Here’s how I make dashi:

• 4 cups of water.
• 10 grams of kombu (optionally, soaked for 30-60 minutes)
• 15 grams of bonito flakes.

Put the kombu in a pot with the water and bring right up to a boil but don’t let it boil. Remove it, then add the bonito flakes and simmer for about 10 minutes until the bonito sinks to the bottom. Strain and save.

I use dashi for making miso soup, age-dashi tofu, or friend eggplant with dashi sauce. I’ll write about those in other posts.

Cabbage Simmered in Dashi

This was an experiment I tried today that turned out really good.

• Red cabbage, sliced.
• Half an onion.
• Dashi
• Rice vinegar
• Optionally, bonito flakes.

In a pan, cook the onions with some vegetable oil until soft. Add the cabbage and cook for a bit, then add the dashi to cover. Cook until the cabbage is soft, about 10-15 minutes. Splash some rice vinegar in the end. Optionally, you can add some soy sauce. Serve with some bonito flakes on top.

Some new plan sandwich experiments this week! Click here for post #1 in this series.

• Avocado
• Optionally, garbanzo beans
• Za’atar spice blend, or just salt and pepper.
• Veganaise or Hummus, optionally combined with Sriracha or harissa.
• Microgreens or pea sprouts.

In a small bowl, combine the avocado, the garbanzo beans, and the za’atar or salt and pepper seasoning. Mash it all together with a fork. Spread the veganaise first, then add the avocado mix, and top with a bunch of the greens.

You can do it open face, or you can also do a full sandwich. If you make a sandwich, it goes really well with pickled red onions.

Will Smith is one of the hosts of Will and Brad Made a Tech Pod, which I am a Patreon member of, and is one of my favorite podcasts. In a recent episode, Will mentioned this post in his shitty.blog blog about making oatmeal in the rice cooker. I have been trying to make good oatmeal for years and could never figure out how. I used this as an excuse for getting a new, and larger Zojirushi rice cooker, which happens to come with a special setting for oatmeal.

I make it exactly like Will describes, and sometimes I add just a bit more water or oat or almond milk to get it a bit creamier.

Some of the combos I use for flavoring:

• Fresh strawberries, blackberries, or blueberries.
• Walnuts
• Cinnamon and apple.
• Hemp, flax, or chia seed.

Overnight Oats

Ingredients:

• Rolled oats
• Almond milk
• Maple or date syrup
• Chia seed
• Optionally, yogurt. I like the Greek yogurt from Trade Joe.
• Optionally, dried berries from Trader Joe.

I use roughly a 1:1 ratio of oats to almond. Throw it all together in a jar, mix it, and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

I know next to nothing about hand planes, so I decided a great way to start learning would be by restoring one.

Disclaimer: if you are looking for how to restore a hand plane, you may want to go look elsewhere.  I am not an expert and it’s very possible some of the things I am doing here aren’t the better way to go.

I went to Ebay and bought a Stanley #4 smoothing plane.  It looked great, had all the parts in good shape, no cracks on the handles, no big scratches, and seemed pretty well used, so to me it seems like someone really gave good use to this tool and cared for it well, all good signs.  From this handy dating flowchart, I believe this is a type 14 from the 1929-30 production run.

It came with quite a bit of rust.

The first thing I did is take it apart and give it a good cleaning.

Then I left it soaking on a bath of Evapo-Rust overnight.

The next day I took out the pieces and cleaned them up with mild detergent and a soft scrub.

I spent a lot of time using sand paper to clean up the metal.  I used 150, 220, 400, 800, 1500 and 3000 grits.  I also used a small cotton buffing wheel with green compound on my dremel in the end to give it the end finish.  The result is not perfect but it’s good enough for me, at least for the level of equipment and time I want to spend in this operation.

My bench was a bit of a mess after a couple of hours of sanding.
I put it all back together and added a bit of oil on the screw treads just for good measure.

Then I moved on to flatten the base, which also wasn’t in a great shape.

For that I use a glass with different grits of sandpaper stuck to it using double sided tape.

Then I gave it a quick sharpening.  Here I was really starting to rush it because I really wanted to try it on wood, but I’ll give it a better sharpening later on, and learn how to camber it as well, which I didn’t this time.

For my sharpening I started by flattening the back of the blade and then setting the bevel to 25 degrees using a jig on my DMT diamond stones.

Then I end with 4000 and 8000 grit Japanese water stones.  The 8000 one in particular gives it an amazing razor-sharp edge.

I end with a few passes on a leather strop with green compound.

This got the blade super sharp.

It turned out looking like new in the end, and it works beautifully.