Saturday, March 28, 2015

Handy Skills: Sharpening a Kitchen Knife?

I know, I know! How the hell could I be 29 years old and not know hot to use one of them knife sharpening rods that every household ever has?

Well, truth be told, my dad has shown me how to use a sharpening steel a few times in the past, but I'd just forgotten by the time I moved out of home and had my own knives to sharpen. I also didn't have a sharpening steel for the first couple of years out of home, but you can be damn sure that as soon as I forked out the money for one (and it was more expensive than I thought it was going to be, but worth it in the end), I jumped on YouTube, found some videos, and spent an hour sharpening every knife in the house, which greatly pleased my girlfriend.

The videos listed here are on the longer side, and there are undoubtedly shorter videos that'll get right to the point, but these videos go into honing vs sharpening, various blade shapes, various honing rods, and all sorts of details that I never would've known to consider. Sure, most of it doesn't apply to me, but it's worth knowing what you don't know, right?

And now I make sure our kitchen knives are sharp on a regular basis. And my girlfriend thinks I'm obsessed.

In the future I'd like to learn how to sharpen knives on a whetstone too...

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Handy Skills: Knots

Handy skills... you know... those skills that are probably easy to learn, but you just never took the time to actually learn, despite being in many situations where said skill would come in handy.

One of my goals for this year is to learn a bunch of these skills and then, of course, blog about them. These blogs will be super short; I'm mostly just going to briefly explain what the skill is, when I would use it and then throw down a few links that helped me out.

First skill of the series: knots.

A few weeks ago, my mate Dave asked a bunch of us to help him move into his new house. Between my group of mates, we've all helped each other move dozens of times, so we all got involved again. Dave hired a three ton truck, we started loading up his furniture on a scorchin' Sunday morning and so presented our problem: none of us knew how to properly secure the furniture inside the truck.

It was a little frustrating because I'd watched my dad tie all kinds of knots hundreds of times since I was a kid.

Michael, another mate who was helping out on the day, and I jumped on Google and quickly picked up how to tie a clove hitch. It turns out that's not the best knot to use for that kind of work, but it mostly served its purpose for the day: we got the furniture where it needed to go without damaging any of it.

Anyway, that night, fed up with not knowing something so useful, I jumped on the internets and sat there with a piece of rope tying and retying knots over and over again: