Your Old Cooling Racks Are The Perfect Storage Solution For These Jumbled Kitchen Items
Unless you're an avid home baker, chances are your cooling rack is not used very often for its intended purpose. Even if that is true, this kitchen tool has a lot of handy uses, from making the crispiest roasted veggies to doubling as a grill basket in a pinch. But if this metal grid still ends up at the bottom of a drawer, dusty and forgotten, it's time to repurpose it for an organizational hack.
If your plastic container lids are constantly playing hide-and-seek in your kitchen drawers, it's time for the cooling rack to shine. The same metal rack you use to cool cookies can indeed bring order to your chaotic lid situation. The rack can be placed horizontally over a shallow bin and then tucked inside a drawer or cabinet. Then, you can slide your plastic lids between the metal bars to keep them upright, visible, and easy to grab. Cooling racks that have overlapping rods cannot be used because there won't be space to fit the lids.
It's basically an instant filing system for the kitchen item that tends to get jumbled up the quickest. Take the organization a step further and categorize the lids by shape and size. Even if a cooling rack isn't on your list of top items for organizing a kitchen drawer, it's a perfect storage hack for anyone tired of mismatched containers and missing tops.
Other organizational hacks in the kitchen using a cooling rack
This hack isn't just for plastic lids – it can also be used for pot lids. If you insert the metal rack diagonally into a cabinet, where the ends of the rack can be pressed against the walls of the cabinet, the metal or glass lids can be set in between the rods. Their handles or the rods themselves will prevent them from slipping through.
Have you ever been washing up after a holiday gathering or dinner party and found your dish drying rack filled up in a matter of minutes? Make an instant DIY dish rack with the cooling hack by laying it on top of a shallow bin or standing it on top of a towel to collect water.
The cooling rack hack also works for drying soft items as well. When trying to dry dishwashing gloves, reusable bags, or plastic zip-top bags, it seems like there's never a good place to hang them where they aren't in the way or dripping all over the place. Again, a cooling rack can be set in a warm, sunny spot, allowing it to function as a temporary drying rack.