So my cooking blog shows that I’m a pretty decent cook. (Or at least a cook who makes decently pretty food.) But my downfall is that I’m slow. Particularly in the knife skills. It takes me a while to chop everything I need. So this month, I devoted some time to practicing my knife skills.
Sunday, September 6, 2015 – The day before Labor Day, I decided to make French Onion Soup. Now, when I say French Onion Soup, some people think a piece of bread, some cheese, and a blow torch. While blow-torched melted cheese and toasted bread in soup is great, I just wanted to work on the basics and do something with some caramelized onions. So really, this was an exercise in caramelized onions in broth.
But yeah, the first step is chopping those onions into long thin strips, so I can caramelize them and make them into soup. I peeled and chopped up 2 onions, and it took me 12 minutes (which included honing and cleaning the knife, which prolly cost me a few minutes). Not bad, but lots of room for improvement.
As for the soup, I used store-bought beef stock (Swanson brand) and Kitchen Bouquet, and OMG so much flavor!
Sunday, September 13, 2015 – Potato salad involves a lot of chopping, so I figured it’d be a good knife skills practice session. Plus, it was worth practicing a bit before making it again for Mid-Autumn Festival.
I managed to get it done in an hour, a huge improvement from the first time I made potato salad, last year, which took 2 hours. (Although in this case, I think it was just as much the ability to multi-task that helped as much as the improved knife skills.)
Also, it’s better to err on the side of not enough mayo than too much mayo.
Sunday, September 20, 2015 – You know what else has a lot of chopping? (In fact, it’s all chopping.) Salsa. So I did.
First time I made salsa, it took me an hour. Second time, 45 minutes. Today, 30 minutes. Definitely getting better at this.
So am I done practicing knife skills? Yes and no. It was a good exercise for this month, but I need to keep practicing my knife skills in general. You know how on TV, chefs just go chop-chop-chop-chop, and suddenly everything is chopped up into nice, small, even squares? Yeah, I can’t do that yet. So I need to keep working at it.
Plus, I get some delicious food out of it, so…