Wherever the mood strikes....

By Eric Ackerson 9.14.09

I spent last week in a rented apartment in Belize, Central America, wherein I was blessed with A/C and cursed with a rotten chefs knife.

In order to save money on some of my travel I like to cook as many meals as I can when I am far from home. By way of a bonus, I also get to explore local ingredients and have collected some fantastic recipes. Invariably, I also get the joy of using the worlds least effective chefs knife. You know the one... purchased at the grocery store complete with serrated blade! Never sharpened to begin with and then dragged across the chain mail chopping block of the previous occupant right before being used as a screwdriver and hammer combo to fix the broken fixtures and rusty faucets.

This same knife seems to follow me around the globe in a constant game of international Hide and Seek. I invariably reach for the drawer that contains the kitchen utensils and find a smirking corroded blade peeking out at me from behind the plastic spatula. As I gently wrap my hand around the handle, withdrawing my nemesis from her new hidy hole, I feel like she mocks me. "Here I am AGAIN" "You had to know it would be me, didn't you?"

After a trip to the grocery or market, I get down to business. I prepare my mise en place, clean and dry my ingredients, place the first criminal cabbage or felonious bok choy on the guillotine and pick up the knife. Even the vegetables look scared that I will hurt them. My fingers dance knowingly away from the as yet to offend staple of the kitchen. I can almost feel the dull blade bounce off the skin of the next tomato and continue on down a quarter of the way into my fated phalanges. When will this evil mistress, subject me to the horrors of some third world chop shop for the befingered? I don't fancy a trip for stitches in any place that doesn't take Blue Cross Blue Shield.

So far I have been lucky, but who knows when I will run out of good fortune? Bangkok? Belize City? Dubai? Fate is a fickle lover.....

I can think of only one way to avoid this knife, this shadow of mine. The next time I am on the road, wherever the mood strikes, I will reach into the drawer, retrieve the device in question, look her directly in the evil eye, then withdraw the gleaming Henkel from behind my back. The one I brought from home, then laugh while my sadistic mistress falls backwards into the drawer of pain, spurned for a newer model, never to be risked again...

Simple solutions are usually the best.