Well, why wait for the next time you bake to make your house smell great?

Instead, start stocking away leftover bits of anything that smells great. Next time you squeeze a lemon for juice, scrape out a vanilla bean, or cut the peel off a ginger root, save the scraps in your freezer. (If you've had a tin of lavender tea sitting in the back of your pantry since Obama's first term, you can probably count that as a "scrap," too.)

Once you've got enough that goes well together, pop those babies in a pot of water, and set it on your stove to simmer. Some favorite combinations:

lemon & ginger
cinnamon & apple
lavender & vanilla

Make sure to keep an eye on the pot and not let all the water boil out-set a timer on your phone if you need the reminder. You can top off the water as it boils off, and as we get into winter, that's a nice little humidity boost, too.

Source: lifehacker