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January 18, 2021January 18, 2021

Outrageous: How To Sharpen a Kitchen Knife

Outrageous. I am outraged by well-intended advice. Twice.

outrageous-lenticular-sunrise — Outrageous lenticular clouds over Mount Baker at sunrise.

Yesterday I read a well meaning but outrageous bit of advice on blogging: have a theme and stick to it. None of this some nostalgia, some book discussion, some social commentary stuff. Choose a theme and stick to it. Anyone who knows me well, knows I wander all over the map. I never stick to routines for long. If you are as old as I am, you might remember a plastic surgeon back in the 1960’s who claimed all you had to do was repeat something 20 times and it became a habit. What rot! If I do the same thing 20 times in a row, it’s time for a change.

Good advice, this sticking to theme. I’m sure many readers want blogs to be predictable, but for me, no thanks. I’m not following it. Can’t follow it. I can’t even stick to bad habits. Hence, this post.

This weekend, I read an item in the New York Times, Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores. Very sensible. Wash your sheets, throw out expired prescription opioids, unclog your sink. Yeah. Sure. Fine. I do these things whenever I am forced to. Who doesn’t?

One outrageous task sent me into low earth spitting orbit: sharpen your knives.

I know something about sharpening. I got my first jack knife from my grandpa when I six. And my first sharpening stone. The NYT article mentioned that a sharp knife is safer than a dull one. My left hand is covered with scars from dull knives that skipped off of the piece of wood I was whittling on and into my hand. These are old scars. I’ve learned to sharpen knives.

Dull knives are dangerous

The article starts with a modern nod to the counter-intuitive danger of dull knives. Good start, I said to myself, glancing at my scarred hand.

The rest was drivel

The rest of the item was drivel. It suggests sharpening knives once a year. Once a year? Piffle. Sharpen your knives the instant they loose their bite. It depends on the knife and how you use it.

How I do it

I sharpen my knives every time I use them, once or twice a day for my chef’s knife. Treat your knives with the care they deserve. Sharp edges are delicate and fragile. Don’t throw a good knife in the dishwasher to get rattled around, dented, and nicked.

After I use a knife, I clean it, and sharpen it on a steel, a dozen or more strokes on each side of the edge. Sharpening on a steel removes little or no material from the blade. Instead, it reshapes the metal into a sharp edge. A steel can’t get rid of a nick in an edge or remove a blunt spot, but it will return an undamaged edge to keen slicing form. The duller the edge, the less effective the steel.

You can’t reshape forever. Eventually, you have to grind the edge, which might amount to once a year, although once every few months is more realistic for knives you use daily.

You must be judicious in grinding, which removes metal from the edge. Grind too often and your knife disappears or morphs into an unusable shape. But if you don’t grind often enough, you have a dull and dangerous knife.

Trial and error

I won’t get into tools, angles, and techniques here. My best advice reflects my experience. Trial and error, grasshopper. Trial and error. There are many techniques and they all work, but not necessarily for you.

The blunter the angle of a blade, the less keen the edge, but the longer it stays sharp when cutting is tough. My perfect edge is not your perfect edge, but when an edge is not perfect, sharpen it. Use the steel often, a grinding stone only when needed. Power grinders are fast, but require expensive guides or great skill. Hard stainless steel blades are bears to sharpen, but stay sharp longer. Good carbon steel requires frequent maintenance, but with proper attention, it cuts like a dream. I have a cheap Chinese cleaver that looks like a mess, but cuts cleaner than its much more expensive German stainless brethren.

As an aside, most kitchens have too many knives. Learn to use and treat a few good knives well. Give an impoverished homicidal maniac a break and send the clutter to goodwill. Your life will be better. Ask Marie Kondo.

February 10, 2019February 10, 2019

SR99 Tunnel Ride

This post is mostly about Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a congenital heart disease that I was born with. HCM is actually fairly common—at least 1 in 500 people have it, which is more than many well-known diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), or Muscular Dystrophy. When you hear of a young athlete suddenly dying on the playing field, the cause is almost always HCM.

A cardiomyopathy is disease of the heart muscle, distinct from coronary disease, which is disease of the blood vessels that supply the heart, typically caused by buildup of cholesterol that clogs the vessels. When a coronary artery is blocked, the result is often a cardiomyopathy caused by dying blood-starved heart muscle, a typical heart attack. HCM often causes symptoms that resemble a mild heart attack.

HCM is different. In HCM, heart muscle fibers grow thick and stiff. In my case, my heart grew in such a way that blood flow through my left ventricle was impeded. Eventually, I went to the Mayo Clinic where Dr. Werner Schaff stopped my heart for half an hour while he reshaped the interior of my ventricle by removing heart tissue. After the surgery, he told me the tissue he removed was the size of my thumb. That was in 2008.

When I returned to Whatcom County from Rochester Minnesota, I was weak, but I felt better. All my life, I felt palpitations, sessions after heavy physical labor, or for no apparent reason, my heart pounded in my chest to the point that I could think of nothing else. I assumed everyone experienced the same thing. I have not felt those pounding palpitations since the surgery.

In retrospect, I had a close call in the fourth or fifth grade. Custer, Central, and North Bellingham Elementary competed in a softball league. I was on the about the fifth string of the North Bellingham team playing Central, the elementary for the town of Ferndale. When there was no possibility of putting anyone else up to bat, I was at the plate. The Central pitcher threw a slow one, smack down the middle, no doubt because the chance that I would hit it was near zero. I saw it coming and swung. Miracle of miracles, I drove it into the outfield.

I started running. I made it to first and rounded toward second, the only time in my entire life that I have made that turn. About midway to second, my feet seemed to disappear from under me and I was engulfed in a reddish-brown fog. The next thing I knew, a crowd of kids were looking down at me and the umpire called me out. They pulled me up and I stumbled back to the bench, blaming myself for being so clumsy. So much for my baseball career.

Knowing what I know now about HCM, I believe I was lucky. Other young athletes have never left that brown fog. The most common first symptom of HCM is sudden cardiac death.

I made it until my early fifties. I’ve always liked bicycles. At that point in my life, I was riding a bike to work every day. We had bought a second home in Redmond, about six miles from the office. Most of my ride was on the Sammamish River Trail segment of the Burke-Gillman Trail, the bike super highway of the Seattle area. The trail is almost level, but I had a climb from the trail to the office on 128^th in Kirkland.

I had a regular checkup with my doctor in Redmond. I mentioned that my chest ached on the uphill from the river trail. He frowned, asked me a few questions I’ve forgotten, ran an EKG, and shoved me across the hall in a wheel chair to a cardiologist. The cardiologist ordered an echocardiogram and pushed me into his echo lab. The technician performed an echocardiogram, the first of many. At one point, she called in the cardiologist to look at the screen. After a while, she gave me a cloth to wipe off the jelly she had smeared on my chest and told me to get dressed. She escorted me into the cardiologist’s office. A routine checkup had turned interesting.

The cardiologist told me that my echo-cardiogram was abnormal. He had not seen my condition often, but he thought it was idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis (IHSS), the old name for HCM.

I went through a series of medications, none of which seemed to do any good. The last straw was a tread mill echo-cardiogram that the cardiologist in charge refused to complete. I had a referral to the Mayo Clinic.

That was ten years ago last November. My heart has improved steadily after Dr. Schaff’s knife work.

Last Sunday, my friend, Bill Merrow, and I rode the historic Cascade Bicycle SR99 Tunnel Ride. I was, frankly, scared, thinking about sudden cardiac death and my aborted softball career, but I also felt like I could do it. Riding through the tunnel before it was opened to car traffic was a once in a lifetime event.

So, I tried. And succeeded. Bill was forbearing, tolerating my slow speed, being passed by 10-year-olds on rocket bikes and families pulling trailer-loads of infants. I stopped once, on the final ascent of the return trip through the tunnel to let my heart slow down and a few muscles relax, but I made it.

Folks with HCM, once they have made it through young adulthood, typically live as long as anyone else. That’s my plan.

August 20, 2018August 20, 2018

Leaving the Homestead

You may know that I live on a road named for my family and in a house that was built by my grandfather and that both I and my father grew up in. Every so often, I meet someone who is like me: stubborn, lacking in creativity, or otherwise inclined to remain sessile in a country where no one lives in the same place for long. All has changed. This spring, I left that motley clutch.

My wife Rebecca and I decided early this year that it was time for us to leave the Waschke homestead. The property has been in my family for well over a century, passed on from my grandfather, to my father, and finally to me. We have a deed tucked in a safe that has Ulysses S. Grant’s signature at the bottom, although I understand those deed signatures were all copies.

The decision was difficult and part of me still disagrees vehemently. Sadly, I am no farmer. I was raised on the farm, but my interests have ranged from mathematics, to classical Chinese history, developing and writing about computer systems, libraries, and writing mystery novels. Although I stayed on Waschke Road and the homestead my entire life, I never wanted to farm. Too much experience has dulled my appreciation for the work on the farm that many find renewing and fulfilling. In recent years, a congenital heart condition and diabetes have made maintaining the farm more difficult and my wife Rebecca had her third back surgery last summer. My city wife is the gardener on our team, but what she enjoyed and I dreaded as stoop labor, is now impossible for her. Our children are not interested in the farm. The inescapable conclusion was that we would live longer and happier if we relinquished the homestead.

We decided to sell the old place. Our first step was to buy a house in town, Ferndale where I went to high school. I move, but not far. Although we remodeled the old farmhouse ten years ago, we both much prefer this smaller and more easily maintained new house. I am happy to spend my days researching and writing instead of fretting over the aches and fatigue that almost put me to bed after a few hours on the tractor or maintaining the farm. We still live from packing boxes—the effort of moving from a house and grounds in which three generations lived without ever moving out was tremendous. We are sorting three generations of accumulation. We found a pair of trunks, which we think traveled to America from Germany when my great grandparents emigrated. One of the trunks contained the chrome plated name plaques from the coffins of my two aunts who died shortly after birth on the homestead before my father was born. The trunks now sit in our new foyer. We’ve cleaned them up and are thinking about whether to let the years show or to restore them.

The homestead is now on the market, waiting for the right buyer. I don’t expect the place to sell quickly. It is not for everyone. Only a certain person in the right circumstances will appreciate it. You can see pictures here.

From Prussia to Minnesota

My great grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke, was an orphan. His parents died when he was twelve, leaving him and his younger brother to fend for themselves. As orphans, Gottlieb and his brother John trained as a builders and craftsmen in the public vocational school system established by Otto Von Bismarck in 19^th century in Prussia. He built sugar mills, which boomed in northern Europe after the American civil war interrupted the supply of sugar from the Gulf of Mexico. My great grandfather emigrated from Germany, I believe entering the U.S. through New Orleans. He went up the Mississippi and used his training and experience to become a railroad car builder in Detroit and later Stevens Point, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. Later, he brought his younger brother from Germany, who was also a craftsman. The younger brother was soon recruited to Whatcom County to help with the late 19^th century Bellingham Bay real estate boom.

Arrival in Whatcom County

My great grandfather Gottlieb saved enough in the car yards to buy farm land near Wells, Minnesota. He apparently did well, but the frigid winters and broiling summers of the upper Midwest were not to his taste. His brother wrote about the mild climate and opportunities in Whatcom County. My great grandfather decided Washington would be a more hospitable to a family farming operation and made the move to Washington state.

Gottlieb leased a railroad stock car, loaded it with machinery and livestock and sent it to Bellingham with his two oldest sons riding along, tending the cattle, horses, and a few chickens. The railroad allowed only one rider to tend the livestock. My grandfather, only thirteen or fourteen, hid in the cattle bedding when the railroad officials came around. Gottlieb, his wife, daughters, and younger sons rode on a passenger train. On arrival, my great-grandfather bought a quarter section of land on the northeast corner of Aldrich and Smith roads in south east corner of Ferndale township.

The Matzkes, my grandmother’s family, were from Pomerania, near Prussia. They were also mill builders and had ties to my great-grandfather’s family. They also emigrated from Germany to Whatcom County, arriving a few years after my great-grandfather and settled on the west side of Aldrich Road close to my great-grandfather. Romance soon blossomed between my grandfather and grandmother. They married and planned to start their own family.

Buying the homestead

With the help of their parents, my grandparents, Gustave and Agnes Waschke, purchased forty logged acres in 1906. This plot became the Waschke homestead. Gus was born in Minnesota, but working on his father’s farm, he soon learned enough about Whatcom county to decide exactly the kind of land he wanted. The loggers who harvested the Nooksack plains in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries took only prime timber— mostly Douglas Fir and Red Cedar—leaving behind brush and trees they considered trash like Big Leaf Maple, Alder, and Birch, and, perhaps surprisingly, a few firs and cedars too big to cut by hand. Gus’s father’s farm was part peat bog, plagued with bog iron, and uneven, which made cultivation difficult.

Gus looked for a parcel that was flat with rich, neither waterlogged nor, dry soil. Not too many cedars—that signaled wet ground that could not be planted until late in a wet year like his father’s bog ground. And not too few cedars either—that meant dry ground that would not yield a good crop in a dry year. He also looked for big fir stumps, tough to clear with a team of horses, but a sign of fertility that would yield abundant crops. He found the mellow loam he wanted on the high ground on the verge Silver and Deer Creek watersheds and north of the skid road that paralleled the Smith Road. In those days, oxen still trudged the skid road pulling strings of logs cut on the Deer and Silver Creeks to the Nooksack river at Ferndale.

Gus and Agnes built a one room cedar shack in the northeast corner of the property, close to Agnes’ parents’ house on the Aldrich Road, where they lived for their first ten years together. Early in their marriage, a dry August northeast wind blew a brush and forest fire through the area. Gus and Agnes defended their home, beating out the flames with wet burlap sacks and shovels. Agnes recalled that they fought the flames until dark. Then they went to bed. She shook her head when she told this story, wondering that they survived, but they were young and life was an adventure.

I plan to write more about the homestead and its history in later blogs.