Saturday Morning Putzing

 
Although I have a few other knives, and Lindsey has her own chef's knife, this is the core of my knife wardrobe. Astonishingly nerdy to be photographing this stuff, perhaps. But it keeps me off the streets.
Top to bottom:
10" Henckels sharpening steel, bought in San Diego several years ago.
7" Henckels International Granton Edge Santoku, bought at Target in Cary about a year ago. Perhaps my most often-used knife, and a fabulous bang for the buck.
10" Viking Professional Chef's Knife, my gift to myself upon getting a job. A bit expensive, and heavier than the same size Wusthof or Henckels. It suits my tastes and serves me well.
6" Dexter-Russell Sani-Safe upswept stiff boning knife, purchased at a restaurant supply store recently. Cheap, sharp, good grip. I've already butterflied some chicken breasts and trimmed a boston butt with it.
12" Dexter-Russell Sani-Safe Serrated Slicer, also from the restaurant supply store. I should have gotten this long ago, given my love of baking bread. It is also inexpensive, sharp and fitted with a good handle. More importantly, it's long and not pointy. I had a decent bread knife, but it was shorter, which doesn't give you plenty of sawing room, and its sharp tip scored the cutting board when I cut through a crusty loaf.
Left-3 1/2" Wusthof Classic paring knife. I got this at Williams Sonoma several years ago with a gift certificate from my sister. Thin. Sharp. Balanced. There are other nice parers around, but I don't see much need to look further than this one. A Dexter Russell parer, sibling of the above mentioned knives, is okay, but the fully-forged, full-tang quality of this little German guy is very gratifying when doing fine work.
The cutting board is a John Boos, purchased with a gift certificate from Lindz's mom. I love it, but I wish I had a bigger kitchen so I could have its bigger brethren also.

Why do I post pictures of my knives? Because I'm weird. Also because I value my tools. I'm always keen to learn more about what is and is not important in the kitchen. I'm trying to get the kitchen-gadget monkey off my back, and a thorough understanding of tools, combined with perspective and poverty, is essential to this. I longingly look at $250 copper sauciers on the internet, but my old, black Lodge chicken fryer is what I actually pull out of the cabinet to make risotto or ragu. It's not so much what you have; it's what you do with it (which also applies to the rest of life). However, what you have is a reflection of yourself. I used to buy a lot of kitchen stuff, but not so much any more. Perhaps I'm slightly more mature. I'm also married to a woman who keeps me grounded in reality. Also, I have amassed all the shit I need. I just need a bigger kitchen with better appliances now....

The Restaurant Store

It's on Saunders here in Raleigh. Check it out:
United Restaurant Equipment Company

Biscuits, Manga, Restaurant Supply and Traffic

Indeed I have been a lazy slug lately. Work has sucked, but last week saw a bit of an improvement.

I've bitched about that enough. Some other developments are:

1)I have over ten days of music in my iPod.
2)U2's new album is very, very good.
3)I made biscuits yesterday.
4)I braised a pork shoulder, shredded it, and Lindz and I put some of it on the biscuits.
5)I recently found a really good restaurant supply store in town. Heaven! I've already gotten a couple of Dexter-Russell Sanisafe knives (an upswept boning knife and a 12" bread knife), and I've got my eye on some Ceramiguard skillets.
6)It took me six and a half hours to get home from work Wednesday. One inch of snow. No one predicted it, and it fell in the afternoon. 3,000 kids were stranded at school. Hundreds and hundreds of accidents occurred. Yes, there were a few spots where it was slippery, but COME ON. If people here in North Carolina shit their pants when a dusting of snow falls, I hope no terrorists get wise. This is a real soft spot.
7)I got a hardcover copy of Akira, a very fine graphic novel (manga). The anime movie is quite cool, but the book is better.

That's the news from North Raleigh.

Unacceptable.

I have complained about my job.

My wiser siblings have offered their well-considered and true input.

My job still sucks, worse than ever. From experience, I know a shitty job when I see one. It has all the necessary ingredients, and it's sucking away my life. I am now actively seeking other options.

Perhaps it's true that work, by its very nature, is unpleasant, and that's why we're paid to do it. This job sucks too much for what it pays.

Sure, the world has many big, ineffectual bureaucracies with lots of worthless hangers-on in them. But I don't want to walk past the lazy-asses as I go to get more coffee in my vain attempt to whip my brain into going faster.

Okay, you won't always have as much direction and instruction as would make you comfortable. But I had more detailed instructions and standard operating procedures at almost all my other jobs. I had a detailed schematic of a caffe latte at Starbucks, and my knowledge of the organizational structure of the company I represent is based purely on what I've gleaned from others' conversations. I answer the phone and talk to people who are dying of cancer, for fuck's sake. I don't know who to connect them to. Why does a company who sells coffee have a better training program than one that sells pharmaceuticals?

And to what expectations am I being held? It was all clearly, if annoyingly, explained at Starbucks. Almost none of the shit I'm being told at my present job have I seen in writing.

I'm lucky and thankful to have a job at all. I want a better one, however. And it's not about money. I want to not hate my job. That's pretty much it.

I'm only getting fatter and grumpier, and the important things in life will suffer. These shitty jobs I've had since September of 2003 have indeed made them suffer. I had bad jobs before in my life, but I have more of a sense of what's important now. I'm inexcusably shirking so many things these days; it's killing me.

I guess I could hang on for a while, but only by telling myself, constantly each day, that the quality of my work is not important.

Unacceptable. It has never worked before; it won't work now.

Friday Night!

 

"Gin Suite #3: An Installation" Glass, wood, alcohol. 2005.

A fine Friday night after a frustrating and unsatisfying week at work. A good selection of olives, some superlative gin, and music blaring in the background.

(listening to Johann Ludwig Krebs's Toccata and Fugue in A Minor)

I had a thoroughly enjoyable holiday. I had a quiet Christmas at home (although I felt some pangs of longing for my sister's house full of gluttony and family), and a quiet week at work when most of the world was off. New Year's weekend was a very enjoyable 4-day weekend in Washington,D.C., once New Year's itself was over. Perhaps I'm just a grumpy old asshole, but I'm never letting myself be dragged to a party organized by my wife's old college friends again. It's happened twice now, and here are the common denominators:

1)Lots of driving
2)Deafeningly loud music that I don't care for
3)Cigarette smoke
4)Bars that are absolutely packed with drunk college kids trying to get into each other's pants
5)Trying to make conversation, over all that noise, with people I don't know
6)Sleeping on a floor
7)Hanging around, bored and hung over, while people talk about shoes, who went home with whom, and who fell down the steps.

Before I go any further, I must beg my wife's forgiveness for sounding like an arrogant, judgmental asshole. She clearly expected these parties, especially the New Year's party, to be more satisfying than they were. These are her friends, and I don't want to sound totally disrespectful. However, she has admitted that she doesn't live in that noisy college world anymore. Most of her friends still do, to varying degrees. I am a husband, and I will attend my obligatory social functions. I would like to limit them, from now on, however, to grownup functions.

When that was over, we checked into a hotel on Connecticut Avenue. We loafed around a bit and rid ourselves of the last of our hangovers. We had Thai food at Thaiphoon just down the street, and I had some very fine Crispy Duck. Spicy and good.

(Franz Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on the name of Bach)

The following day was spent walking around the National Mall and visiting museums. D.C. is a good town for walking, at least the part we were in. Driving, however, is hell. Incomprehensible streets. Every intersection has a few extra possible directions to get lost in. Anyway, it was nice for us to walk. We walked past the Inauguration bleachers being built next to the White House. We visited the National Holocaust Museum. Stunning. Well-done. Sobering. We saw the Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery. We looked at airplanes and space ships in the Air and Space Museum. We had overpriced McDonald's food there, too.
By then, we were tired. We walked back to the hotel and relaxed. I walked down the street and got us Chinese food, and we washed it down with a bottle of Mumm Cuvee Napa Blanc de Noirs that I had bought several weeks earlier. Very nice.

We checked out the next morning (and the coffee in the lobby of the Churchill Hotel is pretty good, I must point out) and got the hell out of town. We stopped at IKEA in Potomac Mills and had a good time. It's the closest one to us, and nerdy homebodies like us love that kind of shit. We got a coffee table to replace the ghetto-steamer-trunk-topped-with-glass coffee table that we had prior to that.

And so, here we are. Work is busy again, and it sucks. Paychecks are sucked up by bills as soon as they arrive. But this gin is really excellent. Hendrick's. I recommend it.

Auld Lang Syne

 
New Year's Eve 2004 (or was it already 2005 when we snapped this?) Location: Lucky Bar on Connecticut Avenue, Washington, D.C.