Fill a bowl with cherry tomatoes. Set a flat lid on top, hold a second lid against the side, and run a serrated knife straight through the gap between them. That is the whole trick.

I used to halve them one by one for salads and it took forever. Twenty tomatoes, twenty tiny cuts, and half of them squirted onto my shirt anyway. Now I do a whole pint in one pass.

The setup

You need two lids roughly the same size, the kind from a big pot or a storage container. Put the tomatoes in a single layer on a cutting board. Set one lid flat on top of them, pressing down just enough to hold them still. The knife goes between the two lids, so the blades never touch your fingers.

Small things that matter

• Use a serrated knife. A smooth chef’s knife will slide off the skins.
• Keep the tomatoes in one layer. Pile them up and the top ones roll away the second you press.
• The lids don’t need to match. One big, one medium works better than two tiny ones.

I won’t pretend this changed my life. It just means I actually make the salad now instead of skipping the tomatoes because I didn’t feel like halving them.