Prog Chefs Unite!!!

My pet hate are serrated knives (Kitchen Devils - hawk...spit!) - the closest I get is the bread knife and that's more wavy than serrated.

 

I have two knife blocks that are full of indispensable ironwork. Discounting the palette knife, bread knife and Sabatier carving knife (and obligatory fork) which generally are single function (though the carving knife is pretty good for filleting and skinning fish) the two knives I use the most are a tried and tested 10" V Sabatier chefs knife that I've owned for about 30 years and an 6" Stellar santoku, which is bloody brilliant - when you first use one it seems like it's only good for slicing because the curve of the blade is too straight to get a decent rocking/chopping action going without snipping off your finger tips but once you get use to using it like that it does everything a good chefs knife can do.

 

Having "fallen in love" with the big santoku I bought a smaller one (sort of paring knife size) but I just don't get on as well with that, though slicing ripe tomatoes no presents no problem for it. I have one 8" chefs knife that I can't use at all, it took me a while to work out it had been sharpened with a left-handed bias.

 

As I do a lot of fish prep one day I'll buy myself a good fillet knife, but the carver I have has a pretty flexible blade and works quite well for now.

 

Two other "indispensable" knives I own are extremely old - the first is a 1951 National Service issue stainless steel table knife that has been reassigned to butter-spreading duty and the other is a wooden handled steak knife I bought from Woolworths when I went to Uni that is my weapon of choice for spud peeling.

 

All knives are sharpened with a steel - I've never owned any other kind of knife sharpener.

 

 

 Btw I installed a stereo in my kitchen. Its not the best one but its as good as most peoples (non music freaks) home stereos. I hate cooking in silence but I could see how listening to the family noise would be nice. Of course I would probaly be eager to drown them out IF I had kids :)

 things didn't go according to plan... This meal I chose to do single-handed because a) Debs was busy and b) it looked simple enough. Having already noticed the recipe called for pre-made pastry cases for the desert that we'd neglected to buy, I allowed myself extra time to make and blind-bake my own, which was fine and resulted in four very nice little cases for the tarts, which were going to be peach not pear as I don't like pears. And then having read the recipe through and realised that the food processor for grating the Parmesan cheese was next used to whip the egg-whites for the desert, which would mean washing up and thoroughly drying everything (you can't make meringues with any moisture in the bowl) or we'd be having cheesy peach tarts and that would be horrible, so I chose to hand grate the cheese in advance, thus avoiding any chance of panic or failure (or so I thought)...

 

As a result of all this pre-thought everything was going to plan - I was chill and in control, the pasta was merrily boiling away, the salad was prepared, the pancetta was crisping up nicely in a frying pan and the little peach meringues were browning-off happily in the oven. Until it came to time to remove the tarts from the oven, to discover that in our tiny kitchen I had nowhere to put them while I served up the main course, rather than stop and think, I entered into mild panic mode and ran around like a headless chicken until I decided to put them in the dining room and hope the cats didn't take a shine to them. On returning to the kitchen I discovered that in taking my eye off the panchetta for two minutes it was now strips of inedible charcoal - still in mild panic mode, rather than grab a pack of streaky bacon from the fridge and start again, I felt the best course of action was to berate the world and all who live on it, especially Jamie Oliver and his entire family, friends and pets and anyone associated him, all the employees at Magnet and Southern for supplying the previous owners of this house with such a crap kitchen design, the previous owners themselves for buying it, myself for buying the house (and kitchen) from them, my employer for giving me a job 30 years ago that resulted in me moving down to this forsaken corner of England where house prices are so high that a house with a tiny kitchen is all we could afford and Sainsbury's for selling panchetta that burns so easily... and Debs for reminding me not to get stressed and to think about my heart, which on reflection was sound and concerned advice and not worthy of my subsequent reaction...  

 

Anyway, in her calm and collected way she rescued the situation by quickly frying up some bacon to scatter over the salad in a cheffy kind of way and the meal was eventually served.

 

And true to form, it tasted bloody wonderful, and the rum and coke I washed it down with was rather fine too.

 

 

Perhaps I will now consider piping soothing music into the kitchen while I cook.

 

 

As some of my Facebook friends may have noticed I prepare Bento lunch boxes for Debs and myself most mornings, I haven't posted facebook pictures for a while as I've settled into a routine of meals that are essentially repeats with variations on what I've already shown. To make these I just get up a few minutes earlier than I used to and prepare everything fresh that morning - all calm and stress-free. Today it's lamb koftas (ground lamb, mint, parsley, onion and a pinch of cumin made into small balls and fried) with homemade hummus made from a tin of chick peas, garlic and some homemade tahini (toasted sesame seeds ground in a coffee grinder with a little olive oil) whizzed in a small food-processor, served with some soba noodles in a lemon dressing and a little green salad. Yesterday was teriaki chicken with seasoned rice... the chicken was the wings, thighs and drumsticks left-over from the chicken used to make the chicken and mushroom pie (I find it's cheaper to buy a whole chicken and bone it out myself than buying individual breast fillets, and I then get "left-overs" I can use in other recipes). All of this I do with the minimum of fuss and zero-stress, I even pride myself on being able to make quick on-the-spot substitutions when I find I'm lacking a particular ingredient, again without the histrionics and melodrama that accompanies following these "30 minute meal" recipes.