My days of admiring professional chefs expertly whip up delicious meals goes back to childhood weekends watching cooking shows on PBS with my dad.
The advent of The Food Network has taken cooking shows to never-before-seen (or necessarily wanted) levels of culinary magic, with chefs competing for titles like Master, Iron or Top Chef.
Cooking shows have fed my desire to be a better cook and given me countless, useful cooking tips for which I’m grateful, and there’s always been one skill I’ve longed to have.
I would drool whenever these professionals would take a chef’s knife to a carrot and slice it, knife a gleaming blur, as fast as my Cuisinart.
Ironically, I teach knife fighting but my kitchen knife skills were lacking. I was nowhere near being in the same kitchen as the pros, and it irked me.
I rationalized it for years that I wasn’t a pro, so it didn’t matter, and I settled for knife-skill mediocrity.
Until I decided that I was going to learn how to slice up a cucumber with the best of them.
I prep food every day so I had no shortage of opportunities to improve my slicing skills.
I pulled up some knife-skills videos to make sure there wasn’t some secret I was missing (there wasn’t).
All I needed was to push myself to practice quick, smooth slices every time I cut up stir-fry veggies.
I found the perfect fruit to begin with, a banana.
I put a banana in my oatmeal each morning so, lacking anything other than just needing to do it, I started slicing up bananas every day.
Of course I was lousy when I began my journey to become a speed-slicer. My first cuts looked like a serial killer attacked my breakfast.
But I kept at it, with each banana becoming more and more uniformly cut, until I can now proudly say I can slice up my fruits and vegetables with the blazing speed of my flicking wrist, just like the pros.
And it’s FUN.
I firmly believe that when we stop learning and stop pushing ourselves to do things we can’t do today we begin to die.
It’s as if our bodies register that we are not growing so they initiate a self-destruct sequence that takes us out of the gene pool, whereas when we challenge ourselves and stretch beyond what we can do now, our bodies marshal our physical forces to keep us alive.
Push or Perish!
With certain exceptions, whatever you want to learn, you can learn if you commit to it.
So get to it.
P.S. If you’re looking to learn something new and exciting, Try a FREE CLASS HERE