{"id":614,"date":"2015-10-04T21:29:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T04:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/?p=614"},"modified":"2015-10-04T21:29:34","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T04:29:34","slug":"september-2015-knife-skills-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/04\/september-2015-knife-skills-month\/","title":{"rendered":"September 2015: Knife Skills Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20150907_012431\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As for the soup, I used store-bought beef stock (Swanson brand) and Kitchen Bouquet, and OMG so much flavor!<\/i><\/p>\n

\"20150913_180929\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

Also, it’s better to err on the side of not enough mayo than too much mayo.<\/p>\n

\"20150921_111644\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday, September 20, 2015 – You know what else has a lot of chopping? (In fact, it’s all chopping.) Salsa<\/a>. So I did.<\/p>\n

First time I made salsa, it took me an hour. Second time, 45 minutes. Today, 30 minutes. Definitely getting better at this.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Plus, I get some delicious food out of it, so…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[65,42,14,39,40,18,83],"class_list":["post-614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","tag-dip","tag-eggs","tag-onion","tag-potatoes","tag-salad","tag-soup","tag-tomatoes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}