Sam's Cookalong Diary Getting to grips with knives

Date Published:

10/01/2008

Watch the video

Buying knives for the Cookalong with Gordon is trickier than it sounds. By our Cookalong guinea pig Sam Jordison

I’m ever so slightly scared of Gordon Ramsay. Not in a bad way, you understand. I know he’s got my best interests at heart and that if I follow his advice properly then everything should be as easy as those things I’ve been fobbing off as pies in the past [see here].

Staring into my cooking-soul

Even so, there is something frightening about the way he stares at the camera before clicking his fingers. Something that suggests he's staring right through the screen into my own cooking-soul. A cooking-soul that he finds wanting, meaning that any second now he will have to give me a damn good bollocking.

I’m sure Freudian psychologists could get an awful lot of mileage out of the slightly dominant relationship the big sweary man has with the nation, but on a personal level, I think it works well. Even though I'm probably never going to meet him, there's part of me that’s almost keening to please him. This desire to be Gordon's dog may be slightly undignified, but it's largely beneficial. The net result of it is that I'm pretty confident I'm going to be a better cook by the end of next week.

Counting the cost

Before I get to that stage, however, there’s some pretty serious preparation to do. When I watched the first three videos and printed off the lists of equipment and ingredients, I began to worry that I was going to have to part with a considerable chunk of cash.

Once I’d properly checked through my kitchen, however, and following on from the advice on the films I realised that the only major expenses I’d face were for that “nice heavy-duty knife” Gordon mentions and the steaks themselves. I’m going to double up with two medium-sized frying pans and reckon I can pretty much muck along with everything else.