A year before starting He Cooks, She Cooks, I studied for a semester in Sydney. It was an exciting time of traveling, making friends and, of course, eating.

I tried Aussie classics like pavlova, lamingtons, shrimp on the barbie, barramundi fish, and a burger topped with beetroot and a fried egg. But my Sydney food memories span many more cuisines. Besides the friendly people and jaw-dropping landscape, the best part about Sydney was the multiculturalism. I always said, if we can’t decide where to eat, let’s just spin a globe.

I’ll never forget the Turkish kebabs and pide from take-away places, the Lebanese restaurant with bellydancers and the best falafel I’ve ever had, Hugo’s gourmet pizza, Chinese noodles from an underground mall in Haymarket, the Spanish churros and hot chocolate at San Churro, King Street’s endless supply of Thai restaurants, Portuguese chicken shops in Dulwich Hill, samosas at the Indian Holi Festival, modern French pastries at Adriano Zumbo, Taco Tuesdays at the Flying Fajita Sistas…

And then there were the times I cooked. I’d pick up a local catch at the Sydney Fish Market and buy produce at the Paddy’s Market, then cook something Asian-inspired at my friend Nicole’s house. I’d make cookies, brownies and peanut-butter-chocolate Chex mix for my housemates. I shared my California background by making fajitas for my friends. And for our Semester-End Fiesta, I made 23 avocados’ worth of guacamole.

I can’t think about Australia without thinking about food. And so often, thinking about food makes me think of Australia. Sydney exposed me to heaps of new and wonderful things that I’ll incorporate into my own cooking for the rest of my life. (Also, Aussie words and phrases like ‘heaps’)

If you’re interested in more about Sydney, see my travel blog, Cross-World Puzzle. My posts tagged ‘food’ are here.

I will remember 2009 as a great year for food in my life. I started this blog in February with my friend Michael, who used to come over to cook dinner nearly every night. We ate quite well, and we accomplished many food goals, as I’ve reflected on before.

Now, it’s time to look forward. I want to continue to learn about flavors and cooking techniques. I want to taste new foods and try my hand at different cuisines. I have some ideas about what I’d like to accomplish with this blog and the direction I’d like to go. Most importantly, I’d like to get a job that combines my two passions of food and journalism.

Now for a few predictions about the world of food blogging in 2010:

I’m pegging dutch babies, pozole and malfatti as the cool things to make in the new year. All of those dishes have been around forever, but based on somethings I’ve seen in magazines, on TV and around the internets, those are to-blog in oh-ten. You’ll see… (Jan. 7 update: I’m adding lentils and aleppo pepper to this year’s future list of trendy/overused ingredients.)

Salted desserts (especially caramel), bacon and macarons have been very popular — almost too popular — for the past two years, but I don’t see that quite letting up. The people who were ahead of the trends might be getting tired of these things already, which means the mainstream is ready for them. Starbucks has a line of macarons coming out. Candied bacon is on more and more dessert menus and bakery shelves. Along with that is the salted caramel, which is not so unconvential anymore, but still too good for bloggers to give up.

We’ll see if we have another year of homemade marshmallows. I’m growing a bit tired of seeing them on Foodgawker and Tastespotting, but I still haven’t made them myself and I’m sure there are other food bloggers who have homemade marshmallows on their new year’s list.

Spatchcocking — butterflying poultry and then roasting or grilling it — started to gain ground in late 2009. I saw it in the summer, and there was a big push around Thanksgiving. I think you’ll find even more people trying it with their turkey next year.

The lines will continue to blur between professional and amateur cooks. Competitive cooking shows like Top Chef are broadening the public’s knowledge about gourmet food. And the proliferation of food blogs is really forcing the bar to be raised when it comes to home cooking. Then you’ve got Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home and David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook, not to mention the sous-vide machine for the home kitchen.

I just hope food bloggers find ways to be creative this year and in the future. The internet has enough banana bread and snickerdoodle recipes, don’t you think? Let’s muse on food, try new things and see what we can do. Above all, let’s eat really, really well.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

My three months in Buenos Aires are up, sadly. I loved getting to know the city by walking everywhere and sitting in parks peoplewatching. The weekends were my favorite because everyone spent the day outside. I would walk to Puerto Madero’s Costanera Sur, where I’d be surrounded by local people and food.

No, Buenos Aires doesn’t have as strong of a street food culture as some countries you see Anthony Bourdain travel to, but I found the area along the ecological reserve to be the best place to fill up for a buck or two. Although I’ve written some about this before, I have a few more street treats to add.

Bondiola — This grilled pork shoulder can be a little tough, so it wasn’t typically my first choice, but it’s a common order for others. Porteños tend to keep their food simple. Bondiola al limon (with lemon) is standard. I liked to load up on the vegetables. My sandwiches always looked like a salad bar compared to those of locals. In fact, that’s how I decided which parilla to visit, by the topping options.

The stand where I got these choripans (chorizo sandwiches) had great salads and marinated vegetables to add. Oh yeah, and it still costs a dollar no matter how much you load on top.

I also loved the caramelized onions and spicy salsa at the stand where I got this morcilla (blood sausage).

And if you read my ode to dough, you know how hard it was for me to ever pass up the grilled bread. Some stands only offer plain, but others will slice it and add cheese, ham or other filling in the middle. My favorite stand was a mother-daughter operation in the Puerto Madero park. They would mix spiced ground meat into the dough before cooking. Fantastic results.

And then, there’s dessert. People would make cakes and other sweets to sell in the parks on weekends. I usually went with a churro or an alfajor, which involves two soft cookies surrounding dulce de leche, then rolled in shredded coconut or dipped in chocolate.

Yep, I’ll miss this.

More about Buenos Aires street food here.

I read some very unfortunate news today on Addie Broyles’ Relish Austin blog. Conde Nast is planning to stop publishing Gourmet Magazine. I feel genuinely sad.

After a trip to Europe when I was 4 years old, I told my parents I wanted to be a chef. They outfitted me with a poofy white hat and let me help in the kitchen when I wasn’t playing with my plastic food-related toys. A few years later — once I had the reading thing down pat — they got me a subscription to Gourmet for Christmas.

I didn’t remember the year, but I remembered the cover, so I was able to find it online. December 1994. A Christmas cookie issue.

Since then my family and I have found many recipes, whole meals even, to recreate from Gourmet. I’ve flipped through those magazines countless times. They’re all in a cabinet in the laundry room now. When I go home, I sit on the floor, lean against the washing machine and browse through marked, folded and food-stained pages.

It’s sad to think the collection won’t get any bigger. While I appreciate the convenience of having millions of recipes online, I don’t see myself getting nostalgic about going through virtual bookmarks.

As someone who loves food — and who would like a job in journalism — the end of Gourmet Magazine is heartbreaking news.

I believe that if you want to know a city, you have to embrace the streets. In Buenos Aires, I walk between three and 12 miles each day, venturing to different corners of the city and using new routes all the time. And if Anthony Bourdain has taught me anything, it’s that street food is often some of the best a city has to offer. I’ve been taking advantage of BA’s cheap and delicious options, so I thought I’d share.

Argentina is well known for the parilla, the grill. There are many stands serving up asado, whether it’s grilled flank steak, blood sausage, burgers or chorizo. The photo above is choripan, a chorizo sausage on bread. Chorizo here is a pretty plain sausage, not the spicy stuff from Spain or Mexico. But it’s got smoke from the grill, classic chimichurri sauce and is enveloped in a perfect baguette. This 4-peso meal (just over $1 US) from Palermo is still one of the best I’ve had here.

Also at the portable parillas are hamburger patties that are otherwise unextraodinary until you realize how many topping options you have waiting for you. I dressed my burger with two varieties of chimichurri, mayo, a pepper and onion salsa of sorts, tomato, pickled cabbage, lettuce and fried shoestring potatoes. Six pesos in Puerto Madero.

When you’re less in the mood for grilled meat, pans rellenos are a great option. People walk around craft markets selling these stuffed breads out large baskets. If you’re lucky, yours will still be warm when you get it. Common fillings are ham and cheese or mozzarella, tomato and basil. I got this massive one filled with pumpkin, corn and cheese in San Telmo for 8 pesos yesterday, and I just finished the other half for lunch today.

There are many possibilities for dessert, too. The majority involve dulce de leche. These churros are filled with the heavenly stuff and are 1 peso each (about equal to a quarter) in Recoleta.

There’s much more, but consider this an introduction.

Read Part Two here.

I know talking about the importance of cooking to readers of your food blog is preaching to the choir, but I wanted to highlight a few things from Michael Pollan’s latest article in the New York Times Magazine. Pollan is a Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley best known for his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’ve been following his work since he called Twinkies “synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes” in an article two years ago about the problems with the U.S. farm bill. I also liked that he used the phrase “head-hurtingly complicated” a few paragraphs later.

His new article looks at what it means to “cook” in the age of fast food chains, frozen PB&J and more squeezable products than I like to think of. Pollan explores the relationship between the decline of true cooking and the rise of Food Network. “The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch,” he says.

Food on television has changed a lot since Julia Child prepared meals live and unedited. Sure, it’s called “reality” TV, but it’s manipulated on every level: makeup, lighting, editing, music, pre-measured ingredients, multiple takes, etc. The Food Network and other food shows have moved away from teaching people to cook and are increasingly about absurd challenges:

“We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s prime-time cooking shows is, Don’t try this at home. If you really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, ‘How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?’

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . .)”

I don’t know. If you care enough about food to have such knowledge and order such a dish, then you probably have a higher standards for what qualifies as cooking, too. Maybe you’ve tried to make your own pasta dough. At the very least, you make your own sauce. But you don’t count adding fluorescent powder to milk and noodles as cooking, and you don’t even want to talk about Easy Mac.

In the world of food blogging, standards for cooking are higher everyday. Have you rolled your own sushi? Infused your own oils? Baked your own graham crackers and oreos? Made your own yogurt or ricotta? Oh great, you’ve made hummus from dried garbanzos you soaked yourself? Well, now everyone is using fresh garbanzos, get with the program.

But we’re still a small subset of the population. Pollan talked to a food-marketing researcher who is convinced the majority of Americans are too far gone in their eating/cooking habits because they’re “cheap and lazy.” Not to mention, busy. So Pollan sees cooking as becoming recreation instead of daily necessity.

It’s “a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch. Cooking’s fate may be to join some of our other weekend exercises in recreational atavism: camping and gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of 21st-century civilization.”

I’m with Pollan on that one, and I’m sure a lot of you are, too. How satisfying does it feel to knead dough or grind spices?

A lot more than it is opening a bag of Wonderbread or using a packet of onion soup mix.

If anyone’s wondering why Michael has been MIA from He Cooks, She Cooks lately, it’s because he’s roadtripping with a few friends from Chicago to LA. Hopefully he’ll have some food stories when he returns.

In the meantime, here is Michael’s final photo essay about Missouri farmers. The images have audio if you want to know a little more about the people supplying meat, eggs, vegetables and honey to homes and restaurants around mid-Missouri.

Eyeballs? Frog eggs? What is this and why was it in my fridge?

Actually, those are tapioca pearls in a brown sugar syrup. And the reason, I later learned, that they are dark in the center is that the tapioca was not fully cooked. They should have been translucent throughout.

Once I boiled them in water a little longer, I put the tapioca pearls in some homemade Thai iced tea.

I’ve always loved the tea at Thai restaurants. It’s also a common flavor at boba (or bubble tea) shops. But as I’ve learned with many other things, the drink can be recreated at home. Once we found an Asian market that sold Thai tea leaves and tapioca pearls, we were good to go.

I cooked the tapioca in a large covered pot of boiling water (at least 6:1 ratio of water to tapioca) for about 30 minutes. Then let them sit in the water uncovered for another 30 minutes. (Some recipes say less time, but clearly it wasn’t enough. Make sure they are translucent.) I rinsed the pearls in cold water and stored them in a simple syrup made of brown sugar (1:1 ratio of brown sugar to water stirred over medium heat until dissolved).

If you find Thai tea, make according to the directions on the package. If there aren’t directions, or they aren’t in English, steep at least two heaping tablespoons of tea for each cup of water you boil. (If you’re adding ice later, it helps to brew extra strong tea.) Chill completely.

In a large glass, add a few spoonfuls of tapioca. Add a few spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk (to your taste). Top with iced tea. Stir and enjoy with an extra-wide straw.

Yes, there are a good number of steps involved, and the process involves a lot of waiting for things to boil and then cool, so make sure you make enough for several drinks so it’s not a waste of time. As far as cost, it’s definitely worth it. Asian markets will have all the ingredients for cheap. Without doing explicit math, I’d guess you’d probably be able to make 10 drinks for the cost of one at a boba tea shop.

A brisket sandwich from Smoque, an amazing BBQ place on the North side.

I just found out about Chicago’s Ribfest on June 12-14th. I will most definitely be going to this. Not only do they have 65,000 pounds of meat (!!!),  they have a lot of bands, including Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin (from Springfield, MO), who I know personally (yeah, I dropped that).  Their music is delightful.  The other band I recognized was the very talented and original Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s (a Chicago band).

Anyone ever been?

check check it

unrelated:  I got a beer of the month club subscription as a gift from my dentist for graduation.  awesome.  I promise I will update my beer going-ons soon, I have much to write about.

Coffee, olives and mustard seeds...all too bitter

I wasn’t too picky of an eater as a kid, but I did have an aversion to onions, green bell pepper, tomato, beets and a few other things that I have since grown to love. There are some foods, though, that no matter how hard I try, I simply cannot stand the taste of. Olives, grapefruit, capers and mole, for instance, are listed on our About Us page as things I do not like. Chef Mike Odette gave me a hard time about this. He said being a chef and hating certain foods was like being a painter and not liking red.

I wanted to figure out why I didn’t like the foods I didn’t like (coffee, most things that are pickled, certain salad greens like radicchio, mustard and others). Earlier this year I realized that all these things are generally considered bitter. But there had to be something that made them extra intolerable to me.

So I did some internet research and checked out four books at the library about taste. I soon learned that there was a scientific reason that certain foods made my taste buds tingle in unhappy ways.

Turns out my TAS2R38s are more perceptive than those of people like my mom who love olives, grapefruit and coffee. TAS2R38s are taste receptors involved in tasting bitter substances. About a quarter of the population are non-tasters who cannot pick up on bitter compounds at all. Another quarter are supertasters to whom all tastes are perceived much stronger. They are more sensitive to the texture of foods, spice, carbonation, and of course, bitter flavors. The rest of the population are simply tasters, people who can taste things that are bitter, but may or may not be totally averse to them.

I’ve determined that I am in the middle, but I lean toward supertaster status when it comes to bitter foods. I found a list of foods that contain bitter molecules, and soon everything started to make sense:

• Coffee – Never liked it. I recently tried some again and could pick out the parts that I did like, the sweetness of the sugar, the smoothness of the cream. Then…bleghh…bitterness stomping on the back of my tongue.
• Unsweetened chocolate – I love dark chocolate more than milk chocolate so this didn’t seem right, but then I remembered how much I dislike mole, sauce made from unsweetened cocoa. My parents make me try their mole every time they order it. I’ve tasted it at some of the best Mexican restaurants in LA, but every time it makes me grimace. Apparently, dark chocolate is sweetened just enough to counteract the bitterness of the cocoa.
• Bitter melon – I haven’t tried this Asian fruit, but I can only imagine that I wouldn’t like it. I’m picky when it comes to regular melon. My brother can eat all the way down to the rind, but I want to spit out even the tiniest bit of white on a watermelon.
• Beer – There are very few beers that I can tolerate. These would be things like Corona (Mexican pale lager great with lime), Blue Moon (Belgian style wheat great with an orange slice) and Pure Blonde (Australian pale lager). But I find most beers, and alcohol in general, too bitter to enjoy.
• Grapefruit – Grapefruit contains narangin, which is what makes it different from oranges or lemons. The only time I can bear grapefruit is with salt, as my mom sometimes ate it. I recently learned that salt can modify or neutralize bitterness.
• Olives – As mentioned, I find olives really gross. End of story.
• Plants in the Brassicaceae family (also known as cruciferous plants) – This includes mustard, and explains so much. I’ve never cared for mustard. I don’t like things that are pickled, and pickling spices usually include mustard seed. I don’t like capers, and capers contain glucocapparin, aka mustard oil. Obviously I don’t like mustard greens either. (Dandelion greens, escarole, endive and radicchio are also known to contain bitter compounds.) Wasabi falls in the Brassicaceae family too, and I’ve never liked that either. It’s not the spiciness, it’s the bitterness that bothers me.
  But it is interesting that some of my favorite vegetables are also in this family. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, turnip and rutabaga. Clearly there is a connection between those plants. Whatever it is that makes broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts different from mustard, and whatever makes turnips and rutabaga different from wasabi is what makes me able to enjoy those vegetables over the others.
• Quinine – This extremely bitter alkaloid is found in tonic water, which I can’t handle at all.

This subject has become so fascinating to me. Did you know you can figure out who is a taster, nontaster or supertaster often by looking at their tongue? Based on discussions we figured my roommate Hannah is a supertaster, my friend Kat is a nontaster and I’m a taster. When we looked at each other’s tongues, it became obvious. Kat’s tongue was smooth, mine speckled and Hannah’s especially bumpy.

Learning more about this has gotten me thinking about how we enjoy food. Beyond personal and cultural tastes, there are genetic differences in how people perceive flavor. This is partly why I don’t follow recipes exactly. Who is to say that 1 tablespoon is the right measurement? (Though baking is a little different because of the reactions that have to occur.) There is just so much variation, which is why I often give estimates in my recipes. I hope that people who try them have the sense to change things according to their own tastes.

But what does this mean for chefs? Are the best chefs tasters or nontasters? Wouldn’t it be great to get Thomas Keller, Jacques Pepin, Eric Ripert and others to stick out their tongues for us so we could find out?

Wanna know more? Check out The Psychology of Eating and Drinking, Making Sense of Taste and Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor.

An iPhone image I demanded my friend take and email to me.

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day with some friends, and man do they have lots of magazines.  As I was reading through the Esquires Big Black Book (an essential guide to being a man), I noticed a nicely printed smaller magazine with the word “meat” popping out.  Tell me more, I thought.

I picked it up and lo and behold, in my hands was a magazine about meat culture.  The name was a little weird, but meatpaper was beautiful.  Images of pork and beef and hunks and slices and charcuterie and oh man.  It was like eight dollars so I passed on purchase for the moment, but when I have a job, and money, I’m gonna look you up meatpaper.

With a name like Chef LaLa and a cookbook called Latin Lover Lite, Laura Diaz-Brown highlights her funky — and easily marketable — side. But after a Cinco de Mayo cooking demonstration, I found more to admire about the woman.

Chef LaLa cooked and spoke at an Inside Columbia Magazine event Friday night. She was also in town for the Speaking of Women’s Health conference. In an hour, I learned she used to be a pop singer, went to med school to be a heart and lung specialist, became a certified nutritionist and studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

She also made four dishes in real time — without the tricks cooking demonstrators usually use. On her menu was:

• Coca-Cola-Marinated Pork with Fruit Salad
• Chicken Fajitas
• Chicken Enchiladas
• Colorful Bean Salad (Recipe on her website here.)

Chef LaLa, an advocate for healthy eating and diabetes awareness, spent a good part of the demonstration dispelling myths that Mexican food isn’t good for you. To a crowd of mid-Missourians, this might have been a surprise to some. She said real Mexican food includes a lot of fruit and vegetables. “We do not eat chimichangas,” she said.

LaLa talked about her family’s history with diabetes and her own issues with weight. “I look at cake and get fat,” she said. She chooses healthy options like low-fat sour cream and corn tortillas instead of flour ones. Some flour tortillas have as much fat as 16 corn tortillas, she said.

Chef LaLa also encouraged people to cook with their families and be open to experimenting with recipes — both important to us at He Cooks, She Cooks. “Recipes are a blueprint for what you like,” Chef LaLa said. “Do it your way.”

Overall, Chef LaLa gave a strong presentation with easily accessible recipes, helpful information and her own personal style. Best line of the night:

“Come closer. I’m not going to bite,” she said to the cameraman. “And if I do, you’ll like it.”

Chef LaLa will be on the Today Show on Cinco de Mayo (Tuesday morning).

Let me just get this outta the way.  From what I’ve seen and who I’ve met, despite their celebrity status, the chefs at the IHA show at McCormick Place in Chicago were a.) really down to earth, and b.) really good chefs.  Morimoto transformed a daikon into paper thin pasta sheets with just a knife by peeling and turning.  Todd English can chop an onion faster than I’ve ever seen, with precision and calm I can’t imagine possible in front of a good 300+ people.

The real part of the show was the exhibitors and buyers walking around.  Of course big names were there, KitchenAid, Wusthof, Pyrex, Lodge, Le Creuset (new colors are black and white, and they look nicer than it sounds, I promise).  These booths looked like they could cost between 3,000 and 40,000 dollars, it was all pretty impressive.

This was also the first year restaurants were allowed booths, which was cool.  Buca Di Beppo, Goose Island, and Lettuce Entertain You were there.  I’ll write an entirely separate post for it, but I was given free beer wooden nickels to Goose Island plus a bag of potato chips (ironic if you read the preview post…).

Anyway, on to the chefs, that’s all you probably care about.

MASAHARU MORIMOTO is a goddamn ninja.  He was sneaking around behind the counter so he could pop up when his name was announced.  He also graffitied his own poster.  Awesome.  The guy is pure awesome.  He’s got the skills to truly be called an Iron Chef.  His accent is still super thick, though he kept joking his mother was Italian because he was using so much olive oil, basil, etc.  Sidenote to prove he is as awesome as I stated already: he used a Sageo, a traditional Japanese cord tied around the handle of a samurai sword, to tie back his kimono’s sleeves while he cooked.  Badass.

Tyler Florence was up next at the GOHO demo area.  Tyler is full of energy, and quite a good host.  The guy’s got charm, some mad cooking skills, and a hell of a personality.  He musta asked if what he was cooking looked nice or beautiful six times, and I musta said yes out loud every time.  No wonder every woman in the showroom was lined up to get his autograph (even my mom).

Also, he gets badass points for wearing what I believe was an IWC Big Pilot watch. Super nice guy, we talked for like 5 minutes while he was signing my moms book.  Speaking of it, his new book is pretty awesome.  If you are new to cookbooks and wanna start off simple, it’s a great choice.  That’s not to say the recipes aren’t challenging, but he spends a good first quarter of the book going over kitchen basics and technique, in one of the most illustrated and well designed manners I’ve seen.  If you look at our What We Read page, you’ll see I’ve read a fair share of cookbooks now.

Todd English is a goofy man.  He was on People’s 50 Most Beautiful People list in 2001, his Olives restaurants are super successful (my mom was raving about the one at the Belagio non-stop), and he’s likes to play with monkfish whenever possible.  He let me smell it too.  It was nice, like the ocean.  He was giving out 100 free books to the first people in line after his presentation.  The line was ridiculous so we gave up.  Oh well.  Also, English kept hocking his Home Shopping Network line of pots and pans.  They actually sound good, even though he kept namedropping the brand, half sarcastic/half because I’m sure they send him a nice check.

Final note, the Wusthof booth was outta this world and beautiful. It seems they came out with a new knife. Looks pretty cool, though I personally don’t like serrated edge blades as much as the regular straight edge.  I bet it’s useful, it just seems harder to hone and keep sharp.

On a slightly related note, I picked up a Shun catalog from the Kai booth, and dear god those knifes are pretty.  I’d be interested in a personal steak knife one day.

So much more happened at the show, and I was only there one day.  If you ever get a chance to learn more about an industry that’s this interesting, take it.  Despite my feet killing me, I got free beers at Goose Island afterwards, and the best burger I’ve had in years.  Hint, it had duck rillette on top of it., which is twice cooked duck paste aka candy, in addition to carmelized onions and a mild blue cheese.  Deadly in the best way possible.