I’m back to cooking, although most of my meals are relatively simple in nature. I prefer to serve healthy food at home, since we eat out regularly and indulge ourselves on those occasions. Tonight, for instance, I prepared baked salmon, steamed broccoli, and Spanish rice. And, no, Earl wouldn’t eat broccoli if it contained the cure for cancer.
But this blog isn’t really about the food I fix; it’s more about the tools I use to do it. For me, nothing beats a really good set of knives. For Earl, my kitchen partner, nothing beats the latest gadget. We have drawers full of them, each with its assigned responsibility.
When I want to dice an onion, I use a knife. When Earl wants to dice one, he uses his handy-dandy slicer/dicer. I agree that he probably gets the onion done in less time, but he makes up for it in cleaning the apparatus with its several parts. The same goes for nuts. We have a nut chopper, but I can do the same task in less time with a good knife. The same goes for garlic. We have a garlic press, but all you really need to do is skin the clove and press it under — you guessed it — a sharp knife. Voila!
My list is endless and probably originated with my Mother who never had an extra gadget in her life. Earl has one that removes grapefruit segments from the outer rind; my Mother used her knife. Earl has a mandolin — No, make that two mandolins — to create carrots and zucchini of any thickness. Mother got the job done with the same utensil she used to tighten a loose screw. Her knife was multi-purpose.
I’m beginning to think Earl watches too many infomercials. You know, the ones where you’re guaranteed a wonderful outcome if you purchase the gadget on sale. And so Earl does. This Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday 2007, we’re going to test some of these gadgets. Originally, I thought we’d order pizza; but now we’re going to get out the GT Xpress 101 and the Magic Bullet and go mano a mano to see what works best. I’m still betting on a sharpened kitchen knife.
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