Nothing can ruin a good Dagwood-style lunch faster than a knife not suited to the purpose of cutting a sandwich without squishing all the innards onto the counter.
Check out this cool sandwich knife. It's sharp and serrated and gets the job done. And it's a pretty handsome object, too. It's made of high-carbon stainless steel that is colored to match the resin handle.
The Pure Komachi Sandwich Kniferetails for about $19. In the same line of Japanese-designed knives are a lavender or turquoise santoku, a red tomato/cheese knife, a pink chef's knife and a blue fish knife. I want them all.
Even though this sandwich cutter cuts off the crusts (I don't believe in the tyranny of children when it comes to cutting off crusts), I forgive it because it turns the sandwich into two dinosaurs. The best I could do as a kid to make my lunchbox more interesting was to color the milk in my thermos blue or green (with food coloring). If only I'd had dinosaur sandwiches to go with.
I am a huge sandwich fan, but it has never occurred to me to scan one. It has occurred to the author(s?) of a website called Scanwiches, though. The website, which doesn't explain itself at all, is posting photos of cut sandwiches for what might be a photographic lunch journal. Whatever the reason, the images of the sandwiches are oddly beautiful.
Today's sandwich (above) is turkey, swiss, lettuce, onion, cranberry sauce, mayo, on a roll. Apparently you can get it at M&O Market, which is a deli in New York's SoHo district.
This brings out the kid in me (not a difficult task, by the way).
When I was young, my sisters and I always insisted on pancakes in weird shapes. Our favorite was when our mother drizzled the batter in the shape of our initials. Or sometimes we made her dribble little dots of batter around so we had the teeniest, weeniest pancakes imaginable.
And we would have been absolutely besotted by these jungle animal pancakes. The pancake forms come in a set of 3 faces: monkey, lion and elephant. The set is $18 from Williams-Sonoma.
So what do we know about me so far? I like ceramic things in the shapes of animals. I hate plastic bags. I have a lot of coffee mugs. I love Jamie Oliver. I do not like cupcakes.
Wait, rewind to Jamie Oliver.
I've been a fan ever since the Naked Chef. Somehow I feel--even though he is a national institution, an international star and probably a zillionaire--that I know him personally. I know him from the days when he was just bashing together a meal for his mates at his old bachelor flat with the indoor basketball hoop.
So I've been craving one of these thingies that he invented called a Flavour Shaker. It's been available in the UK for quite awhile, but only fairly recently here. Here's what Jamie said about why he invented it:
I was in my kitchen a few years ago bashing up some ingredients in my pestle and mortar and I suddenly thought to myself that even though I love the old pestle, there must be an easier and quicker way of bashing and grinding your herbs and spices together. Some way that isn't messy and doesn't take as much time....
I was sure there was a way of coming up with some sort of gadget where you could put all your ingredients inside it and then just shake it all together. So, I started to put some ideas down on paper, doing little sketches, and from there I got a little model made up to see if it really would work.
What he ended up with was this combination of shaker and basher. A small ceramic ball does the bashing inside the plastic shaker that's designed to maximize the ball's action. If you want to see charming Jamie demonstrate the Flavour Shaker, click here.
The Flavour Shakercomes in a couple of different colors and you can get it for $29.95 from Amazon.
Watch this funny TV spot for the shaker:
Number of times the words basher or bashing was used = 5.
Amy Deaver, the brains behind wonderful handmade jams called Lemon Bird, grew up making jam in her native Midwest, but got inspired to return to her canning roots on a trip to Provence. Her jams are all made from fruits that are locally grown--luckily for her (and for us) she lives in California, where the options for local fruit are huge.
You can check out her website at lemonbirddesign.com, but if you're interested in buying some of her all-natural, lovingly made jam, you can skip straight to her store on Etsy.
The jams currently being offered (because naturally they change with the season and the availability of the fruit) are: Kumquat and Tangerine with Vanilla, Kumquat with Dark Chocolate and Espresso (wow!) and Blood Orange Jam. They cost $7 for a 6-ounce jar (plus shipping).
But if you have a reason to splurge on a gift for someone (maybe Mother's Day, or someone getting married, or graduating from college), I think it would be great to offer a membership to Lemon Bird's Jam of the Month Club. For $145, you (or your giftee) get two jams the first week of every other month (12 jams a year). The membership fee includes the cost of shipping. Check out the etsy shop to get more details on the flavors of jam you could possibly receive with the Jam of the Month.
So, this is not really an active blog any more. Every once in awhile I get inspired to come and rant or share, but it's pretty infrequent. Honestly, there are just too many Insta/TikTok/influencers in this world. It makes my head hurt.
BUT I had a lot of fun putting this together for 5-ish years, and you should definitely have a poke around. My personal favorites are the post on measuring citrus zest and the connection between Napoleon and bees (and cicadas and houseflies).
When I was a Girl Scout, I got my cooking badge by making a cookstove out of an empty coffee can turned upside down and set over a "burner" made of a tunafish can packed with coiled corrugated cardboard soaked in paraffin. I cooked pancakes. (Makes a great, perfectly round pancake, by the way.) Anyway, let's just say that I've been earning more and more complicated cooking badges ever since. I have edited, tasted, tested, or created a ridiculously large number of recipes in my life—including at the wonderful (but sadly now defunct) Hallmark Magazine, where I was the food editor. While at the magazine I wrote a blog and got bitten by the blog bug, so here we are.
And here's a bunch of other stuff I've done.
(photo by Lisa Vosper)
Nothing can ruin a good Dagwood-style lunch faster than a knife not suited to the purpose of cutting a sandwich without squishing all the innards onto the counter.
retails for about $19. In the same line of Japanese-designed knives are a lavender or turquoise santoku, a red tomato/cheese knife, a pink chef's knife and a blue fish knife. I want them all.
comes in a couple of different colors and you can get it for $29.95 from Amazon.
