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Imagine you have a good knife and a really shitty knife. You regularly use both, but the shitty one’s kind of shitty. It can cope with cheese and maybe a courgette, but you’d never risk it on an onion or something like that.
One day you want to slice a tomato. Tomato slicing is not a task you entrust to a shitty knife. That’s how you lose a finger. So you pick up the good knife, you position it on the tomato and apply pressure.
You’ve done it a thousand times before, it’s always worked perfectly, but on this occasion the blade fails to penetrate the skin. Instead it slips back towards your hand and gouges into your fingers. ‘Brilliant,’ you think. ‘The good knife’s gone all shitty. What the hell am I supposed to do now?’
There’s nothing you can do. You set what was once the good knife aside (because for some completely inexplicable reason you’ve never invested in a nice whetstone, so it’s basically blunt forever) and you instead grasp the shitty knife. The shitty knife has just been reinstated as the best knife.
You then proceed to mash the tomato to useless pulp.
Point is, from time to time you’re going to find yourself in a position where something that you routinely rely on suddenly lets you down and you end up having to use the back-up thing as the main thing.
This is what happened when Sri Lanka doled out the hammery to Ravindra Jadeja.
Jadeja went for 52 runs in six overs and Virat Kohli was left thinking: “Wait… what?” – or something along those lines.
He was then forced to make the exact opposite bowling change to the one he’s been conditioned to execute whenever he’s been confronted with an instance of bowler hammery in the past. Instead of bringing Jadeja on, he took Jadeja off.
So what happened? Well, Jadeja had become father to a baby girl earlier in the day. Even if the skiver didn’t show up for the debilitatingly intense bit, that kind of a thing can seriously blunt a man for pretty much the whole of the rest of the day.
Good job he didn’t have to do anything more intense, like, say, writing a cricket blog. It could really have messed him up then.
Wait. Which one’s the tomato?
The key to slicing this tomato was varied cutting speeds with emphasis on slow cuts. We should have learnt this when our own tomato was being sliced. Both our shitty and good knives like to rush the cuts. The cutting board could have been better placed too. Our chef has lots to learn in this format.
Having said that, the tomato thought unripe stood up well to all and any attempts at slicing. OK, before this turns into any more puree… 🙂
Something something cut shots.
The key to cutting a tomato easily is to pop it in the cold for a bit, it tightens up a bit and therefore makes cutting easier, blunt knife or otherwise. Unfortunately for Virat, it was a warm day and this particular variety of Lankan tomato refuses to to yield
I always enjoy story time in KC’s kitchen
An apt analogy as Kohli probably gets angry and frustrated and starts swearing while chopping vegetables, before putting himself on a strict fitness regimen and executing his skill sets better so as to improve his chopping abilities.
New brilliance by yer maj in reducing an entire country to a vegetable. Sri Lanka make an apt tomato, given that Ranatunga and Herath have ben key members in the past.
Given their obsession with beards, I nominate India for the prestigious moniker of angel hair pasta
Fruit!
In other news, regular reader Sam basically decided the UK election.
Not entirely joking.
Re: the hover caption. I would have gone ‘there is a knife that never goes blunt’, but yours is better.
A pithier alternative.
What difference does it make? It’s not my knife it’s your knife and it sharpens no more.
Sharpness is nice, and bluntness can stop you, from cutting all the things with knife you’d like to.
Urrgh. Stop me (if you think… etc)
I think of a KC’s culinary analogy as being like a soufflé.
At first you are really excited – because it’s going to be such a wonderful dish – so you start it off with precision and care. You keep it going – if you give up too early, it doesn’t rise to expectations – but if you keep it going too long, then it all falls flat in the end.
Is this your roundabout way of saying that joke isn’t funny anymore, Ged?
i took the soufflé analogy as being an inter course
this reminds me of soggy muffins
Decent figures for Rashid Khan, eh?
NZ have a Coriander’s Son. Must be all this talk about knives and tomatoes.