Let's talk about tomatoes, because summer is peak tomato season and I've been slicing through a scary number of them lately. An easy cutting technique making the rounds on MSN promises faster, neater prep, and I actually tested it because I'll try anything that keeps tomato juice off my forearms.

The core idea is simple: work from the flesh side, not the skin side. Cut your tomato in half through the equator first so you're looking at the open face. Then slice or dice with the blade going into the soft interior, leaving the sturdy skin on the bottom as your cutting surface. The skin holds everything together while you work, and your slices come out clean instead of collapsing into a puddle.

Compare that to the way most of us learned, which is attacking a whole tomato from the top and watching it spray. I spent years doing that. Years. My cutting board looked like a crime scene and my dices were mushy before they even hit the bowl. Cutting through the skin first is what squeezes the juice out of the seed cavities before you've made a single useful cut.

A few things make the method work even better. Use a serrated or very sharp paring knife; a dull blade will crush a ripe tomato no matter which direction you come at it. And if you want picture-perfect dices, scoop out the seeds and pulp from each half before cutting, then slice a grid into the flesh. The seeds are where most of the water lives anyway, and for something like bruschetta or pico de gallo, removing them keeps everything from getting soupy.

It's the same logic I mentioned when writing about Lidia Bastianich's marinara sauce: with an ingredient list that short, there's nowhere to hide, so how you handle the tomato matters. Clean cuts mean less juice on the board and more flavor in the dish.

Half equator cut, flesh side up, serrated knife, seeds out if you're fancy. Just do that, you'll figure out the rest.