I love having sharp knives in my kitchen. I clean them, hone them & inspect them on a weekly basis. Most of them are a mix mash of popular knives found in high end kitchen stores but recently I got the mother load from my friend Josh. On a recent trip to Japan he bought me a Yanagi, but that’s another sordid tale. This is about my current cutlery quiver and how it bit me.
With the sharpness they posess I have a respect for them. Just like a tiger trainer, I know that at any given moment they can turn on me. They can slice and dice any piece of vegetable or meat and just as soon can turn on me and chop off a thumb or nick a nail. All the “curled finger” knife skills tips try to prevent 85% of injuries. But sometimes you just take for granted that the tiger does like to show its fangs as you look away for a second and get bit… or cut in this case.
And yes I looked away from the tiger today while making myself a snack. A fucking snack… not some dinner party fare or a thinly sliced piece of Hamachi but some piece of bleu cheese for goodness sake. I cut the tip on my pinkie chopping off the rind of some bleu cheese. The funny thing is I am usually careful when I do that because I hear horror stories. And as I was doing it was thinking “You know people who cut themselves doing this are idiots” and then bam… shock… blood… panic. It happened that fast. I thought to myself “Nice job moron you cut your finger like all those people you make fun of on Chopped… Now you’ve been chopped son!”
So let this be a word to the wise. Even if you have cut a million chifonades, diced a thousand onions and know your knives limitations inside and out at one point you are gonna take your eye off the tiger and get bit. Let’s just not get to cocky and keep it to a minimum. And yes, I am writing this from the emergency room in Brooklyn Hospital waiting to get stitches for cutting bleu cheese.
