dcarch

robirdstx – You are a master of pork tacos. percyn – nice buns you have (for the duck) and a beautiful tomato pie. Prawncrackers – Love your mushroom dish. I will try to duplicate the Spaghetti alla Puttanesca with cherry tomatoes. I have in my garden all those cherry tomatoes. Very nice whole steamed turbot and garlic steamed shrimps also. Kim – Fried chicken and chocolate cake, life is good! Very sloppy chicken sandwich with gravy as it should be. Very funny, chicken liver in a heart-shaped dish. Genkinaonna – georgeous plating of your squash dish. Scottyboy – If I can make chicken skin that good, I wouldn’t mind throwing away the chicken just to have the skin. Shelby – that is a decadent peanut butter pie! SobaAddict70 – I have the same problem, besieged with tomatoes from my garden. I will have to steal your idea and make myself a dish of Fusilli with cow's milk ricotta cheese and uncooked heirloom tomato sauce. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- It’s been hot here in NYC. Eating ice cream can really chill you down. I made mango ice cream with crispy mango chips in mango cones And I make coconut ice cream with a splash of crème de mint. Dcarch

Pine nuts - $50.00 a lb. Sunflower seeds - $2.00 a lb. You can use almost any other nuts. Tastes just as good. dcarch

At the end, you can't take it with you, except what you put in your stomach. dcarch

I don't know. Never tested it. However, they do sell 130v light bulbs to run on 120v for areas where you don't want to replace bulbs frequently. 130V bulbs running on 120V lasts 2.8 times longer. A resistence heater is the same as a light bulb. So running a 220v heater on 110 v, the heater probably will last 10,000 years. dcarch

For a water heater, you can try using a 220vac 2,000 watt heater and run it at 110vac. If you still want to run it at even lower wattage, run it thru a diode which will cut the current (watts) in half again. Any time you run an electric heating element at lower wattage, you extend the useful life of the heater greatly. dcarch

I'm very interested in reading about your plating in general if you want to write something about it. Thanks for asking. Plating! Plating! Plating! With all these TV competitions, shows, it seems that if you can’t plate, you can’t play! I don’t know if I am qualified to discuss plating in general, not being an expert myself. Perhaps I can talk about my own silly food-plays thinking/techniques. First, I don’t do food carving or food topiary. It takes too much time and it can in fact turn some people off. Most of the time I just pile food on a plate. I believe everyone can plate food well. If you can say, “Wow! That is a beautiful plate!” that means you have a good sense of esthetics. I think that is all you need to plate food well. In truth a good photographer is really not that good. He/she takes a thousand pictures, and in that thousand, there is one or two which look promising. After a lot of cropping, and darkroom ( now Photoshoping) trickeries, a masterpiece worth framing materializes. The most important thing about food plating is start doing it and do it as often as you can, even if you are cooking just for yourself. After a while, when you look at the ingredients of a recipe, a thousand images of how you can plate that dish will scroll through in your visual mind, and you just pick and try out the one or two which you feel might work. A little final arranging and garnishing, Voila! “WOW! Too pretty to eat” will be exclaimed by all your dinner companions. If you Google “How to plate food”, you will get thousands of hits. IMHO, all those “do this” and “do that” are meaningless. Painting by numbers will not make you a great artist. Plating by formula will not encourage you to develop spontaneous creativity. Have fun. Plating is rewarding, and it is free. dcarch

You know the under-the-counter corner kitchen cabinet? Something like this in there would work well for what you need. http://www.storageessentials.co.uk/shop/file+storage/images/library/Rotating%20unit.jpg dcarch

Keep two stacks of plates? dcarch

IMHO, sushi is all about presentation. How many sushi and sashimi recipes have you seen? dcarch

To answer your question first, it depends on the spoon's shape and the consistence of the sauce/gravy. IMHO, that technique is getting kind of over used. It is kind of getting boring. dcarch

As I understand how things work: 1. A motor's power rating is based on the maxium load you put on it before it generated too much heat and burns the coils out. Or in the case of an induction motor, the motor stalls. 2. A motor draws very little power if it is just free-wheeling or has a very light load. dcarch

Motorized planner blade steel is probably very good steel to make into a knife. dcarch

Thanks! I have made knives with metal files. Very difficult to work with, but you get a very sharp knife at the end. I may get some 1095 steel to make a chef knife. I still have many old non-carbide blade. You should try to make one yourself. Nice steel and the right kind of thickness for a knife. The brass "ferrule" was a plumbing coupler. dcarch

Thank you. It is not easy to find a good high-carbon steel cleaver. Everything is stainless steel nowadays. I had to make my own. dcarch

I don't have a point to proof. I am not disputing the fact that a belt sander is a great tool for sharpening knives. As I said, I use one and most professionals also use belt sanders in their shops. I am just wondering if you have overlooked the important fact that the OP is a complete beginner with a good quality knife asking for advice to sharpen his knife. Frankly I have never heard of recommending a belt sander for a rank beginner starting out to sharpen a good quality knife. dcarch

Not completely true for a universal (not induction) motor. I believe all blenders have universal motors. A universal motor can in fact be run on zero hz (flat voltage), namely direct current. An induction motor is a scynchronous motor, it's RPM is frequency dependent. dcarch

Thanks guys. I cut the blade out from the saw on a wet tile saw but with a metal cutting wheel. I need a very tough edge, but not a very hard edge, so I didn't need to harden the already hardened tool steel saw blade. the grinding and rough sharpening were done with an angle grinder, again, with water. It does keep a sharpe edge very well. I left the saw tooth on for mainly two reasons, one is to use that end of the knife to jaccard tenderize meat, the other is to use it as a scraper to form/shape sauce for interesting plating looks. I had no idea what to do with the hole that came with the saw blade. May be I can use that as a finger hole and learn to swing the knife like a cowboy with his six-shooter. dcarch

HowardLi, I am very puzzled by why you are so insistent in recommending to a beginner to use a belt sander to sharpen an expensive knife. I am surprised that you feel that for a beginner, it is easy to correctly put on a convex edge on a knife. I am surprised that you feel a beginner has no problem in telling when a critical edge can be permanently de-tempered and destroyed on an electric grinder. I am surprised that you are unfamiliar with the fact that most sanding belts are printed inside the belt with directional arrows to run in only one direction. As a machine shop teacher in a college for many years, my experience in what beginners can do with motorized machines are very different than yours. As a long time part-time knife maker, I know how difficult even for me to do things right with a belt sander. For your pleasure, one of the many knives I made just for fun, with a convex edge. dcarch

It is so nice to have a nice cool summer salad from your own garden. Green Giant Janpanese Heart Squash blossom dcarch The Beauty And The Beast

You guys can be a little edgy, but all have a sharp senses of humor. dcarch

Just have to comment on this... A friend owns a slaughterhouse and wholesale/retail meat store. They sharpen their knives on an unbacked belt sander and one day I tried it. I didn't think it worked as well as I could do at home on diamond stones, but it was faster. Main thing is that the knife didn't heat that much. I never got close to changing the temper. Having said what I said, I do use my belt sander to do some sharpening, and most knife makers also use belt sanders. The point is, you have to have the skill and experience, if not you can really destroy a good knife very quickly. dcarch

It's nice that we're pointing out the disadvantages of belt sanding, but note that it takes a lot of force, applied for a fairly long time, for a steel to get hot enough for heat-treat processes to become active, seeing as there is no backing behind the belt where the knife is sharpened. If you simply tell someone to dip the knife edge into water every few seconds, you avoid the problem completely. As for metal removal speed... if someone tries to do this without following instructions, I wouldn't feel too bad. Those who have used a machine to grind a knife will tell you it takes seconds to heat up the thin edge of a knife and permanently turn a $300 knife into a $10.00 knife. Dipping in water helps, but not much. Regarding no backing behind the belt, that is a completely different issue altogether. One of the important thing with sharpening a knife is to keep the proper angle of grind for the specific knife edge. Using a belt sander with no belt backing, you will be putting a what is known as “Convex Edge” on your knife, which can be desirable if you know what you are doing and what your knife is used for, but not very good idea if you are not familiar with this topic and you knife is not designed to take on a convex edge. It is important to know that sanding belt can only run in one direction. To replace multiple belts on the machine constantly you run into the risk of mounting the belt in the opposite direction and break the belt easily. There is some danger if you grind your blade and not follow the direction of run of the belt. The blade can cut into the belt, and the belt can grab the knife and throw the knife at high speed in an unpredictable direction. IMHO, do not try. dcarch

A belt sander should only be used by someone who is very experienced. You can forever destroy a good knife in a few seconds if you don't know what your are doing. It can take away metal too quickly and the heat can de-temper the metal if you put too much pressure on the blade. I keep a few sheets of fine grit wet/dry silicone carbide sand paper in the drawer. Put the sand paper on a flat surface and a few drops of water, you can get a very even sharpening on the edge quickly. Of course the sheets of sand paper take no room to store and they last a long time. dcarch

Not completely off-topic. I have seen frozen soft shell crabs in the markets. I have not tried them before. dcarch

If you read the instructions of your refrigerator, you may find it is stated that when you re-adjust the temperature of the freezer and the refrigerator compartment, it may take a few days for the temperature to balance out and stablize. Putting a large hot pot in the refrigerator will totally upset the thermostat. dcarch