in search of a cutting edge

Some knives refuse to become sharp, whatever one does to them. One day, I was frantically trying to get a new over-long boning knife in trim, which was made of some especially rubbery steel that just didn’t react to grinding at all. When it eventually did, it had developed a micro-serrated, messy edge that would perhaps cut through half-decomposed gravlax, but little besides. A middle-aged member of the extended family was watching me, glasses flashing dispprovingly in the sunlight (sorry, I made this up. I needed some sun here at my desk, in early February, in Sweden). “You know, you really have a knife fetish of some sort,” he said eventually.

There are excuses for that kind of statement.

pressing matters

The culinary value of pressed garlic might be overrated. Most of the time, I am fine with chopped garlic, which sautés nicely. Pressed garlic has, of course, gotten special fame as translucent yellow blobs on takeaway pizza. Sometimes, we just don’t want sauteed garlic. I make tsatsiki with raw, pressed garlic. When I’m about to get a cold, I fill a bowl with yogurt, salt it and add some oil, and press three to five cloves of garlic into it (I never get colds). Pressed garlic is good in soups. Anyway, I do own a garlic press.

The act of pressing garlic brings back long-lost melodies of adolescence. Scritch. The presser’s gleeful thrill carries a note of benevolent aggression. Gotcha, clove.

two secret uses of the salad spinner

I own a Moulinex salad spinner that has served me for approximately 25 years. It holds vast amounts of goods, has a turning crank and the habit of getting unbalanced.

One turns to get rid of the worst of the moisture, and then the spinner begins to spin and wobble out of control. So one stops, opens the lid and very carefully re-distributes the content until the internal spinner-colander almost balances on the pivot. Then one closes the whole machine very carefully again and the spinning becomes a feast.

Robin has a “good grips” spinner that has no such problems of balance. But it turns slightly slower, so the drying takes more time. So we have two spinners, a slow and safe one, and a battered Ferrari.

I don’t want to write about dry lettuce. We all know that it’s better. There is a nice restaurant in the Gothenburg Brew House in Gårda, called bEAT (yES1) that offers very fine, fancy, hand-hewn salad dressings (in line with their other food, which is most of the time very good). But at lunchtime, they serve their lettuce literally floating in its rinsing water. Quite disgusting really. Matter of one hand of the cook not knowing what the other does. Hope he doesn’t cut himself one of these days.

I want to advertise two alternative uses of the salad spinner.

towards a knife block

Most knife blocks that are offered in the shops suck. The cheaper ones are made of blocks of (often tropical) wood glued together in some factory of far far away (I don’t want to think by whom), and the slots are subsequently cut out in some automated process. Most of them look shabby and are in fact too expensive for what they represent in terms of woodwork and functionality.

Then there is a huge variety of high-end design thingies, which only seem to be better, but are they really? First of all, even the chef’s knife blocks (ought to be ‘knives’ really: blocks for several knives owned by one chef) might have been assembled in places where we wouldn’t want to visit - who knows these things? And even here, there is always a slot of a size missing and a bunch of another size too many. How annoying isn’t it to spend a fortune for something gleaming in stainless steel and plastic only to have to keep the cleaver, the boning knife and the standard size chef’s knife in the drawer in any case?