Huh. Good Advice.

This month, Good Housekeeping Magazine is celebrating its 125th year in publication. Here are four easy ideas pulled straight from their recent issues to make your home, kitchen, and office better:

1) When you cook pasta, make sure you cook it "al dente" style, meaning slightly firm. The longer you cook pasta, the higher the glycemic index rises. Boiling pasta for five minutes puts the glycemic index at 38. Cooking it for twenty minutes raises the G.I. to 61. Bottom line: no mushy noodles!

2) The easiest way to remove the skin of a tomato is to put it in a bowl and pour boiling water over it. Let it sit for a couple of minutes and then remove it from the water. Score the skin with an "X" and then remove the peel. It melts right off.

3) Most people guzzle their coffee first thing in the morning. The problem with this habit is that your morning buzz is followed by a crash in the afternoon. To avoid this, ration and measure your coffee in two ounce servings ( slightly larger than a shotglass). Sip the two ounce servings slowly throughout the morning. In doing so, the caffeine leaves your system slowly rather than suddenly.

4) To dissipate and remove odors commonly associated with the kitchn, pour one cup of regular vinegar into a bowl. Let it sit on the kitchen table. The high acidity of the vinegar will absorb and neutralize those odors that come from smells such as frying fish or cooking onions.