If your grandmother is anything like mine, then surely you have eaten or have had to submit to some weird (weird to you) home remedy that your grandmother swears works and is willing to bet her life on it. While these home remedies may seem a bit sketch and strange to us, they are absolutely normal and 100% effective to our grandmothers.

I most definitely had my doubts about some of the remedies my grandmother would pull out of her years of knowledge but I lost track of the number of times I called her while I was at school to ask how to heal a sore throat or upset stomach. Here are just a couple of reasons why you should definitely try your grandmother’s home remedies in college or wherever you may be…you’ll need them, I promise.

1. There is a bad case of sore throats going around in your hall and you are either one of the first or last ones to go down with one. Your grandmother’s home remedy for a sore throat? Cut up some tomato and onion, add some vinegar, salt and a bit of lime juice and eat it like a bowl of cereal. Sure, it’ll taste absolutely foul and will leave your breath in need of about 100 breath mints but it should cure your sore throat almost overnight.

*This one is one of my personal favorites because my grandmother has made me eat this on several occasions and it really has worked. *

2.Your are trying to adult and you are cooking something up in the kitchen when your hand accidentally touches the bare metal handle of the lid of the pan. You now find yourself with a burn on your hand. Grandma’s home remedy? Potato skins! That’s right, peel a potato (you can add it to your meal!) and place the skins over the burn and bandage it up. Leave it on for half an hour or so and the burn should feel a lot better.

3. You fell off your bike or skateboard and now your cut knee and elbow are infected from not being cleaned properly. You better believe grandma has a home remedy for that. Remove the Band-Aid, grab a lime and let some lime drops into the cut. It will be about 10x more painful than from when you first got the scrape but like my grandmother says in Spanish, “el limon lo cura todo”, which is Spanish for “limes (lemons) cure everything. The cut will be thoroughly cleaned and the infection should heal a lot quicker.

Believe me, you are going to miss these home remedies when you are away at college. However, these home remedies have probably been in the family for generations and have worked all these years, so there must be some credibility to them, right?