Chopping Salads Has Never Been Simpler With One Unexpected Tool

Whether you enjoy them as a small side to your main entrée, as an entire meal themselves, or you eat them for breakfast, salads tend to be packed full of nutrients thanks to their base layer of greens and any additional vegetables you include. However, if you use the pre-bagged grocery store greens, some of those pieces of lettuce and even spinach can be pretty huge. Cutting that up along with everything else you include (vegetables, meat, etc.) is kind of a chore that makes you not want to eat salads at all (despite them no longer being a punishment food). But what if there was a way to effectively slice up everything, all at once, right in the bowl?

If you have a small pizza cutter wheel with a long handle, you can dump all your ingredients together and chop them up with the handy tool directly in the bowl. Just throw everything into a medium-sized bowl (metal or glass works, but plastic is best) and run the pizza cutter back and forth over everything until it's sized right for your bite. All that's left to do is throw on some homemade dressing (okay, bottled works, too). One thing to note, however: Unless your pizza cutter is very sharp, it likely won't be able to make it through grape or cherry tomatoes.

The pizza cutter is really an unsung and under-utilized kitchen tool that can be employed in a multitude of ways, starting with cutting not only quesadillas (which is great because not everyone has big enough knives to make it through the entire diameter in one fell swoop), but plain tortillas into strips that you can then fry up and put on your salads, or triangle-shaped chips. It can also be used to cut up pie dough into precise lattice strips for baking.

If you have kids, the pizza cutter can really come in clutch, from easily cutting off the crusts of sandwiches, slicing grapes, or even cutting up pieces of cooked chicken, meatballs, steak, etc. At breakfast time, a pizza cutter will make short work of turning pancakes and sausage links into toddler-sized bites, too.

Finally, if your knife skills aren't up to chopping herbs the way chefs do it, break out your pizza cutter and run it over them. The great thing is you can roll it over and back, instead of cutting in just one direction, making it a more efficient way to create a lot of garnish in a little time.