Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook Read Online Free Page B

and mixers and whatever else. A caveat, though: more expensive does not necessarily mean better! Since this is the technological age, weed through consumer reviews on such shopping sites as Amazon.com to see which ones are best. Thrift stores and flea markets and stoop sales (or tag sales for you non-New Yorkers) are also great places to find kitchen stuff, if you don’t mind the questionable provenance .

CHOPPING AND PREP TOOLS
     
    Because having a stove is great if you intend to cook something, but unless you plan on living on whole boiled potatoes, you’re going to need just a few prep tools.

Knives
     
    We know it’s been said many times, many ways, but the only knife you need is a good chef’s knife. Period. If you’re still chopping vegetables with a sad little steak knife you borrowed from your mom’s cutlery tray, stop it this second and go out and buy a real knife. A good knife has a solid feel, comfortable grip, and can be sharpened when it gets dull. Dull knives are dangerous! They slip off tomato skins and cut your finger. Buy the best knife you can afford; decent knives can be purchased for under $30 at discount stores, but if you’ve had a sudden windfall of cashola it doesn’t hurt to drop a Benjamin on a really spiffy one.
 
    A Few Basic Knife Skills
     
    The more you chop, dice, and slice, the better your knife skills will get. It helps to know the correct way to hold a knife, but really it’s practice and intuition that makes almost perfect. We say “almost perfect” because the skills are constantly evolving and we’re always figuring out new stuff and what works for us. That said, it doesn’t hurt to have a little practical guidance, and since minced garlic and diced onions are included in most all of our recipes, here are a few tips for getting them prepped quickly while keeping your fingers intact.
     
    Garlic
    Wet your hands and your knife before beginning. That will keep the garlic from sticking to your fingers and the knife. Break off a few cloves and lay your knife blade squarely over a clove. Use the palm of your hand to give the clove a whack. That should crush the clove and loosen the skin. The papery skin should slip off easily once it’s been whacked. Discard the skins and continue smashing as many cloves as you need.
    Once you have skinned all the cloves, bunch them up on the cutting board. The quickest and easiest way to mince is to use a seesaw rocking motion. Use your writing hand to grasp the blade and use your other hand to rest on top of the blade to provide balance. Rock the knife back and forth steadily, stopping once in a while to bunch all the garlic up again, because it will spread out as you are mincing. When you have this method perfected you should be able to mince a whole bulb of garlic in two or three minutes.
     
    Onions
    First, slice off the top and bottom of the onion. Then slice the onion in half lengthwise. Now the skin should come off easily. Once the skin is removed, place the onion cut side down. With your fingers safely curled in, grasp the onion at the bottom to hold it in place. Slice the onion widthwise, trying to keep the slices intact. Then turn the onion and slice lengthwise.
    Isa swears that if she breathes through her mouth, she never cries from cutting up onions. Try it for yourself and see if she’s lying and crazy or not.
     
 
     
    Now that you have a good knife, you’d better learn how to use it. You could take some classes or watch a few hundred hours of Emeril (say what you will, that man can chop !), or you can just think about how to cut something beforehand instead of hacking away willy-nilly. Let the knife do the work—it wants to!
    Besides the chef’s knife, we only really bother with a serrated-bladed bread knife and a little, sharp paring knife. The bread knife is great for slicing bread, of course, but it’s also a miracle worker for slicing very soft tomatoes and sushi nori rolls. The little paring knife can come in handy