Homemade Sausage Making

I picked up a knife tonight to do some work and looked at the edge and I could SEE it. So I got out my stones and repaired the edge. I must find a way to keep the edge from being damaged. Perhaps tomorrow I will make a new knife holder on the inside of a cabinet door.

I've always liked a wood block that holds a half dozen knives and a sharpening steel, more convenient to have them on the counter. I find myself honing them alll the time so they are razor sharp when I need use of them, cut only meat and veggies, never any bones or paper. My favorite way to halve chickens is with a sharp hand ax powered by a 16oz finish hammer. RAY

Ray, If you stand the whole chicken on its neck end and start a cut about quarter inch off the center line of the tail, the joints in the skeleton separate easily along natural lines. I remove the spine this way and then the sternum by nicking the cartilage and breaking the wishbone and pulling the "keelbone" out.

I keep my hunting and kitchen blades like razors, my wife won't touch them, another reason I do 99% of our cooking. Any time contact with bones is expected I just like to opt for something that was made solely for that purpose, maybe a little tap-tap-tap with the same hammer I made a living with for so many years. The cleaver, ax, and meat saws are also at maximum sharpness, a 2" chisel works nicely for me at times also. About the only thing I use my tools for anymore.

I have learned that it is easier to sharpen an edge than to make an issue of knife handling.