12 ways kitchen shears can help you be a better cook

You can have your Cuisinart, your mandoline, your pedigreed santoku knives. I'll take kitchen shears, thanks.

In my kitchen, shears are the utility player that simply gets things done. I reach for them for a whole range of tasks:

1. snipping fresh herbs directly into a saucepan.

2. cutting slippery chicken off the bone (or cutting up a chicken because the shears power right through the joints).

3. trimming fat from cuts of meat.

4. chopping uncooked bacon (again, directly into the pan).

5. removing sausage from casings.

6. cubing a pork shoulder or beef chuck.

7. quickly cutting gooey candies for cupcake or cookie decorations.

8. custom-shaping a kid's sandwich.

9. making a tinfoil cover for pie crust edges.

10. creating a waxed paper stencil for sugaring a chocolate cake.

11. opening stubborn packages of all sorts.

12. cleaning shrimp: Simply cut down the back of the shell, which opens the shrimp enough to remove the bad stuff.

Talk about value. I doubt I could cook without my kitchen shears. My insurance? A spare pair.