I watched my dad and grandpa sharpening knives with a whetstone and leather strop many times as a kid. It's a talent I don't have, and I've tried many types of steels, etc. I'll just stick with my sharpening gadget since I only have to slide the knife through it.
I do that with axes and knives. In reviews, I see that people often complain that their axe wasn't sharp enough when it was delivered, but I prefer putting my own edge on an axe. If you put too sharp of an edge on an axe, it will chip. That can be fixed too, but it's more work. Knives are just relaxing to sharpen.
Same with lawnmower blades. Razor Sharp = Razor Thin. Grass and small twigs will chip it, and then you're basically tearing the grass instead of cutting it.
I have two of the drag through or what I call V sharpeners. One uses a steel and the other a stone. I use them on my smooth blade small kitchen knives and they work great. I mainly use the V steel one for sharpening and some times the stone one just to polish the blade. The steel one works on my small serrated blades but it is easier just to grab my ceramic rod (steel) to keep the edge fine. The complaint I have about the stone one is it doesn't hit either the tip or up by the handle. It does polish the rest nicely, but I like an even sharpness, tip to handle. Like you, I find the hand V steel gadget the quickest and easiest for keeping knives sharp. Usually three swipes and they are razor sharp. You can tell by the wear on it, it isn't a neglected kitchen gadget. You can see the red stones in the stone one.
I thought about getting a mandoline slicer because I thought it would be safer & faster. But after I learned safe knife skills from You Tube chefs, the knife seemed safer. And easier to clean. I do have an infrared temperature thing. I only use it for coffee to get the right water temperature.
I mostly use the mandoline when slicing a volume of potatoes for a casserole or for pan frying...I get a uniform slice. My mandoline goes in the dishwasher, and so far it's survived...but I rarely use it because of the inconvenience relative to a knife. At one time there was a knife skills class in Charlottesville, but it no longer seems to be offered. As much as I like to cook, I wish I had taken some formal basic kitchen/cooking skills classes. Regarding an IR gun...I got my money out of mine. It helped me discover that there was a massive air leak around my attic stairs. I used it to decide where to place the thermometer on my wood stove, and to find out why some of the thermometers were nearly 100° off from each other. I still used it on the wood stove as a comfort factor to verify the accuracy of the thermometer I use. They're pretty slick...you just gotta be aware of their limitations. Now that I have one, I wish I had upsized to one with a contact thermometer so I could calibrate the gun to the specific object.
Yeah, a mandoline is most useful for uniformity. Also, I like "crinkle cut" pickles and I can't do that with a knife.
The IR gun I got from Amazon is very accurate. It uses 2 lasers & can be calibrated for different hard surfaces and liquids, which have differences in how they reflect heat. Order detailsOrdered on October 3, 2022 (3 items) ThermoPro TP450 Dual Laser Temperature Gun for Cooking, Digital Infrared Thermometer for Pizza Oven Grill, Laser Thermometer Gun with Adjustable Emiss ThermoPro
I received a Yahoo email with a few interesting gadgets: First is a set of silicone sandwich holders to stop the slop from falling out the back, whether you're eating burgers, sloppy joes, bbq, etc The other item is grilling baskets for kabobs, to use in place of skewers. I don't like the examples with things jammed in there, since the pieces in the middle will not get exposed to the grill. But I bet these would work great single-layer for your classic kabobs to stop the onions & shrooms from spinning around so only one side gets cooked. Those two items on either end are regular skewers with "pushers" that slide to push the cooked food off. I doubt they would work very well, since we've all had those cooked-on pieces that get really stuck somewhere along the way. Scrunching up the other pieces of food to push them off ain't gonna work...they gotta be freed up individually.
The sandwich holders are ridiculous; at some point you'll have to take the sandwich out of there to finish it. (Also in that picture, the food must be fake because those dogs aren't reacting to hamburgers at all... never gonna happen. ) That reminds me that I saw some silicone egg poaching cups on Amazon and almost bought them. Then I remembered that I don't like poached eggs.
I was looking at canning supplies earlier, and on the Ball Mason website I noticed the newest "keepsake" mason jars feature a honeybee design. Being a sucker for any kitsch, I ordered them immediately.
I was gonna comment about the "half-a-sammich-in-a-bowl" thing, and even looked at the Amazon comments to see what others had to say about it. The only consistent negative comments were that--unlike similar products--this one was real stiff, so you cannot grab the sammich. Others like it being stiff because it as a flat bottom so will sit upright instead of being laid down on the plate, like the burger in the middle of the table in the pic. I assumed the dogs aren't going for the sandwiches because they don't like soy products Regarding the Mason jars: I use them for non-canning food storage purposes all the time. I have a Food Saver attachment for canning jars, so it sucks the air out of them and you gotta pry the lid off to break the seal. Since it's not truly "canned," you can reuse the lid over & over. I prefer the glass jars to plastic containers.
I am looking for a manual grapefruit juicer.I looked on Amazon but the one I thought would be good(Rubbermaid)because it had the grip on the bottom is unavailable.