Over the years, I've run into a few things that weren't immediately-obvious to me.
One of the big ones was eating pomegranates by opening them underwater. For those not familiar, pomegranates have a lot of red seeds and white husk between them:
Cutting a pomegranate or even opening a pomegranate tends to burst at least some seeds. The seeds are sticky and stain and tend to spray juice when pierced.
However, if you just cut through the outer hull of the fruit, then open it by hand underwater in a bowl of water, any juice that would have sprayed out is just grabbed by the water. Even better, the (inedible) white husk floats, so it self-separates instead of sticking to everything.
Today, I decided to try eating a watermelon with a spoon. In the past, that's tended to also make things spray, so I tried a grapefruit spoon, one with serrations that runs down the side. And that works great -- the spoon is like a knife, can go more-cleanly through the watermelon than a regular spoon, and still lets you scoop up the watermelon.
Any other neat tips that might be unorthodox or that people might not have tried or know about?
Some will call this blasphemous - If you want to eat spaghetti without having to slurp up noodles and get the sides of your mouth and potentially your shirt stained, use a fork and spoon. Slice the spaghetti buy crisscrossing it, scoop into the spoon, then put it in your mouth. Probably only do this at home and not at a dinner party.
Or learn to twist the spaghetti with your fork against the spoon. It took me all of about ten minutes to learn that.
Simply break it into little pieces before cooking it. Bonus points if you do it in front of an Italian.
The thing is, there's a million different pasta shapes, and most of them are short. Yes, it will make pasta-passionate people sad, if you break spaghetti, because that makes them terrible at trapping sauce compared to the many other shapes.
But ultimately, it's also a matter of: Why are you eating spaghetti-shaped pasta, if you don't want it to be spaghetti-shaped?
I don't use a spoon, but I do twist it on the plate or bowl to get a "ball" of spaghetti (or linguini or angel hair).
That works as well, but it's harder to direct in my experience. The fork+spoon method of twirling just works best for me.
Well, when I'm in Canada. Here I eat noodles with chopsticks.
I just use a different pasta. spirals are my go to.
I break spaghetti in half before cooking