My DVR is also giving me the "this is how you record shows" no love message.

So, I'm cooking a mushroom and mozzarella risotto and thinking about Top Chef. In lieu of an episode, I want to talk about knife skills. What are they? Who has them? How does one obtain them?

I was cutting my onions tonight, and thinking, how do people cut onions? 'Cause I sure don't do the weird horizontal slicing thing Casey was doing. I used to do the awesome blossom sort of cut, where you'd slice downward into the onion in a grid, then turn it on its side and slice off the little chunks. But now I've gotten to the point where I cut off both ends (I figure the crying is a small price to pay if I can get it done faster.) then I slice the onion in half. I lay the halves flat, so it's easier to maneuver, then I slice them vertically and horizontally. Then I chop, if necessary, until I get the right consistency.

What do you do? What am I supposed to do?

Liese I pretty much chop onions the way you do. I start opposite the hairy end because I've heard cutting the hairy end is what makes tears but I still have to put my head in the freezer especially when I'm cutting the stinky white ones. To me knife skills just means using the knife the way it was designed, you use your thumb and forefinger to guide the blade as opposed to having a death grip on the handle and you chop with a rocking motion to prevent food from sliding out from underneath the blade.

I think that knife skills aren't about tricks or whatever. It's more about practice.

Once you've got that callous on the inside of your index finger you've got the skills.

I cut onions the way Casey and Sara were doing it -- cut off one end, peel, cut horizontally and vertically towards the poles and then chop down.

Knife skills are partly about practice, but also about knowing how to cut stuff up. Deboning a chicken or filleting a fish are both knife skills, but they're as much about knowing the critter's anatomy than about knowing how to hold a knife.

I cut my onions the way Casey and Sara and Jessica do. I'm not that sensitive to onions, so unless I'm chopping a bunch of onions.

I think knife skills are all about learning the way to cut up things and then practicing so that you can do it competently and get uniform results.

My knife skills aren't the best, but I definitely feel comfortable using a knife and I don't worry about getting cut.

Sadly, it looks like Mia's restaurant (Mia - from Season 2 of Top Chef) has gone out of business.

Oh my.

Sparkle! Josh's website.

Top Chef: Yahoo Quickfire preview.

Also, over at TWOP, I hear that in a preview for Tim Gunn's new show it says that the season 4 PR designers will be introduced on Tim's show.