Drum roll please

[cjsmith]

I am now the proud owner of a second nonstick skillet* large enough to brown a pound of ground turkey. Being able to run two of those at once during a cook-for-the-week session is going to be a real win for my tender feetsies.

So far I have learned two lessons with my new skillet:

1: It takes a lot longer to cook stuff if the pan takes a lot longer to heat up.

2: Scraping the meat to one side of the pan and tilting the pan to drain off the fat is downright awkward if your skillet is slicker'n black ice. The meat keeps sliding around!

I am also the proud owner of a garlic press. I am getting more frou-frou by the day. A garlic press! *eyeroll* But by golly I am going to get over my fear of using stuff that grows in the ground as opposed to stuff that comes in jars. (I reserve the right, however, to go back to jars due to the economics imposed by waste. How fast do I have to use up a bulb of garlic?)

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*Those of you who wish to argue that my first large skillet is no longer nonstick will get a fair hearing. I've clearly eaten a lot of Teflon over the years.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

I've been very happy with my Tramontina knives; they're a bit less expensive than the German ones (they come from Brazil), but no less high-quality. The first one I bought came from a cooking store where I could try out several different brands and see which one fit my hands right and felt like it was naturally balanced. The second one came from ... some mail-order place that sells only a handful of brands, but which came up on Google when I searched from Tramontina.

I'm not sure there's such a thing as a dishwasher-safe cook-quality cooking knife, though. (But, then, really you don't want to leave them dirty that long anyway.)

[brooksmoses]

125 West seems to be the relevant store, incidentally. They've got free shipping, and the sort of good-quality service one would hope for from the sort of frou-frou sort of place they're trying to look like.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Nice! Thank you. That 6" utility knife looks just about perfect. Maybe a bit short for a head of lettuce, but a good shape for a general purpose knife. I'm almost afraid to ask, but those look to be wood-handled -- are you supposed to hand-wash them? (I'm one of those complete goofballs who think *tools* are here to serve *us*, not the other way 'round. I don't grok why people keep putting wood handles on knives. About leaving them dirty, though, I'll just say that my dishwasher runs a lot more frequently than my hand-washing gets done!)

[brooksmoses]

The 8" is the first one I got, and the 6" is the second one I bought. If you'd like to handle them at some point, we can probably arrange that.

The handles are high-grade plastic, not wood, so they're fine in the dishwasher. The problems (as I understand it) are more that dishwashing a knife tends to bang it around a bit, which dulls the blade. As for hand-washing, the habit that I've tried to develop is that, when I'm done using the knife, I immediately wash and dry it and put it up -- I don't wait until I do the rest of the dishes. Since it's just one knife, and nothing has dried on it, it's just a matter of a couple of sponge-swipes to clean it, and not the significant effort that "hand dishwashing" usually is.

In any case, the worst that the machine-dishwashing is likely to do is dull it a bit more quickly.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, nice! I can arrange to have the knife in its own separate section, so that the worst it'll get banged against is the plastic bin that keeps the silverware out of the washer's mechanism. That might at least help.

A couple of swipes with a soapy sponge does seem easy, too. O'course, I now have most of my (icky) knives in a crusty ever-growing pile awaiting sufficiently high motivation from me. Heh. Oops. :-)