August 23 2000

Poor John!

John just can’t get there from here, “there” meaning Iguassu Falls, Brazil, and “here” meaning his home in Iowa, USA. What a frustrating non-trip!

Reading

Craig is back and has a great quote of the day:

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. Elizabeth Hardwick“

Moffem: Alles falsch?! – What’s wrong?!

Endlich hatte ich auch mal Zeit, einen Blick in das Museum für falsche Fehlermeldungen (MOFFEM) zu werfen. Gefällt mir!

The Museum of faulty Error Messages has a collection of English error messages as well. Check it out!

Link via Schockwellenreiter, wenn ich mich recht entsinne.

Sharp knives and dull knives

Al talks about chef’s knives:

I have bought the best chef’s knife in the world, and… it wasn’t made in France (shock) or Germany (SHOCK!). It was made in…Japan. Yeah, Japan. […]

Here is one of the great cooking secrets: A sharp knife is much safer than a dull one. For one thing, you are careful around a razor sharp knife. For another, you don’t use as much force to cut with a sharp knife; you slice rather than push through, reducing the chance of the knife “skipping” off something hard and cutting your hand.

I knew about the sharp knives being safer than dull ones. And I checked: our knives are made in Germany (of course wink: ), by Justinus.

2 thoughts on “August 23 2000”

  1. Alwin Hawkins

    Did you read Bourdain’s comment about knives via today’s link?

    You need, for God’s sake, a decent chef’s knife.

    No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers – all those medium-size ‘utility’ knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers – not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here’s all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef’s knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen. And stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won’t)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I’d forgo the Germans.

    That being said, the only way he’ll pry my Wusthof santoku from my cold, dead hands, even if I do have to work like a dog to resharpen the thing.

  2. Andrea Frick

    Oops, we have five different knives… but maybe a bread knive is legal and doesn’t count in this department? wink:

    I like to use knives with different sizes, depending on the size of whatever I’m cutting. But I guess this has to do with my lack of practice with the big one.

    So Wusthof is a German or Austrian brand? Can you believe I never heard about them? trippy:

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