My wife bartends for a place that has a very good food cart who she befriended who also has an excellent knife sharpener (mechanical, then hand hone).
what used to take me 35 minutes each with a whetstone takes me five each, and I buy them a round.
Yeah, it took me yeeears to find a decent place.
I would seriously, and without any chiding tone whatsoever, advise learning to do it yourself. I just did it to a knife this evening. All you need is one good whetstone, at the ready.
Even something as cheap as this will get it done.
There are numerous youtubes about how to sharpen knives.
Thatâs good advice but it still irks me that I should have to. To return to the automotive maintenance metaphor: itâs not that I donât know how to change the oil on my car, itâs that any city with hundreds of thousands of drivers should have large number of convenient service stations.
I get it. I hate cleaning. It irks me to have to. In my world, I want that honed âshing!â to my knives and so I do it myself. Same for cleaning the pool. I donât want some dumb kid in my back yard screwing up the place. So I do that myself too. But cleaning the house? Nnnnnnnnope.
The tamari + sherry combo is a killer for all kinds of dishes, but especially soups. Youâd never consciously place it if you donât know, it just blends in and makes everything richer.
Never underestimate the power of separately sautéd onions and garlic.
Iâll just put this here:
Mushroom stock? Never thought of that! Clear stock, or cloudy with mushroom bits?
Onions and garlic after an hour, instead of sauteed first, then the peas and stock added to them?
DILL? In pea soup? Whoa.
A good umami substitution in lentil soup might work here too: 1 tablespoon each of red wine vinegar and Dijon mustard, added at the end.
cloudy. for optical reasons 
Murky and redolent! Itâs the stuff I get from the local health-food coop in the one quart cardboard boxes, if that helps; I canât remember the brand but itâs probably Pacific or Imagine.
That would be the standard way, yes; I do it that way for some other soups by sauteing them in the soup pot at the outset. That approach doesnât work as well for this one due to the initial step of boiling and draining the split peas at the beginning. Since that meant I was cooking the onion bits separately anyway, I found I like them to have a more distinct flavor so now I add them closer to the end instead of at the beginning.
As I write up these details, I realize itâs evolved gradually via a series of little changes over a period of time. Keep the successful changes, discard the meh. Eventually the accumulation becomes something special.
I think I know exactly which one you mean.
More distinct: youâre entirely upending my approach to soup-makingâŠI like it!
I hear you. This really sounds like youâve turned it into a masterpiece.
My wife is all over me for not starting cooking today. LOL. Iâm the iron chef. Itâll take me 20 minutes to throw Thanksgiving together.
I started on Sunday.
You may be Iron chef, but I am Leaf On The Wind chef.
3 bags of cranberries
3 cups sugar
Juice, zest and pulp of 2 limes, 2 oranges
A fat 3 second pour of Grand Marnier
Cook it.
Well truth be told Iâm more like Yan Can Cook.
Iâll take a pick in a bit, but two bags, a touch of salt, sugar, and I pushed it through a ricer. Itâs so effing good.
Good idea on the ricer. Iâm leaving mine chunky. I had a taste, Oy! So yum. I have the stock ready for gravy and stuffing. Everything is set. Just have to get up early for the turkey.
Bread baked, turkey boned, all stocks have beenade, all veg that could be prepared is, @renke the black forest has been baked 
, pecans candied, linens washed and starchedâŠ
Fuck it, ima gonna go to Dennyâs.
Pie pie pie pie pie pie pie!
I was gonna make it last night, but my sister and I killed a bottle of wine, and I just didnât feel like baking.
#PIE!!!
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