Dakki

I'm sure it's a fine stone (although you might be paying some extra for the brand) and 6000 is fine enough, but 1000 is not fast enough, IMHO.

+1 on EdgePro. It does take away some of the skill required to sharpen well freehand, but you'd still have to learn to identify a wire edge, remove burrs and so on. Once you have that down it becomes much simpler to learn your angles, hold the blade at a consistent angle to the stone and use a light touch, which are the skills required to sharpen freehand. Basically EdgePro removes the muscle memory stuff but you'll still have to learn the rest, which I think will be faster and simpler if you don't have to worry if you're holding the blade at 17 degrees instead of 15 or whatever. I'm not a fan of combination stones. The "coarse" side is never fast enough and the "fine" side is never fine enough. That said they're much, much better than nothing and good to learn on, particularly if you had some cheese-soft supermarket knives to practice on. I've used ceramic, diamond, India, Arkansas and Japanese stones and the Japanese are my favorite, followed by the diamond. All are perfectly adequate for the job and YMMV. EDIT: Pretty knife, nickrey.

Bacalao.

Yesterday's leftovers in taco form.

Chicken. (j/k)

Looks edible. /understatement. How'd you smoke the squash?

Shrimp with rajas.

As far as I know, expiration dates on cans are BS - US law doesn't even require them on anything but baby foods and formula. As long as the can isn't perforated the only stuff that can grow in there will make it bulge. Here's a cute story about a couple eating a canned chicken they got as a wedding present - on their 50th anniversary!

That looks utterly delicious. Tell me there was a lager involved.

AFAIK the flavored-butter-under-the-skin approach is pretty standard and renown for producing well-browned skin. No idea if it works as well as the barding but hey, your barding options look rather limited from here. Whats the conversion between metric and imperial shittons and the shitload? Is there a shittonne?

Article here. (I think we need a "Food in the News" section) 48 million sick, 3 thousand dead a year in USA alone. They apparently "did not examine whether people were sickened by poor food preparation or tainted meat and produce" (says CBC) but they're looking at inspecting plants more often and gov't-ordered recalls. Hey, it can't hurt. I think we need more education. I don't have any actual figures (feel free to correct me if you do) but I'm pretty sure most food poisoning comes from unsafe handling at home, not the rarer but highly publicized outbreaks from restaurants and packaged foods. The vast majority of people are pretty clueless when it comes to food safety. I've seen people plop a bunch of salad leaves in a puddle of raw chicken juice without a second thought, refuse to sanitize organic tomatoes because harsh chemicals will take away the organicness and so on. I think the current foodie media boom helps to an extent but I sometimes see stuff in print that's basically outlawed under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. So what's your take?

Awesome. Now you can look like a gigantic nerd in two completely different ways!

I have to admit the chick saltshaker is pretty cute, and the table setting placemats could be useful as a teaching prop.

Steak in the style of Ducasse, same as last time. No pic since it would be redundant. This time I got the doneness right and it is fantastic. Unfortunately the browning isn't quite what I'd like it to be so... keep practicing?

Call it "French curry," just like Japanese curry, Indonesian curry, etc.

Collecting vintage glass bakeware is pretty hardcore. I have a load of the stuff that I liberated from my mother. It was supposedly some of her wedding presents so that would date it to the early or mid 70s. Is this the good glass or no?

This bill was introduced in Suffolk County, NJ, not the whole of the US, and it bans the sale of extremely high caffeine content drinks to minors. No need to panic yet, unless you're a minor and actually live there, I guess? (The article you linked also got the name of the legislator wrong. She's Lynne, not Lynn, Norwick, at least according to her Facebook profile.) Anyway, however anyone feels about it, there's no principle that adults can put anything they like in their bodies - we have drug laws, after all. Neither is there a principle that manufacturers can put unsafe amounts of things in their products, which seems to be what the bill is about.

Sorry to disappoint everyone still offering advice - annachan already got some nice knives as discussed a couple of posts above.

Steak tacos with cheese, same salsas as last time. Sorry about the crappy pic, I was hungry.

Scored some free samples of 45, 15, 9 and 3 micron diamond compound from US Products (hey, running a machine shop does have some perks). I'll let you guys know how they compare to the 3M stuff.

Thanks, Pierogi. The mushrooms were sauteed in the leftover butter from the steak, the potatoes were done following FatGuy's instructions in the thread I linked to in the post you quoted. The 'shrooms picked up some garlic and beef taste from the fats. Next time I think I'll deglaze the pan with a little white wine and thicken, and pour the result over the mushrooms. This was my first attempt at the Ducasse method and it wasn't 100% successful. The outside was very tasty but not nearly as dark as the pics in the other thread, and the inside was closer to medium-well than medium-rare. Thankfully this not-so-great ribeye was on sale so I scored a half-dozen of these, so I can practice until I get it right before I ruin a better, more valuable piece of meat.

I gotta learn to plate stuff.

It's pork night and nobody let me know? I ended up making a ribeye via the Ducasse method. Thanks a lot, guys.

Frijoles charros with a little cheese. I have to remember to watch out for my shadow while taking photos.

Cleanup in general. I'm also unreasonable about doing it "right" so it's not like I can let someone else do it for me, either.