The weather held up and I was able to coach the pickleball class on Wednesday. The daily high temperatures stayed near 70 degrees through Friday with occasional rain showers. My back is much better, but with the rain showers and breezy conditions, I didn’t play any pickleball. I’m raring to go now, but we’ll have to wait until the weather improves.

With a lot of time spent indoors, I’m trying to improve my kitchen knife handling skills. On Friday night, I helped Donna prep dinner. She had chicken with peppers and tomato over orzo on the menu, so I sliced onion and also red, yellow and green peppers. I also did a fresh basil chiffonade. I told Donna she needed to enlist me as sous chef early because I’m pretty slow with a kitchen knife. I keep in mind the wise words of Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto – he says if you cut yourself in the kitchen, it’s because you weren’t focused on the task at hand or you were trying to go too fast. The dinner came out excellent and it’s fun for Donna and I to work together in the kitchen.

Saturday morning the rain held off and it wasn’t too windy which was a good thing. Donna had a tennis tournament at 10am. I walked down to the east courts to watch.

Donna and her teammate Cindy easily won their match. It was interesting. The tennis club here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort is very well organized and a lot of members take their tennis seriously. Donna has really improved her game and looks forward to continuing to take instruction and is thinking she might play in the tennis league next season.

I had an e-mail notification of a USPS packaged delivered on Saturday. The thing is, these notifications usually mean the package arrived at the local post office. The Viewpoint mail team picks up at the post office twice a day. Then they sort the packages and will usually put a notification slip in the small mailboxes the next day. With it being Saturday, that meant I wouldn’t get the notification until Monday. So what, right?

I was anxious to receive my package because I knew what it was. That’s right – another Japanese kitchen knife. This one came from Japanese Knife Imports in Beverly Hills, California. This store is operated by Jon Broida and his wife, Sara. They sell high-quality gear and Jon is both a former chef and expert knife sharpener. Sara is Japanese – she grew up in Haguro, Yamagata prefecture in northern Japan. She says, “Imagine Ohio with rice paddies instead of corn fields.”

How many knives do you really need? Most recommendations I’ve read for home cooks is around six. Professional chefs will have two to three times as many as they need some specialty blades and back ups for their most used knives. Anything more than that and you are a collector.

Donna has plenty of kitchen knives to choose from. I wanted to have some of my own. The Japanese knives I’ve bought for myself tend to be a little more specialized and higher maintenance. I don’t want to go too far though – I don’t need a collection. There are guys that constantly buy, sell and trade knives online just to keep their collections alive and sample knives from different makers.

For me it started with a $25 certificate from Cutlery and More. I ordered a Yaxell/Enso ko-bunka – an all around small utility knife. It’s a factory-made knife constructed from stamped steel blanks – with the discount certificate I got it for around $60. Then I bought a boning knife – a Misono honesuki (Japanese poultry knife) forged from Swedish steel at about twice the price of the Enso. Then I stepped up and bought a hand forged JCK Natures Blue Moon sujihiki – a slicer from Japanese Chef s Knife in Tokyo made in Sanjo, Niigata Prefecture, Japan.

I went to the Viewpoint on-site post office Saturday afternoon and they were kind enough to find my package among the delivery waiting to be sorted. This time I really stepped up and bought a Kintaro 210mm Gyuto (chef’s knife) hand forged by Yoshimi Kato in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Echizen was formed when the city Takefu and the town Imadate merged in 2005.

In Echizen, there’s a place called the Takefu Knife Village. This is a cooperative that was created by a number of master blacksmiths in the area. They were concerned about aging out of business while younger workers weren’t interested in learning the traditional ways of making knives and tools. The cooperative built a modern workplace and equipped it to attract younger workers. They buy steel in greater quantities by combining orders – a lot of their steel comes from a local factory, Takefu Specialty Steel Company.

I find the history fascinating and the Takefu Knife Village has been a huge success since it was formed in 1993. Today it’s a tourist attraction and supports many younger blacksmiths and sharpeners making knives with traditional methods.

Yoshimi Kato, the maker of my new knife works at the Takefu Knife Village where he forges steel into knives. He is the son-in-law of Hiroshi Kato, one of the founders of the village. He married Hiroshi’s daughter – I find it interesting that they have the same last name. I read that the name Kato ranks number 10 among the most common Japanese surnames.

I think this is a pretty cool knife. The core steel is Hitachi shirogami #2 clad in a soft stainless steel. Shirogami is often called white paper #2 or just white #2. This is because Hitachi ships it with a white paper label. The ship their aogami #1 and #2 with blue labels – thus they are called blue steel. The shirogami is a very pure carbon steel without any alloying additions. It can be made very hard through heat treatment allowing a thin, sharp blade that paradoxically is easily sharpened. The JCK sujihiki I have is made from stainless clad aogami blue #2 – it’s like white #2 with some chromium, manganese and tungsten added. Enough knife nerd stuff.

Winter has really arrived in Mesa, Arizona. Yesterday’s high was only 54 degrees with scattered showers. When it rains here in the desert, we rarely see a continuous drizzle like you might find in the Pacific northwest. When it comes down here, it usually pours with larger raindrops in small storm cells. The desert always welcomes moisture, but sometimes it can mean flash flooding. Today will only be in the low 50s with more rain. The rest of the week should be about 10 degrees warmer, but we can’t rule out more rain coming from the west where southern California is getting wet.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and  I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!