Progress has been pretty slow on our new digs. Donna’s been organizing drawers, cabinets and closet space. I haven’t accomplished much. I’m still a little frustrated at times by looking for something, then realizing we left it in the motorhome – things like the extra wide foil for the Traeger and grill or the BBQ tongs. Yesterday I could have used a needle file. After searching, I realized my needle files were still in a cabinet in the coach.

Today I’ll go over to the 202 RV Valet storage facility and retrieve a couple of things. I also want to put mineral oil in the drains to seal the “P” traps. Water usually does the job, but since we aren’t running water down the drains, it’ll evaporate and allow odors from the holding tank to enter the coach. Mineral oil won’t hurt anything and won’t evaporate. I have a gallon of food-grade mineral oil I recently bought to condition our cutting boards.

On Easter Sunday, we went to Frank and Kelly Burk’s house for a late lunch/early dinner party. I think we had as many as 10 people there at one point with eight staying to eat. Kelly made traditional Easter food – ham and asparagus with hollandaise sauce and scalloped potatoes. Someone else contributed sweet potatoes made with a unique recipe that involved basting with 7Up and cooking for hours. Donna made a fruit salad and I made a slaw.

The slaw was interesting. It was very simple – just cucumber, a Granny Smith apple, a honey crisp apple and scallions. The dressing was apple cider vinegar, honey, sour cream, salt and pepper. The trick to making this slaw is to slice the ingredients extremely thin. I sliced the cucumber and apples into 1 to 2mm thick slices – a thickness somewhere between dime and a quarter thick. Kelly was surprised that I did this with a knife, not a mandolin or some other slicer.

I’ve been working on my kitchen cutlery skills and I sliced these ingredients with a technique that’s probably old-hat to the cooks out there reading this, but it’s fairly new to me. I held the food items on a cutting board with my left hand with a claw grip. I curled my fingers back toward my palm, keeping my finger tips away from the knife blade. The side of the knife blade butts up against the second joint of my middle finger. With each slice I move my grip slightly before slicing again, creating the thin, uniform slices.

With the cucumber, I sliced it lengthwise first, leaving about half an inch still attached at the stem end. Holding it in a claw grip with the slice vertical, I made thin slices that were half the diameter of the cucumber. I used my FKRZ bunka Japanese kitchen knife which has a blade about 2 inches tall, giving me a lot of surface against my finger joint with no danger of slicing my finger tips.

The dinner, conversation and company was much fun and we really enjoyed the Easter gathering.

On Monday afternoon, we invited Dick and Roxy Zarowny for happy hour. They were pulling out of Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort on Tuesday morning to head back home to Spokane, Washington. Donna made baked jalapeno poppers and a bean dip for tortilla chips. Donna and Roxy had kayaked on the Salt River the previous Thursday and hoped to see wild horses. They had fun, but didn’t see any horses – Roxy’s been skunked on wild horse sightings.

One of the things slowing me down on household projects is pickleball. I’ve played almost every day this week. A couple of hours on the court with full sun and temperature in the 80s really wears me out. Today was the fifth day in a row on the court and my legs are weary.

I mentioned the Japanese bunka knife. I want to talk about a Japanese knife blacksmith. His name is Teruyasu Fujiwara (knife nerds refer to him as TF). He is a fourth generation Japanese blacksmith and is known for his heat treatment of Hitachi YSS high carbon steels – shirogami #1 (white #1) and aogami super (AS). In the 1970s, he and his father pioneered the technique of forge-welding stainless steel and carbon steel in to a san-mai (three layer) laminate. This allowed them to heat treat the core carbon steel to a high hardness level while taking advantage of the superior corrosion resistance and toughness of mild stainless steel.

When they started experimenting, they thought they would probably encounter a 20% failure rate – the laminations would de-laminate or crack during heat treatment. They actually lost 80% of their work before they perfected the process. Since then, Hitachi Steel Corporation’s YSS specialty department has developed a process for producing laminated san-mai steel in sheet form.

TF is one of only a handful of blacksmiths that can successfully forge weld their own san-mai stainless-carbon sandwich steel. He claims the hand forged san-mai to be superior to the machine rolled pre-laminated factory stuff. He makes three lines of knives. The first, entry level to TF knives is called the Nashiji line. This is “value” priced and made from pre-laminated factory rolled san-mai steel with a white #1 core and soft stainless cladding. His heat treatment of this steel results in a high hardness level allowing exceedingly sharp edges while paradoxically being easy to sharpen. “Value” pricing is relative – non-knife nerds would probably think these are expensive knives.

The next level of his knives are the Maboroshi no Meito – Maboroshi or Mabs is the common reference name. These are white #1 core with soft stainless cladding hand forge-welded by TF. These achieve an even higher level of hardness and retain the ease of sharpening. These knives have legendary cutting ability, but they cost double the price of a Nashiji knife.

His top level is called Denka no Hoto – Denka for short. Denkas are made with Aogami Super cores and soft stainless cladding hand forge-welded by TF. Once again, the price is double that of the Maboroshi, making them very pricey! The AS steel reaches a super hard level – 67HRC or so and features a razor thin edge that holds up well. I doubt I’ll ever buy a knife in this price range.

I have a few TF Nashiji level knives and I’m really impressed by them. I’m so impressed that I felt I had to try a Maboroshi to feel that hand forge-welded magic I keep hearing about. I ordered one from District Cutlery in Washington D.C. and received it yesterday. I haven’t used it yet, but it came scary sharp!

I like the finger cut-out in the choil (rear of blade) in the Maboroshi. It makes a very comfortable pinch grip.

Yesterday, Donna went kayaking on the Salt River again, this time with Kelly Burk. They put in at Goldfield and kayaked about two and a half hours downriver to Granite Reef. They saw nine wild horses this time. Maybe Roxy will see them next year!

We had a few interesting meals this week. On Saturday, Donna pan-seared ahi tuna and served it with jalapeno, ginger and lime sauce over white rice, with quartered cucumbers and avocado.

On Tuesday, Donna made spicy-sweet grilled chicken with dijon mustard sauce and served it with rice and grilled broccolini.

Yesterday, I fired up the Traeger wood-pellet fired smoker-grill and put on a rack of babyback ribs I’d prepped the day before. These are always a favorite. No picture this time – I’ve photographed the entire process a few times on these blog pages.

The weather has been very warm with the hottest day of the week on Easter Sunday – we hit 98 degrees. Every day has been in the lower 90s. We expected cooler temperatures by now, but it looks like we’ll have a couple more 90 degree days before the temperature drops into the 80s on Sunday and low 80s by Wednesday. With the sun rising earlier and warm mornings, we’ve been up earlier.

Tuesday morning I woke up around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and watched the sunrise over the Superstition Mountains to the east.

Most mornings lately we’re out of bed by 6:30am and off to pickleball around 8am. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday and sometimes Saturday, Donna plays tennis from 9am to 10:30am. We’ve been running the air conditioner here in the afternoon and the swamp cooler in the Arizona room, but I’m having doubts about the effectiveness of the swamp cooler. I’ll have to look into it.

*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!