Keep me out of the kitchen before I mangle again
I’ve been doing a lot of cooking the last couple of weeks. We decided to have a potluck lunch at work last Wednesday, and I found a recipe for crock pot beef bourguignon that I wanted to try. Horribly fattening, bad for your cholesterol, yadda yadda yadda, but oh boy is it tasty. And I love cooking. It feels like doing magic - well, if you’re not familiar with what’s going on, it *is* magic. Pots and kettles full of simmering liquids, assortments of herbs and powders that are really expensive and hard to get, strange-looking tools - if those don’t make for magic, what does?
(The first person who says anything about love or sunrises is getting whacked with a ladle.)
So, yeah, cooking. I made another batch of the wonderful beef stew last night, and as I pulled out my Japanese Santoku knife, the edge felt just slightly off. Without thinking, I reached into a drawer, pulled out a honing steel, and gave the knife five runs down its length.
And then I gasped in horror at what I’d done.
You’re really, really not supposed to use a honing steel on this knife. You’re supposed to use a whetstone, which I did not have in the house at the time. I felt the edge gingerly, and compared to the smooth mirror polish it had a few minutes previously, it felt like the lid of a tin can. I shuddered with shame and dread.
And then I took out my frustration on three pounds of chuck roast. And I got over it. Cooking’s great therapy if you’re not under any time constraints.
On the way home from work today, I stopped by a cutlery store and got a whetstone. When I got home I oiled it, drew the Santoku over it a few strokes on each side, and the edge is looking and feeling *much* better. I think I saved a piece of my immortal culinary soul. Please don’t tell anyone, I promise I will *never* do that again.
June 18th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
“Please don’t tell anyone,” says the man posting it for the entire world to read.
June 18th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Hope the Beef Bourgignon came out well. I remember making that for the cooking club we had at Rackspace many many moons ago. Hope things are going well.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:51 am
*sigh* I feel your pain. I broke the tip off of one of mine!
June 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Yeeeeouch! I actually stopped breathing when I read what you’d done… be nice to your knives, man!
Love ya bro -
M
June 20th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Oops. I did that last night with the sharpening steel. I mean, it isn’t a Japanese knife, it is Henkel I think in the Japanese style - great shape.
But oops never the less.
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:43 am
Ditto, Marnie. Bye, bye bite :~( Good excuse to shop for a replacement though :~)
July 4th, 2007 at 11:15 am
(he said something about cooking is magic…ARGH! can’t resist!)
If it is that magic is altering reality through the exertion of your will, then cooking is indeed one form of magic. Love (dodges ladle)…love plays an integral part in this for if it were not for your love of others, no cooking would happen. You exert effort to feed the bodies of your fellows. There’s nothing more human than eating together.