Dull Knives and Cold Pans

 

 

 Keep your knives sharp and your pans hot

 – Just something we say to each other sometimes

 

           These knives are pretty dull right now. Unlike chef knives, which lose their edge with work, my writing “knives” need use to stay sharp, and I’ve neglected them for several years.

            It’s true: I was going great-guns there for a while, working on this blog, working on an amalgamation of the blogs with an autobiographical skeleton to hold the meat of the essays. Agent letters were going out. Book pitches galore. I was using my time away from cooking wisely. To a point. Although, honestly, I was feeling pretty idle in August of 2018 when I got a call from a former Exec Chef;  he wanted me back for a minute! I returned to my first command for a year-long stint at the helm, a bittersweet, rat-heavy stint.

When I left, I thought I was done with kitchens forever. My lower back was so happy.

With a little time on my hands again, I began working on a different, third-person version of the cooking memoir, which had nothing to do with the clog blogs, but really tended to focus on the highs and lows of a long kitchen career, including my profound loathing of cocaine (I do go on!), and the personal growth and sacrifices with which this career rides tandem. I found it fairly compelling, enough to give it a pithy title (To Hell with All That) and worked on it almost every day.

The record-scratch of March of 2020 occurred and I, like a bunch of other people, found it almost impossible to concentrate on the literary equivalent of pushing peas around a plate. Work slowed down. Stopped.  

            A couple of months later, I sort of started again, but really couldn’t see the point of it all: The state of the world was more interesting than the state of my navel. I returned to the project a few times, but the work produced was nonsense-adjacent, slightly feral in tone, and, I suspect, incomprehensible to anyone living outside of my head. And I badly needed to find a job-job at that point.

            The job I found was a great gig. Tiny little place with a great reputation in Seattle, a lot of creative room to maneuver, a name that inspired me on a daily basis to begin an essay about my feelings of insecurity whenever my writing work was compared to that of a giant in the field (vanity much?). A different kind of rat ruined the experience, but the timing worked in my favor – I needed a month off for traveling and that would have been almost impossible to swing if I were still in my clogs every day.

            Journaling comes pretty easily to me when I’m out and about. The little notebook-and-pen combo are like good paring knives – they stay sharp enough to trim Brussels sprouts and garlic without taking off the tip of a thumb; I couldn’t have fashioned a tomato rosette with one of these little knives (we’re talking figuratively here) without a trip to the whet stone, but they were used every day, with some interesting results. Sketches, reflections, food notes, all embedded in the chronology of the journey.

            With those journals in mind, I’m changing the course of these clog blogs for a bit, while I get back into the groove and feel ready to tackle the large scale butchery that is Trad Pub – the knife set I’ll need to hack into that beast must be very sharp, so I want to get some good practice reps in here first.

            But while we’re here, talking about knives, let’s talk about sharpening, a field I am decidedly not an expert in, so the talk will be brief and might consist entirely of: Should you like to learn more, there are many resources out there for you. (My former Sous Chefs’ jaws are hitting the ground right now – I’m a honer, and an infrequent sharpener, at best; my knives are pretty annoying to the Razor Lads. If they thought I had the audacity to describe a method, that I actually believed I was a good source of information here, were worries plaguing me while writing this. So let that short and italicized instruction suffice.)

One such resource is a book called Knives Cooks Love. I’m pretty sure I have a copy around here somewhere….

I found it. Flipped through it – it’s a Sur la Table book with a very onion-heavy focaccia on the cover, the kind of book stacked next to the store’s register. While the clerk is wrapping your le Creuset Dutch Oven – this season’s colors run from Brioche, to Peche, to Rhone, to Red, by the way – while the clerk wraps up your latest gorgeous kitchen treat, you decide to buy the book, for yourself, for a friend who loves to cook but simply can’t master the knuckle-claw, it doesn’t matter: It’s a book with a lot of information and dinner-party recipes. I don’t remember how it landed up on my shelves – I’m too smug/vulnerable to have purchased it myself – I’m supposed to know how to do the knife stuff by now, and I am not a home cook, I do not need a recipe for a beet and walnut salad.  This is an unfortunate, insecure combination of feelings, a frequent tightrope walk through my culinary-school-free career. But we aren’t all born knowing everything, and I’m not as knife focused as many chefs.

I’m deeply regretting the choice to write about this topic. Nothing leads to greater public shaming than calling yourself out on your own dull-ass knives. But, as it’s an essay about writing tools, and it’s going all over the place and isn’t really coming together in a particularly cohesive way, I have, perhaps, illustrated the point in a graceless, ragged way. Let us persist.

            My first serious knife was a gift from a guy named Hilbo. I worked with him just before the turn of the century at a long-closed spot called, Hilbo’s Alligator Soul. I consider him my first mentor (in kitchens), and remember his ferocity and kindness with a full heart. I named that knife Chopper, a santoku with a Granton Edge, the way a girl might name her first cat Fluffy. I don’t name all of my knives. That would be weird. But there was Kingfisher, a gorgeous knife that I brought along when I traveled in 2010. My daily sharps for cheese and butter are anonymous; my chef knives live in a knife roll right now.

            As for hot pans, I have no real need anymore, not with the kind of cooking I currently do. I’m not searing steaks or scallops, because I don’t have a hood in my kitchen, but also because I’m not interested in eating those fleshy bits right now. I don’t need a hard sear on a batch of lentils. If you are interested in high-heat cooking, hey! It’s summertime (she writes, wrapped in a blanket because it’s June in Seattle), get out there and do some grilling.

            Let the spirit of the saying guide you: May your knives forever be sharp, may your prep callous not grow too large, may your pans forever be hot, and may the oil not spatter your face. It's meant as a blessing.