This is surprisingly difficult to keep writing with the same regularity. I guess that's why columnists get paid the big bucks. And now onto the post...
I was preparing dinner tonight (a quite good shell-less turkey taco concoction (I only mention because apparently you, the blog reading public, want to know)) and again I came upon a problem. I’m dicing tomatoes and it strikes me that I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I mean, I’ve always gone cut it in half, then lots of cuts in one direction and then lots of cuts perpendicular to that, and then I get my little square tomato pieces. But this can’t be right, as it seems kind of slow and, worse, by the time you get to the end, it’s practically impossible to make straight cuts because the tomato can’t stand up. It reminds me a lot of a conversation from that movie, Barcelona, where one of the main characters goes into a discussion about how he was taught how to shave by his dad, but he recently watched a commercial that gave him the impression he was doing it all wrong. By the way, if you haven’t seen that movie, I highly recommend it.
My feeling is that it’s always frustrating to come upon a task that people have done roughly a hojillion times before you (in this case dicing tomatoes) and to have to rediscover the knowledge of how to do it. But, rather than going and talking to an expert chef to see how she dices tomatoes, I’ll just continue to do it this way for a while, and then come upon a better way one night. I think it’s something that’s really missing from our society. There are a lot of people out there who are very good at what they do and they’re really not very good at passing that knowledge on. Oh sure, maybe the how-to-be-a-millionaire-by-the-time-you-are-sixty-five authors would disagree with me, but I’m sticking to my guns. We don’t pass on inherited knowledge very well. Maybe blogs and search engines will help. I wonder what advice google has for me on dicing tomatoes? Apparently, not very much.
D
