Happiness is a Sharp Knife
Jan. 25th, 2005 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneI’ve been diet buddies with my ex-girlfriend for the past 3 or 4 weeks. We’ve done all the meal prep at her house, and what prep I’ve done at mine hadn’t required a lot of cutting until Sunday night. I have only two kitchen knives (ignoring a bread knife and a tomato knife that I’ve never used): one is a Chicago Cutlery 3” blade, I think it’s a paring knife, the other is a really nice German blade, about 6” long. I keep them burr-free and with a pretty good edge with a nice honing steel that my dad gave me.
Sunday night I’m prepping salad for the next few days to take to school for lunch. I’d finished tearing up lettuce and spinach and was about to start slicing celery. Basically I’m at a point where I can sit down and semi-watch TV while cutting the celery. So I grab my Chicago Cutlery and whack off the bottom and top of two stalks, they come off wonderfully easily. I sit down to World Poker Tour American Chopper versus Trading Spaces and start slicing. I’m able to get very thin slices that are less than a 8th of an inch thick, you can see light through them easily, and I’m just having a good time with my knife.
Last night I’m making some fish and asparagus and need to whack the bottom of the stalks off (a) to get rid of the really fibrous part and (b) so they’d fit in the pan, and again, I just marvel at how easily my Chicago Cutlery knife slices right through them. The knives that I used at Michelle’s (the ex-GF) required some effort and sawing for the same task. So I was happy.
Tonight, I decide to try frying plantain chips. I don’t know the full run-down on plantains, one thing I read tonight said that compared to bananas they are more starchy than sweet. I can’t stand bananas, I don’t like the smell and hate the texture, I know of only one other person who dislikes them as vehemently as I do. They also have one very identifying characteristic: they’re a bitch to peel! They look pretty much just like bananas, but they don’t peel! You literally have to cut them out of their husks, it was quite amusing. I tried peeling one like a banana, but no dice. So I cut it in half (with my heavier German blade), tremendously easy (can easy be tremendous?). Then it was fairly simple to slice down the length of the half and peel/cut them out. I had to cut out the black spots, again, the knife handling it with alacrity even though it was much longer than would be practical for such a job (my Chicago knife was dirty and we have a semi-contaminated water supply in Phoenix right now, so I couldn’t just wash things). You also have to whack off an inch or so off the stem end as it, like asparagus, is highly fibrous.
This really wasn’t a post about cooking, just a post about how much I like good knives.
The plantain chip experiment is an in-progress work. A few recipes recommend soaking the plantains slices in cold water before frying, another recommended a potato/vegetable peeler to make long, thin slices of plantain (as opposed to coins) then fry those. I won’t even talk about working with oil temperature and timing, much less spices. So I have some experimenting yet to do and a lot of stuff to work out.
What brought on the desire to cook plantain chips was that I’ve been buying bags of said chips as snack food. They’re moderately good for you, heck, they’re down-right nutritious compared to a bag of corn chips. They’re also $2 a bag. So I bought two plantains a couple of weeks ago to experiment with. It was a lot of fun, they taste reasonably good, and I think I can improve the taste once I get cooking methodology and spices down better.
It’ll be $2 bags until then.
Sunday night I’m prepping salad for the next few days to take to school for lunch. I’d finished tearing up lettuce and spinach and was about to start slicing celery. Basically I’m at a point where I can sit down and semi-watch TV while cutting the celery. So I grab my Chicago Cutlery and whack off the bottom and top of two stalks, they come off wonderfully easily. I sit down to World Poker Tour American Chopper versus Trading Spaces and start slicing. I’m able to get very thin slices that are less than a 8th of an inch thick, you can see light through them easily, and I’m just having a good time with my knife.
Last night I’m making some fish and asparagus and need to whack the bottom of the stalks off (a) to get rid of the really fibrous part and (b) so they’d fit in the pan, and again, I just marvel at how easily my Chicago Cutlery knife slices right through them. The knives that I used at Michelle’s (the ex-GF) required some effort and sawing for the same task. So I was happy.
Tonight, I decide to try frying plantain chips. I don’t know the full run-down on plantains, one thing I read tonight said that compared to bananas they are more starchy than sweet. I can’t stand bananas, I don’t like the smell and hate the texture, I know of only one other person who dislikes them as vehemently as I do. They also have one very identifying characteristic: they’re a bitch to peel! They look pretty much just like bananas, but they don’t peel! You literally have to cut them out of their husks, it was quite amusing. I tried peeling one like a banana, but no dice. So I cut it in half (with my heavier German blade), tremendously easy (can easy be tremendous?). Then it was fairly simple to slice down the length of the half and peel/cut them out. I had to cut out the black spots, again, the knife handling it with alacrity even though it was much longer than would be practical for such a job (my Chicago knife was dirty and we have a semi-contaminated water supply in Phoenix right now, so I couldn’t just wash things). You also have to whack off an inch or so off the stem end as it, like asparagus, is highly fibrous.
This really wasn’t a post about cooking, just a post about how much I like good knives.
The plantain chip experiment is an in-progress work. A few recipes recommend soaking the plantains slices in cold water before frying, another recommended a potato/vegetable peeler to make long, thin slices of plantain (as opposed to coins) then fry those. I won’t even talk about working with oil temperature and timing, much less spices. So I have some experimenting yet to do and a lot of stuff to work out.
What brought on the desire to cook plantain chips was that I’ve been buying bags of said chips as snack food. They’re moderately good for you, heck, they’re down-right nutritious compared to a bag of corn chips. They’re also $2 a bag. So I bought two plantains a couple of weeks ago to experiment with. It was a lot of fun, they taste reasonably good, and I think I can improve the taste once I get cooking methodology and spices down better.
It’ll be $2 bags until then.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 05:45 pm (UTC)I'm a little uncomfortable...
Date: 2005-01-27 11:07 pm (UTC)