Knife Update

What everyone posted pretty much confirmed what I was considering, I have 3 main options depending on how much work and care I want to put into my knives:

1. Carbon Steel Blades: high maintenance but excellent tools if you have the know how and the inclination to keep them in good condition.
2. High Quality Stainless Blades: These take less of a commitment but still need to be honed every use and professionally sharpened twice a year or so.
3. Less Costly Stainless: If you don't want to be bothered with taking care of them and don't want to spend a lot of money these are the way to go but be prepared to replace them every 4 or 5 years and they won't give you that visceral pleasure a really good chef's knife supplies when slicing through pretty much everything

I actually went to a local shop that stocks some knives and tried some out, my final choice taking into account price, quality, and availability are the Henckel Pro S series. I can either purchase the 10" Chef Knife, Paring Knife and Honing Steel locally or I can purchase a set of 7 (8"Chef, Paring, 5"Santoku, Serrated Utility, Shears, Honing Steel and a block to store them in) FOR THE SAME PRICE at Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005K8P8/ref=ord_cart_shr/102-8526757-3082555?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

I'm going to have to rely on the kindness of my friends in the States to ship them to me but this way I get a lot more bang out of my buck, not to mention a butload of books with the balance of my Christmas money.

Thank you all for your great input, what do you think of my choice?

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while...why do we say Samhain is our New Year

You know every year when Samhain comes around this bothers me, I don't really think of it as the end of the year. Yule is still part of this year and the days between it and Twelfth Night are in some way an in between time before the New Year really gets off to it's start. Which conveniently places the 1st of January right around what my gut tells me is the start of the year.

Honestly do any of you really consider the time between Samhain and Yule to be the next year? I know we love to cite the old Celts for this tradition but I have never come accross anyone here in Ireland who considers Samhain the New Year.

Shortbread question

I'm planning to make shortbread cookies for my class but I'm going to have to bake it in batches. I'm wondering if the dough will suffer if it sits out for a while, perhaps I should refrigerate it? but then I would have to let it come back up to temperature. I'm going to make a triple batch so the longest the last batch will have to wait is about 2 hours.