The fatal design flaw with the magnetic knife rack is how one goes about attatching it to a wall. This is less of an issue of you own your house/condo, but for us renters, it gets difficult. Clearly drilling through the tile backsplash above the counter was not an option (why on earth does everyone put tile there anyways?), and drilling through the wood cabinetry was, but seeing as its not our cabinetry, I felt it was kind of a jerky move. Anyways, this was clearly a job for google.

Query: “How to put up magnetic knife rack without drilling through tile”
Answer: (Besides several dangerous but unhelpful ads for cool culinary stuff): “Two-sided tape”

Really? Thats the best we can come up with? I find it hard to believe that two-sided tape would actually hold a 1′ long strip of metal…let alone all the knives. And then there’s the issue of pulling the knives off the rack without pulling the rack off the wall. And finally, if you’ve ever tried to work with two-sided tape, you know it makes everything it touches permanently sticky. Google Fail.

Now this is the part where the “hacking” starts. Normal people would conclude one of two things:
1) I guess I’ll go buy a large wooden block that takes up valuable counter space and dulls my knives.
or
2) Screw it (no pun intended), I’m drilling into the tile/cabinetry anyways.

Hackers are not normal people. When part (most, really) of your job is to build things using parts that others before you assembled and usually failed to document, you have few if any qualms about using things in a way that was perhaps not their intended purpose. For most of us though, rather than being a skill we learned on the job, this resourcefulness is an innate quality, for which we finally found a use (besides annoying our S.O.’s). And you can’t turn it off when you leave the office. This has lead to skates being repaired with zip-ties, rusted out wheel-wells being covered with duct-tape, “drapes” (actually bedsheets) being hung with self-adhesive hooks, string and paper-clips etc. I think its that “just make it work” attitude.

And so, that was how I found myself wandering around the kitchen, knife in one hand rack in the other, placing the rack on various surfaces to see if it could possibly fit there. The (accidental) stroke of genius came when I held the rack up against the side of our metal Seville shelf from Costco, and realized that the *back* of the knife rack was magnetic too, and was now stuck, quite securely to the metal shelf!

Unfortunately, knives are made of metal too, and while the magnets in the knife rack were strong enough to hold the shelf in place under normal conditions, they were not quite strong enough to keep it there when a metal knife was being pulled off the rack.
And so a strip of wood found under the sink, and zip-ties (second only to duct tape on the quick-fix-for-everything scale) were employed to restrain it. Success. Elegant? No. Functional? Very much. A hack? Totally–but a damn sight better than two-sided tape.

I realize this is not terribly exciting to most people. But I thought I owed it to the internet at large to offer a better solution to the magnetic knife rack dilemma than two-sided tape. So there.

And so, I decided to celebrate both my kitchen and Thanksgiving (the Canadian one!) by cooking a turkey dinner. A whole turkey seemed a bit overkill though (especially since it was only feeding 4 people) and so, I took a page out of Julie Powell‘s book (or rather, an entry out of her blog and a page out of Julia Child’s book) and attempted to make Boned, Stuffed and Roasted Turkey Breast.

Now, full disclosure here, this recipe does not come from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I am not that brave. Instead, it comes from The Way to Cook, in which Ms. Child has toned things down a notch. Further full disclosure: I toned things down a few more notches. Amongst other sins, I simplified the stuffing (you really don’t need anything but bread, onion, sage and spices), I basted with chicken broth rather than butter, I made a gravy base with chicken broth and added the juices from the turkey to it at the very end (turkey breasts really don’t have the juice to make enough gravy for 4 people), and I skipped the deglazing business when I made the turkey stock from the bones (personally, I think I should get points for even *making* the stock).

Ok, so after that rap sheet of culinary short cuts, what I am about to present probably doesn’t seem quite as impressive, but I’m proud of it, so I’m going to write about it anyways.

The first challenge of this culinary endeavor began outside of the kitchen. I had been warned that unless it’s X-mas or Thanksgiving (which its not, in the US right now), that turkey breasts can be hard to come by. So when I found one in a store on the other side of town, I bought it immediately, without giving any thought as to how I might haul it home. Well, I made it about as far as UW on the bus, before giving up and calling for reinforcements (and a ride) to get myself and the turkey breast home. They are heavy little buggers.

Then came the skinning and deboning. This was actually not as scary as I expected it to be. A good knife, a large cutting board, and an extra pair of hands proved very useful.

After some careful knife-work, I was left with two massive boneless skinless turkey breasts, and an equally massive breast bone (which went directly into the stock pot, no questions asked).

Now we come to the fun part: stuffing and wrangling. I say wrangling because that is truly what it is. It took two of us, poking excess stuffing into the cavity and yanking at the cheese-cloth to beat the thing into submission. Afterwards, just to be sure, we secured it with some embroidery thread and a few knots I remembered from sailing (actually, I think it was mostly just a creative use of half-hitches). Anyways, Julia suggested sewing it…really? Sewing cheese-cloth? I think not.

(Turkey breast wrangling: before and after)

I was truly amazed that we’d made it this far without anything exploding, and the kitchen, considering the carnage that had just taken place, really didn’t look that bad. However, we’d reached the part of the recipe that scared me the most: the cooking part.

I like stews. You begin by sauteeing some veggies, add some sauce or broth, some spices, maybe some meat and a few more veggies, and let the whole lot cook. Its a very gradual process, and if at some point in that process you decide the stew needs more salt, or cumin or whatever, you just add it in, and to test when it’s done, you can try little bits of it. Roasting anything (especially meat or poultry) requires a certain leap of faith that just doesn’t exist when you’re cooking a stew. For me, this is the most terrifying part of roasting a turkey: that 2.5 hour stretch where you sit there, basting and checking diligently as the recipe tells you to, and praying to the culinary gods that you don’t undercook, or worse yet, overcook the turkey. A meat thermometer is a huge help in such situations, but really there’s no way to know for sure until you haul the bird out of the oven, remove all the hardware used to hold it together, and cut the first slice.

Luckily, the culinary gods were smiling on us that day, and we managed to get it just about right. We even timed it so that the potatoes, the turkey and the green beans were all ready at about the same time. It must have been beginner’s luck.