I cook a lot. I bake a lot. I consider myself pretty handy in the kitchen. There isn’t a recipe I won’t try, at least once, and most of the time, they come reasonably close to what I think they’re supposed to, or at least they’re moderately edible.

I also have a decent number of tools to help around the kitchen, but I’ve learned over the years that investing in a few quality items is preferable to having a drawer full of cheaper, specialized items that don’t get as much use.

I enjoy watching kitchen hack-type segments on social media.

Sometimes the “shortcuts” are so ridiculous that you know they’re either satire or someone who is clueless in the kitchen. Other times, they’re just links to get you to buy stuff.

Occasionally, though, I stumble across something that is truly life changing, and that happened to me last weekend.

I learned that I’ve been using my box grater incorrectly for decades. This is of particular consequence to me because of my macaroni and cheese recipe.

Years ago, an acquaintance told me that she’d found the best mac and cheese recipe. This one was “the best” because it stayed creamy, even after hours in a crockpot. As someone who makes at least two or three crockpots of food for various concession stands every week, I knew a gold mine when I saw it.

First of all, the ratio is so easy to remember: 4 tablespoons of butter, 3 tablespoons of flour, 2 cups of milk, and 1 pound each of pasta and cheese. 4, 3, 2, 1. Easy as pie.

The second major secret is using Cooper sharp cheese. That’s it. No mysterious blends of three or four cheeses. Nothing at all complicated. Melt the butter, whisk in the flour until it’s golden, add the milk, stir over medium heat until thick, stir in the cheese, and then finally add the cooked pasta. From experience, cellentani is just about the best pasta for this recipe, but any short, round pasta will do.

I can practically make this recipe in my sleep. Most of the time I do, as swim meets are crack of dawn, Saturday morning events. And yes, swimmers will eat mac and cheese for breakfast. Most teenagers will, but swimmers devour it.

The other easy thing about this recipe is that it’s so easy to double, triple, quadruple, or in the case of one particularly long wrestling tournament, quintuple.

And that is where this hack comes in. While I love making this recipe, grating 5 pounds of cheese is not for the weak. When you’re only making one or two times the recipe, the time it takes for the milk to thicken is about the same amount of time that it takes to grate 1 or 2 pounds of cheese. When you’re shredding 3 to 5 pounds, however, it takes a little bit of time.

I have my extra large metal bowl that I’ve used to grate the cheese into for years, but as the pile of cheese grows, and the grater becomes more unsteady, and the cheese block gets smaller, well, let’s just say that maybe a knuckle or two may have had a rough encounter over the years.

Until Sunday afternoon, when I saw someone do the most amazing thing. They turned the grater on its side and grated directly into the grater. When the block of cheese was gone or the grater was full, they just picked it up and emptied it into whatever container was going to hold it.

Holding the handle with one hand while grating with the other in a horizontal direction instead of a vertical one, using a wider base instead of an ever-growing pile of cheese, and grating away from myself not only lessened the chance of injury, but it took me about half the time to grate the cheese!

While I stood there grating with two hands and kicking myself with one foot for not figuring this out sooner, I started asking why something so obvious didn’t occur to me.

Aside from the fact that as long as I can remember seeing people grate cheese, that’s how they did it, my own box grater, a wedding shower present, had come with its own detachable plastic container base. It was supposed to be a bonus feature, one that never quite worked right because grating into a box that was the exact size of the base of the grater, four inches off the countertop, was a physics nightmare waiting to happen. It did, however, indicate to me that the “right” way to use the grater was vertically. Since that matched up with how I’d always seen it used, I never thought to question it.

When I asked the internet if this was news only to me, I was surprised at the number of people who had already been doing it that way for years.

I was not surprised at the number of people who were just as shocked as I was to discover this game changer.

It’s especially disheartening to me because I recognize what a strength being able to think outside the box (in this case a literal plastic box) is, and over the years, I even had a job where we were trained to look at things differently and challenge “the way we’d always done things.”

Now of course, I’m looking at every household task and wondering what shortcuts I’m missing. Many times, the fastest, most efficient way to do things is the way we’ve always done them, simply because our brains and muscles already know the way, but every once in a while, there is a game changing way to do something.

The parable of the cheese grater is going to stick with me for a long time, as a reminder to be on the lookout for other ways to flip the world on its side.