Week 2

Today I’m starting with Day 2 of Week 2 since the transitions work better that way. As usual, everyone showed up 15 minutes before the start of class for attendance taking, phone sanitizing and hand washing. Then began the demonstration on how to properly use a chef’s knife! After about fifteen minutes of demonstrating, Chef had all of the tables grab cutting boards, knives and a knife honer so that we could practice the technique that he had taught us. I’ll quickly summarize the lesson.

The proper way to hold a knife is to pinch both sides of the blade just above the handle using your thumb and index finger of the dominant hand. The three fingers remaining should gently wrap around the handle. Focusing on the cutting hand first when chopping, the motion is to bring the knife down and forward, up and back, and repeat until done. Your non-dominant hand should have your knuckles facing out, protecting your finger tips, with your thumb being the finger located the farthest away from the blade itself. When using the honer, the blade should be angled at 20 degrees from the honer, and should be run along the honer for the whole length of the blade. Any other angle will dull the blade. Below is a video to demonstrate.

Day 1 of Week 2, Chef asked us if we wanted to do something other than standing around the kitchen listening to him talk. The class seemed to think “do we really have a choice”, to which Chef would probably have responded, “not really, no”. While I don’t mind listening to Chef speak, as he has important and useful things to say, I love a change of pace. So we went to the cemetery closest to the HRM building. Once inside, Chef asked us to find a shady spot and reflect on what we wanted people to think of us at our funerals some day when we were dead and gone. And I did reflect. Here’s what I wrote.

AHA Moment

I realized in that cemetery that the journey matters more than the prizes you earn along the way. It’s a very good thing to set short-term goals for yourself. But, when you attain that short-term goal, you’ll find yourself lonely or purposeless unless you have set a long-term goal as well. As human beings, we must be striving for something greater than ourselves at all times, and hopefully that something improves us as individuals as well as the world around us.

As for me, the meta-narrative I am choosing to live by is the truth. Life is hell; coming to terms with that fundamental truth is the only way you can choose to live that hell the best way that you know how. The best way to survive in a world full of blood thirsty competition, pain and suffering is to tell the truth. That’s what I want people to say about me at my funeral: that I was honest to a fault.