By Chef Alexis Hernandez
The Food Network moment that annoyed me
The first time I saw someone cut chives with scissors was on Food Network.
The host held the bunch over the dish and snipped like it was nothing.
And I remember thinking, Why would she do it that way?
How can you control where it lands. How much goes on. How evenly it’s cut.
I was a pull-out-a-cutting-board person. Grab the chef’s knife. Slice the chives properly. Wash the knife. Wash the board. Put everything back where it goes.
That, to me, was what a real cook did.
That opinion sat in the back of my mind for a long time.
Then one day I realized something uncomfortable.
I was being a snob.
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The truth is, I was already using scissors for the unglamorous stuff.
Cutting parchment. Snipping kitchen twine. Trimming little pieces of fat off a whole chicken.
So the scissors were never really the issue.
My pride was.
I was not protecting flavor.
I was protecting an image of myself.
And once I saw that, a lot of things got easier.
The tomato moment
The first real shift happened with a can of whole stewed tomatoes.
You’re making sauce. You need them broken down.
Old me would have done the whole routine. Pull out the cutting board. Chop the tomatoes. Wipe the juice. Wash the knife. Wash the board. Put everything away.
Instead, I dropped the tomatoes straight into the pan and snipped them right there.
It felt wrong for about three seconds.
Then it felt smart.
Dinner kept moving. The sauce did not care. And suddenly I had one thing to clean instead of three — not a board, not a knife, not a whole extra round of cleanup.
That was the moment I stopped confusing extra steps with standards.
Where scissors earn their keep
My knife still runs my kitchen. I am not retiring it.
But scissors keep dinner from turning into a production.
Raw bacon is a perfect example. It slips around on the board like it is trying to get away from you.
Now I snip it straight into the skillet.
Same with pizza night. If the pizza cutter is missing, I refuse to act like this is a crisis. I grab the scissors and cut the slices clean.
And then there is chicken management.
Spatchcocking a chicken or turkey. Snipping skin. Getting into spots where a knife feels like more drama than it needs to be — and more cleanup than I feel like dealing with.
None of this is lazy.
It is just efficient.
The pot roast leftovers
The moment that fully converted me was leftovers.
I had pot roast from Sunday dinner and wanted quesadillas.
I needed the meat shredded and cut into smaller pieces.
Old me would have pulled out the cutting board and turned that into its own task. Instead, I pulled the scissors out of the drawer and cut the meat right where it was.
Then I made the quesadillas and put the scissors in the dishwasher.
That was it.
No extra mess. No extra performance.
That is when I finally understood what had been bothering me about my old thinking.
I was acting like the cutting board proved something.
It didn’t.
Dinner was the only thing that mattered.
What I actually care about now
I used to think scissors meant less control.
Now I think control sometimes means controlling the mess, not the cut.
If I need precision, I use my knife.
If I need dinner, I use what keeps me moving.
Because the food does not care whether the chives were cut with a $200 knife.
The food cares whether it was seasoned properly and cooked with attention.
Turns out that Food Network host was not being sloppy — she was just ahead of me.
She was being smart.
I still love a cutting board and a sharp knife.
I just do not need to prove it every time I make dinner.
