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Shave off minutes of meal prep with these quick and easy kitchen hacks

Save time with these quick and easy kitchen hacks for grating cheese, peeling garlic, slicing tomatoes and more.
/ Source: TODAY

Chef Chris Kimball shares his quick and easy, time-saving kitchen hacks to help you shave much-needed minutes off meal prep.

Fishing out pieces of eggshell

Avocado, Tuna and Egg Tartines: The egg shell will come off in one or two pieces
Grace Parisi

When you crack an egg and you find a rogue piece of egg shell in your mixing bowl, most people will try to fish it out with their fingers or a spoon, which can take a while and break the yolk.

Instead, use an empty half-eggshell to fish it out. The jagged part of the egg shell will cut through the raw egg and the bit of lost shell will stick to it. It's much easier than using your fingers or a spoon to fish it out.

Grating cheese

cheese and grated cheese
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Give soft cheese a quick blast in the freezer for a few minutes before grating. It hardens it up slightly and makes it much easier to grate.

Measuring sticky stuff

sticky chocolate spoonfuls
Alamy Stock

Non-stick cooking spray can make can make your life easier in more ways than you might realize — like measuring sticky liquids like honey and maple syrup and grating cheese. Spray the measuring cup with non-stick cooking spray before pouring in your sticky liquid; it will make cleanup so much easier. You can also spray some on your cheese grater, which will prevent soft cheese from getting stuck to the grater.

Peeling garlic

Garlic
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Garlic can add great flavor to your dinner, but it can be quite a burden to peel. Cutting the ends of each individual clove and pulling off the skin is time consuming.

Peel garlic quickly by separating the cloves and shaking them between two bowls or a pan and lid. The papery skins will fall of and leave you with perfectly peeled cloves.

Slicing cherry tomatoes

Ziti with Crispy Cauliflower, Cherry Tomatoes and Lemon
Casey Barber / Casey Barber

Making a salad with cherry tomatoes means slicing through a lot of cherry tomatoes!

Save time slicing cherry tomatoes by putting them between two plates, or plastic container lids, and slicing between them.

Aerating red wine

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You should open a bottle of red wine and let it breathe to open up the wine's flavors, but depending on how old the wine is, it can be anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours. Plus, the thin neck of the bottle doesn't allow enough air in anyway. If you want to speed up the aeration process, put the wine in a blender and process for 30 seconds.