7 Huge Mistakes You're Making in the Kitchen

It happens—you go overboard on one ingredient, and the resulting recipe suffers. Luckily, there are ways to fix that. If it's too spicy, sugar or butter should help the situation. Too sweet? Add lemon juice. Dish tasting off? Add a touch of salt.

To make your pasta dish extra flavorful, boil pasta until it's about 90 percent cooked and remove it from the pot, reserving a cup of the water it was cooked in. Then add your pasta to a separate pan with your sauce and pour in a little of the reserved water.

This may seem obvious, but it's a step that's often overlooked. Chopping ingredients and measuring spices ahead of time will result in less-stressful cooking experience and better overall results.

It won't work, ever. The key is to smother the fire, which you can do with baking soda or salt. If you don't have either of those items on hand, simply turn off the heat and put the lid back on.

How often do you sharpen your knives? Probably not very often, right? Reddit user WArslett thinks you should change that. "A honing steel is designed to be used every time you use the knife, six strokes each side before you use it is sufficient."

Unless you're making a stir fry, there's no need to keep stirring the pot, unless the recipe specifically calls for it.

As Redditor i8yourpinkcrayon puts it: "...a falling knife has no handle." While it may seem like common sense to step back from a falling knive, it never hurts to reemphasize this point to your family! If your knife is about to hit the floor, stand back and let it fall.