Outside the dugout: What's cooking?

This is what I have, but don't take my word for it for being great:



It does make your knives at a 15 degree blade. If you have old European blades they will be at 20 degrees but if you are patient you can get your old blades to that standard. Newer European blades are at the 15 degree Japanese standard.

 

Kind of.

The last pass is a strapping pass, but not really good at honing serrated blades. I just buy a good bread knife every 20 years or so.

 

Cutco makes a decent knife. Many years ago one of the college kids that we rented to was trying to make some extra scratch selling Cutco products and wanted to give us a sales pitch. When he saw that we had a nice assortment of Henckel's he was despondent. But we did feel sorry for him and bought the Cutco kitchen shears and they were great.

Somehow they walked off.

I rarely use kitchen shears (nice for spatchcocking a chicken) and bought some really cheap ones. Kind of like going to Harbor Freight for a tool you might use once or twice as opposed to buying a pro tool for a job that you do a lot.

 

You really need three different ones. One for straight cuts and one for cuts going left and one for cuts going right.

IIRC they are called snips and not shears, but I might be wrong on that. It has been a lot of years, but I do have all three versions.

 

Just a little Cold War humor:

Right turn = moonshine
Left turn = vodka

 

Tonight is defrosted and reheated enchiladas with diced tomatoes, diced onion, and finely chopped cilantro toppings. I might use some dried epazote on mine.

On Mondays we have a house cleaner come not so much because we need one, but because she needs the money. We knew her and her husband, but we didn't know that her husband was bipolar and one weekend he was on the depressed side and took his own life. Very sad.

So on Mondays we try to not dirty up the kitchen much so we can enjoy it for a while. It is one day that we often have take out, but heating up stuff in the oven and doing a little chopping is not making a mess.

Tomorrow is grilled lamb kofta kebabs. I will leave the tzatziki sauce to my bride as she just has a way with it that I don't. And she is not Greek. I am not either although @gtj31 could tell you that it is no surprise that a lot of Greeks thought that I was Greek.

Tomorrow I will also make Mexican pickled red onion with the idea that it can be a burger topping for a quick pre-game meal on Wednesday before the FAU game. It is a Rick Bayless recipe and it is spot on and a staple from the Yucatan.

 

While finely chopping cilantro for tonight's dinner I started thinking about mowing grass. When I was young my dad had a motorized reel mower that he made me use even though it weighted a lot more than I did, and I was "husky", and it did a great job shearing the grass off cleanly, but with the added danger of throwing a rock or piece of a stick right into your face. Then we got a rotary mower that was much safer, but didn't give a good, clean cut. It was very ragged.

Golf courses and sports fields are usually cut with reel type cutters dragged behind a tractor for a very good reason. It gives a superior cut.

That is why I use a knife to chop cilantro and parsley instead of throwing it into my Cuisinart. It is a small difference, but it is a difference. Maybe only I notice it.

 

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The other day I took a good look at our cast iron skillet. It is collectable. Not super collectable but well over the $100 dollar range. I think that my wife got it from her mother who was a "junker" back in the '60's in Ohio.

And we have LOTS of collectable marbles, many of them really old ceramic ones that my MIL bought way back when nobody wanted them. She had/has a good eye.

 

I have a couple. In fact the lamb kebabs I will be grilling tonight are sitting on one in my frig as I type this. My mom called them cookie sheets because she used them to bake cookies.

My favorite one has a double layered bottom. It makes the cooking surface temperature more uniform.