I thought I should start a theme here regarding the challenges of the kind of life we have. Since we are making breakfast right now, here is the first one: cooking equipment.
As some of you already know, we rent furnished apartments in Vancouver & Paris (we always get the same ones). And since they are both rentals, shall we say, they don’t necessarily have the best cooking environment. Also to be fair, we are pretty picky with the kind of things we cook with. Pans have to be stainless steel or cast iron, knives (oh the knives) have to be good and sharp, containers have to be non-plastic, etc., etc. For the most part, these two apartments have what we need, but there are small challenges.
In this post I want to talk about the knife situation a little bit. If you’ve done any kind of cooking, you know the value of a good knife. For me, a bad knife can really turn a nice afternoon of cooking into a nightmare. When we lived in LA, we had found a Japanese hardware store in downtown (of course in Little Tokyo) that had some amazing knives, and we quickly got addicted to Japanese knives. Especially the ones that are stainless steel but have a carbon tip-they are VERY sharp and they stay sharp for a long time. Pretty soon I couldn’t do any chopping with any other kind of knife, but a 210mm Gyuto (this one doesn’t have a carbon tip and we have the non-hammered version).
One thing with the carbon tip, as you might know, is that you have to use, then wash and dry right away, otherwise they will get rusty at the tip. Which is a little pain, but definitely worth it.
About a month ago, we finally decided to buy a good knife to carry around with us after I read a blog entry. He was talking about taking good knives with him when he travels, and I thought “why not?” After looking around for a while, we picked this one:
Wusthof Classic
It’s been a pleasure to cook since. =)