I’m getting annoyed at the trimmed celery bunches and stalks I’ve been seeing for a while. They have the root and the tops sliced off already and packaged in plastic bags that carefully hide the bottom and top of the package that would reveal the celery was old and browning at the cut ends. I think these were being kept in overly dry cold storage trying to extend their shelf life.
Sometimes they sell cleanly cut individual stalks at the grocery but now I don’t trust that those aren’t coming from those same packages with the brown parts trimmed off. So I just buy the package of 1 or 2 whole bundles that I’ll usually only use half or less of, but I can still tell how fresh it is.
Recipes that say ‘prep’ time is 20 minutes. Seems like most of them do.
Let’s see 19 ingredients, a 2.5 pound chuck roast that needs cut up into cubes, carrots peeled and chopped, onion chopped, potatoes cut into bite sized pieces.
And oh, brown the beef before it goes in the slow cooker. And don’t forget about all the other ingredients.
20 minutes. Well, If I had 4 people that would help with the prep work and an industrial kitchen, no problem.
Good lord, I’m not the super hero Flash.
I’m used to their bullshit estimates though. ‘Yeah, right’.
And some are just silly (I’m looking at you ‘Cooking Light’) - Only three steps!
My wife who doesn’t cook much and doesn’t bake at all, will constantly berate me for taking an hour and a half to prepare something for the oven that recipe says should take me 30 minutes.
Unquote or ‘End quote’ is occasionally useful in spoken media if you are quoting a longer except of something and you want to clearly delineate the quote, especially in cases where you disagree with the quote and don’t want any part of it attributed to you.
But I feel as though quote-unquote might have come about as a spoken version of ‘air quotes’
I just ignore the estimates- but I concur they are often bogus, Sometimes when I prep for Turkey Day, my wife can help as a prep cook, and that really helps. I do most of the cooking.
Nope. It’s just a gardening/farming term that you don’t happen to know.
Means covering the stalks as they grow, with soil or with something else, so they’ll be white instead of green. No sun, no photosynthesis, no green. May also change flavor and texture.
(It’s also a food processing term – some vegetables, if you’re going to freeze them, should be blanched first. In that sense, it means dunking them in boiling water for a couple of minutes.)
I often dice small quantities with a large paring knife. If I’m dicing larger quantities i pull out the sankotu. Honestly, i mostly use the chef’s knife for large cuts of meat. What’s the benefit of using a big knife for a single onion?
The handle of a paring knife is typically down closer to the line of the blade. If you try to bring the blade down flat against the cutting board, there’s no room for your fingers between the handle and the board, so really you can only use the tip of the blade for cutting on a cutting board.
A chef’s knife, with its tall blade, puts the handle up higher. Now you can bring the whole blade down against the cutting board without squashing your fingers.
I guess i do that with the santoko. And if there’s a lot to chop, that’s useful. For my single onion, i like having my hand closer to the action. I feel i cut more precisely that way.
Disagree. If you get the angle even slightly wrong with a broad blade, you are stuck with that and the slice gets progressively wider/narrower as you go down. Especially in something rigid like an onion.
I guess i have about 10 kitchen knives that are each a favorite for some task. Lol. Maybe i have a knife problem. I love my mid-sized ceramic knife for onions, and the largest paring knife is my second choice. I would not take out the large knives for an onion or a garlic clove.
I mostly use the chef’s knife for meat and the santoku for veggies because i used to cook a lot for a vegan friend, and that made her happier. (That i didn’t use the same knife prepping her food as i used for meat.) They are pretty similar in chopping action.
Bearing in mind the “well beyond their actual importance” part of the thread title:
Newspaper story leads that refer to some person in the first paragraph but don’t name him or her till the second, then, when giving the name, do so in a way that doesn’t explicitly connect them, forcing the reader to make an assumption.
A 67-year-old Boondock County man has invented a death ray that may destroy all life on Earth.
Joe Shmoe said he has always dreamed of being responsible for mass destruction and that his ray has an excellent chance of working.
OK, it’s not a giant intuitive leap to conclude that Joe is the Boondock County inventor. But a journalist’s job is to impart information in the clearest manner possible, NOT compel the reader to make a guess (even an easy one) about the identity of the subject. Besides it’s formulaic and lazy writing.
*Inventor Joe Shmoe of Boondock County has made a death ray that could destroy all of Earth’s life forms. Mr. Shmoe, 67, said he has always dreamed of . . .
My wife does the same thing! Drives me crazy. Her excuse is that her hands are too small to use a regular chef’s knife. Also, the other day she was trying to take a door off the hinges so she could paint the door frame, and she was using this dinky little screwdriver instead of a regular sized one. Same excuse.
An old chef’s method of dicing an onion was to cut off the top to get a flat spot, then slice down into the onion in a cross hatch pattern just to the depth of the diced pieces, then slice off the diced portion, all while holding the onion in hand and using a paring knife. Quick, easy to control the diced size, and just enough for a single dish.
God I hate it when people insist on using cash, and then it adds precious minutes to my transaction wehn the cashier figures out the change, or worse, the customer is digging through their change purse trying to find exact change!!!