If you can get to Seattle by tomorrow, you can catch day two of the 2006 [Seattle Cheese Festival](http://www.seattlecheesefestival.com/). If you’re already in Seattle, lucky you.

Last night I went to a seminar on matching British cheeses with Seattle beers. (Can’t you already hear the comic book guy from the Simpsons saying, “Best. Seminar. Ever.”?) The beers were from two local breweries, Elysian and Pike. My favorite matches were Westcombe Cheddar with Pike Pale Ale and Crozier Blue with Elysian Dragonstooth Stout. (Apparently I was the only person there who liked the latter match. Whatever.)

After the tasting, Craig Hartinger of Pike Brewery offered everyone a taste of Lindemans Cuvee Renee, a Belgian lambic, ostensibly as an alternative match to one of the cheeses, but probably just to see people contort their faces when they tried it. Lambic is one of the world’s weirdest styles of beer, an intensely sour and funky brew made with wild yeast.

Full disclosure (meaning that I am bragging about it): I attended the seminar for free on a press pass, and I am fulfilling my end of the bargain by writing about it here.

Today Laurie and I went to the cheesefest proper. We paid $5 to walk down Artisanal Alley, an innovation at this year’s festival that meant we could taste the Neals Yard and other premium cheeses without having to rub shoulders with the kind of common folk who eat cheese in a can.

In Artisanal Alley were two cheeses that I’d never tried before but look forward to having again. The Mount Townsend Creamery (on the Olympic Peninsula) is brand new–they opened last month–and they were making an excellent soft chaource-style cheese called Seastack, along with a couple of others that I didn’t find terribly interesting.

Next door, I tasted Winnemere, from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. It’s made in the style of Forsterkäse, a Swiss washed-rind cheese wrapped in pine bark. Winnemere is washed with a local (to Vermont) lambic-style beer and wrapped in spruce bark. Like lambic, it’s weird and delicious. If you find it, grab it.

In conclusion, eat more cheese.

*To Believer subscribers and other post-postmodernists: Snark alert!*

Hey, did you know that if you start early and serve a wide variety of delicious, healthy food, you can prevent your child from becoming a picky eater?

Did you know that 54 percent of American families have dinner together every night?

Did you know that natural sugar is magically better for you than added sugar?

Did you know that every night, I turn into a monkey and fly around distributing free bananas?

No less than three of these claims appear in the new “food issue” of Child magazine.

First up, we have “How to raise an adventurous eater.” Anybody who remembers their own childhood or has a child over age one knows the answer to this: you can’t. Duh. My parents are adventurous eaters (I routinely take my dad along on restaurant reviews and he always tells me he’ll eat whatever I ask him to), and they served a variety of food, and for most of my childhood I was pickier than a koala. Koalas only eat eucalyptus leaves. For me, it was pizza.

Okay, the article isn’t that bad. The best point is made by Mario Batali, who says:

> The way I have always introduced new or adventurous food is by not making a big deal about it: Put it on the table with no fanfare and enjoy it. Don’t make a big deal if they don’t seem interested–and then do it again.

Great advice, but I am living proof that you can do this and still end up with a eucalyptus-eater.

Next, there is a survey of “How America’s Families Eat.” The methodology of this survey is not explained. I assume a bunch of readers sent in cards. Other facts about America’s families:

* Only 16 percent report that their kids misbehave at the table.
* 56 percent report that “working parents share cooking responsibilities”.
* 69 percent report that Mom does all the cooking.
* The average family has homemade dinners 6 nights a week, fast-food dinners 2 nights a week, restaurant dinners 2 nights a week, and take-out dinners 2 nights a week. Is it any wonder American waistlines are expanding, I ask you?

I’m going to gloss over the sugar article except to say that if you follow its recommendation to limit your eight-year-old to no more than five teaspoons of added sugar per day, which is less than what’s in one decent-sized chocolate chip cookie, you will turn your child into a person who stays up nights plotting how to get more sugar.

Finally, there’s an article about England’s bestselling kid-food author Annabel Karmel. We have one of Karmel’s books, First Meals, and I admire her eclecticism, but we didn’t end up using the book much, except as something for Iris to read (it has cute pictures of kids eating). The problem with Karmel’s approach is that she makes a distinction between adult food and kid food, and often for no apparent reason. She does cute recipes such as Sleeping Cannelloni, with olive feet and grated cheese for hair. If you think of it as party food, it’s fine. But I don’t know what to make of this recipe for Perfect Pasta–it’s a reasonably tasty-sounding (albeit too low in fat) dish of noodles with broccoli, scallions, and chicken, sauced with soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, and (far too much) honey. It makes four servings. At 365 calories per serving, it certainly doesn’t serve four adults, and if it serves four kids, (a) what are the adults supposed to eat, and (b) what size of kid?

Oh, incidentally, the pasta recipe contains three of those five teaspoons of added sugar (assuming your kid only eats 365 calories worth of pasta), so skip dessert.

This was an especially bad issue, but all of the glossy parenting magazines (Parents, Parenting, Child, Working Mother) live in a world where food exists only to be a problem or to solve a problem. How do I fix a picky eater? How do I get my kid off cookies? No wonder readers lied on the survey. Who wants to admit to being part of the problem? Even an article with recipes for a Father’s Day barbecue features a main course (shrimp and chicken skewers) with 1g of fat and a dip made with low-fat mayo and sour cream. Mommy, why doesn’t Daddy live here anymore?

Oh, one more thing. In the same issue, there’s a story entitled “Wooing My Pregnant Wife.” Don’t you think they’d sell more magazines with a story about wooing someone else’s pregnant wife?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s almost sundown, and I have a big sack of bananas. I hope you’ve been a good little boy or girl this year.

So, I managed to save myself from buying any new knives, albeit it only by ordering a cool new sharpening kit. For some reason, I seem to have excellent restraint in some shopping categories and am a borderline shopaholic in others.

I have all the kitchen gear I need. My ten-inch skillet is wearing out, and I’d like to replace it one with an oven-safe handle. Someday I’d like a rice cooker with a nonstick finish. And I do admit to looking forward to the day my scale dies so I can replace it with a cool new one that holds more weight and has a better display. But there’s really nothing I need for the kitchen right now, and there are probably a few things I could stand to get rid of. On the acquisitiveness scale (aka the Trump score) here, I give myself a 3.

When it comes to computer gadgets and software, I’m one of those guys. I’m already wishing we could replace the computer we bought less than a year ago with the newer, faster model. I’m always wondering whether I might like a different keyboard or mouse, and I register shareware all the time. One time I went out to get my iPod fixed and came home with a new laptop. Honestly, I’m not proud of this. I’m giving myself a Trump score of 8 in this category.

There are plenty of other categories in which I get a score of 0, just because I don’t like shopping for those things, like clothes. It’s either rock shirts or Lands’ End. (I’m guessing Laurie didn’t marry me for my fashion sense.)

While I was working on that knife post, I realized that there’s another category in which I surprise myself by being not at all acquisitive. It’s recipes.

When I make brownies, I make Alice Medrich’s New Classic Brownies. I might make a totally different kind of brownie at some point, like a cheesecake brownie or a peanut butter brownie, but for plain chocolate brownies I’m not going to bother trying other recipes. Probably there’s another brownie recipe out there I would like better, but finding it is not worth making a hundred pans of not-so-great brownies. (I don’t mean to say that your brownie recipe is worse than mine, but if you’re in a fighting mood: Your brownies blow. Steve Bath 4EVA, sucka.)

When I want chowder, I crack open some clams and 50 Chowders.

And for many, many other recipes, I put myself in the weathered, plow-weary hands of Christopher Kimball.

The term everyone seems to be using for this approach is “satisficing”–that is, I stop when I find something that meets my criteria, without worrying about whether there’s something better.

I guess after I try making something two or three times, I give up and figure I’ll order it some time when we go out. Spaghetti carbonara is going into this category. Every time I make it, the sauce is overcooked or undercooked. (I’m not blaming the recipes for this, of course.) So screw it.

Actually, if anyone has carbonara tips, let me know. (My Trump score has just gone up by one.)

I’m starting to get nervous when I think about knives.

It’s not that I’ve developed aichmophobia, which is the fear of knives and pointy objects. It’s the fear of descending into a well of self-doubt and wallet-mutilating consumerism. The same things that keep everyone up at night, right?

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve only ever owned one knife, a Henckels Four-Star 8-inch chef’s knife. Okay, sure, I have some butter knives, a paring knife, a boning knife, and a bread knife. (The warden confiscated my shiv.) But those aren’t really knives, in the same way that a PDA isn’t really a computer: yes, it does most of the same things a computer does, and it even does some of them better, but you wouldn’t replace your computer with a PDA. Obviously, I’ve been happy with the Henckels. In Fritz Lang’s _M_, the murderer (Peter Lorre) pauses while on the lam to peer into the window of a knife shop, and the knives for sale are Henckels. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

Last year I did, in fact, have to rely on my knife’s little buddies while the big guy was on vacation. It spent a couple of weeks at the knife-sharpening ranch of Bob Kramer, proprietor of Bladesmiths. Kramer is considered one of the best sharpeners and knife makers in the business. His custom blades are absolutely gorgeous–but if you think a German chef’s knife is expensive at $90, you will probably pass on a Kramer at $400. (They do have a money back guarantee.)

My knife came back from Kramer much sharper than the day I bought it, and with occasional steeling it stayed sharp for over a year. Now it’s dull again. My first inclination was to send it back to Kramer. But I still remember how hard it was to go knifeless last year. It was like going without pants for two weeks. Okay, not really, but it wasn’t fun.

My next thought was, hey, I could send the knife to Kramer but buy myself another knife to tide me over until it gets back. I know exactly what it would be: a Forschner Victorinox. The Forschner is a strange beast among knives. It’s made via the same inexpensive process (stamping) that produces millions of cheap and crappy knives, but somehow the Forschner comes out cheap (about $30, and I’ve seen them online for less) but not at all crappy. In fact, it’s sometimes beaten the Germans in tests by Cook’s Illustrated and others. If you’re shopping for your first good knife and aren’t ready to spend $90, the Forschner is for you.

Obviously, this is where I started to dig that well. I thought, hmm, I can’t just get another 8-inch chef’s knife and let it sit around in a drawer fifty weeks out of the year. I could get something different. I’ve sometimes wondered whether I would prefer a 10-inch chef’s knife. A lot of professionals use them. Or I could try one of those newfangled santokus, which proponents claim are especially good for slicing vegetables, though not as good for chopping, since the blade doesn’t have much of a curve.

No, no, I decided. I don’t need another knife. I looked online for a local sharpener with a faster turnaround. Everybody seemed to have good things to say about [Epicurean Edge](http://www.epicureanedge.com/), in Kirkland. Their turnaround time is 24 hours, and they’re open weekends. I was about to head over there.

Then, when I least expected it, I fell victim to another common affliction, one that disproportionately strikes males. This disease is known as “I could probably fix that myself.”

I’ve tried knife sharpening. I have a double-sided hone, and I’ve dutifully scrubbed my knife against it. The evidence of sharpening was there, the little metal leavings, but obviously I was doing it wrong, because the knife was no sharper than when I started. I’ve also tried an electric sharpener, but I got scared that it was shaving big chunks off my knife and that in a matter of months I’d be left with a pitiful stump.

Then I remembered the eGullet Culinary Institute (eGCI), and specifically Chad Ward’s Knife Maintenance and Sharpening course. Chad says–I am paraphrasing here–that sending your knives out to a professional is like hiring a professional to make love to your spouse. Okay, actually what he says is:

> Knife sharpening is not difficult. It is not shrouded in mystery. With a little knowledge, a little geometry, a couple of tricks and some inexpensive tools, knife sharpening can be fairly easy and extremely rewarding.

Chad is writing a really cool book called _An Edge in the Kitchen_, which will be out next year, but you can read the very entertaining sharpening course right now. He discusses many different sharpening tools, and one of his recommendations stuck with me (sorry), because it’s inexpensive and comes with colorful plastic pieces.

It’s called the GATCO Edgemate, and it comes with a handheld clamp for holding the knife at the correct sharpening angles, plus coarse, medium, and fine hones. I ordered one (new in box) on eBay for about $27 total, which is less than I would pay to have my chef’s, boning, and paring knives sharpened a single time at Epicurean Edge. It should arrive next week.

I’m really excited to try the GATCO, and I’ll let you know how it goes and whether I’m capable of using it without developing aichmophobia.

Sometimes when you screw up in the kitchen, it’s an outright failure. But sometimes it just takes a mental realignment to turn a loss into a win.

I attempted to make *gulyas alla triestina* for dinner. I’ve made this before and it’s delicious and not as hard as it sounds. It’s beef stew with pancetta, red wine, lots of onions, and smoked paprika. It takes well to improvisation, but I screwed it up tonight because I tried to be clever.

Gulyas is a perfect dish for the pressure cooker, because the stew’s flavors are so big that they can’t be destroyed by 250 degrees of braising power. I wanted a vegetable to go with the stew, and savoy cabbage seemed like the perfect thing. Dinnertime was approaching. I popped open the cooker and found that the meat was almost done, but not quite. “I know, I’ll just throw the cabbage in on top and cook it a few more minutes.”

The trouble is, there’s a special pressure cooker warning when you’re making beef: if you let the pressure out quickly, the meat gets tough. I’d never tested this and frankly believed it was an urban legend, like the idea that you have to soak beans. Bean-soaking is still hooey, but the rule of beef is true. Suddenly it was dinnertime, and all I could do was let out the pressure (in an impressive jet of steam) and hope for the best. I opened the pot to find raw cabbage and unyielding nuggets of meat.

Luckily, there was another pot on the stove that stepped in to save the day. It was full of Anson Mills polenta. Honestly, this pot was doing its best to fuck with me, too. When I tasted the polenta to make sure it was coming along, I tasted a weird raw vegetable flavor that was oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I realized that it tasted exactly like a fresh, green cornhusk smells. This is serious polenta. A few more minutes and an application of butter and Parmigiano, and it was perfect. (At one point I laughed, because I hadn’t planned ahead what kind of stew I was going to make, and I knew that on the calendar I had written “stew over polenta,” and there I was, actually stewing over polenta.)

Now, you’re probably way ahead of me, but what I realized was: the best part of any stew isn’t the meat, which if you’ve done your job has basically turned to tofu: easy to chew, great at soaking up flavors, not very interesting by itself. So I had this great smoky sauce (with chunks of slab bacon), a big bowl of polenta, and one two-year-old who loves polenta and any kind of sauce. We chucked the meat and ate all the sauce and most of the polenta, although there’s some left to make fried polenta tomorrow, and Iris only had a few bites because I mentioned there would be dessert.

Dessert was vanilla ice cream with poached rhubarb. No problems there.