Equipping your kitchen

A lot of newcomers learning how to cook non-professionally at home or newly-wed couples entering their first kitchen get turned-off of cooking when they learn the various tools and equipment they need to own. Their so and so friends or grandma, or aunties or the various cook books and cooking shows and advertisements trying to sell them the idea that they need to fortify their kitchen with kitchen-ware as if they need to turn their kitchen into a full-blooded 3-star Michelin restaurant.

The fact is, you only need so much of what you will actually use. I will give you a lowdown of what you actually need, based on necessity and personal experience. Of course the list I about to give you is neither definitive nor exhaustive since what you will cook may differ with what I normally cook at home. But I’m giving you an idea of what you may necessarily be using on a day to day basis. This shall be like your basic tool-box, as you improve in your cooking skill, you may decide you need that shiny equipment as advertise in those infomercial in Channel 118 of Astro.

Knife

Now the first thing you need, the most important most essential tools a cook needs to have, is a knife. Not those bullshit 5-knives set with colorful and sometime printed flowery picture that are garbage and where you’ll definitely end up not using them but a simple, decent, chef’s knife. I could probably spend an entire column discussing about the anatomy, physiology and history of a chef’s knife but I wouldn’t want to waste your time. It looks like this:

 Please believe me when I tell you that you only need one of that in your entire cooking life. Not those full set, serrated things your facebook/instagram friends try to sell you no matter what stories they cook-up about the “magic” those knives can do. Just buy ONE chef’s knife, the length will depend on how comfortable for you to hold and use it.

For brand, depends on your preference. If you have money to burn, you can go for those high carbon stainless-steel German blades like J A Henckels. Those will set you an upward of RM300++. But high carbon blade is hard to maintain and unless you are prepared to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, I’d forgo them for vanadium steel instead. The best I can recommend is the Japanese made Global, or Kai. Theirs cost between RM100++ to RM200++. You chef’s knife will be used for everything, cutting, chopping, filleting, slicing, boning, loping, you name it. Learn how to handle your knife properly if you prefer to keep all ten fingers until the day you die, there’s a lot of websites and youtube videos that can offer that. If it ever gets dull then sharpen them as per the instruction the company tells you how to, or if you’re extremely hopelessly lazy just buy a new one.

Pots & pans

Obviously you need them to do the actual cooking. Deep bottom saucepan of various depth, at least two, one large and one medium. I can’t stress enough that your pot/saucepan must be thick-bottom. I don’t care if they tell you that it is bonded with copper, rubbed by the hands of 40 virgins, using the material NASA use to send their rocket into space, a thin-bottom pot/saucepan is good for nothing. If you prefer scorched pasta sauce, carbonized chicken, burnt garlic, then go ahead and buy those “cap harimau” pot/saucepan you can find in those Chinese hardware store.

Sauté pan. You’ll need those for a majority of dishes. They also need to be thick-bottomed and very heavy. How heavy you ask? Heavy enough to cause serious injury when smacked against the head of a person. If you are not sure which will dent; your pan or your victim’s head, then throw away that pan into your trash. If you chose to buy non-stick pan instead, treat it nicer that your wife. Never wash it but wipe it clean after every use. And for God’s sake never use metal on it, use wooden spoon or plastic spatula to toss and turn whatever you’re cooking in it. Metal is like kryptonite to non-stick pan, they’ll scratch the surface.

Wok

A wok is the most versatile equipment to cook with. You can use it for deep frying, stir frying, making sauce, even steaming (heat water on it and put your bamboo steamer on top of it!). I always find stir fried vegetables in a wok tasted better that using a sauté pan. It offers width for cooking that pots and pans sometimes could not.

Oven

The difference between normal oven and convection oven is those convection ovens have fans to circulate air around the food being cook resulting in evenly cooked food in less time than normal oven. Any type of oven is fine so long as it is big enough for you to roast an entire chicken in it. Of course, a bigger oven is always preferred and no, microwave oven is NOT an oven.

Pestle & mortars

Before anyone asks, no, it’s not mortar where the army use in the battlefield as support artillery to blow up enemy soldiers into chunks and pieces. What I mean is lesung batu, and no house in this country at least should be without one.

Blender/food processor

Blender can sometimes handle jobs that food processor normally does, but never the other way around. So if you’re strapped for cash, always put priority over buying a blender than a food processor.

Utensils

The most obvious, you forks, knives and spoons; specifically, you’ll need things like can opener, colander, whisker, potato peeler, tongs, grater, measuring cup which can measure up to 500ml@2½ cup. Anything else I’ve forgotten?

Side ingredients

There are ingredients that separate restaurant quality dishes from home cooked dishes that made all the different in the world. Sadly these ingredients are taken for granted that not many people have them ready all the time or know how to us them properly. Always have these ingredients handy and restock ready to be use at a moment’s notice.

Shallots

These little guys are ubiquitous in this country but are always taken for granted. Not many kitchens have them readily or used in cooking constantly. Perhaps maybe because they are small it is quite cumbersome to peel and people always substitute them with regular red onion thinking them of the same. But no, they’re not the same nor serve the same function. Whenever and whatever you are sautéing, despite it not being called for use in your recipe, always add in chopped/sliced shallots into it, or use it in sauce. They will make a difference to your dish.

Garlic

Garlic is God’s gift to human beings. Treat it with respect. Never put it into that presser thingy they called the garlic presser. Whatever spewed out of that thing, that is not garlic. Smash it with the flat of your knife blade, or using a mortar. Roast it entirely while it is still in cloves to be squeezed out when soft and brown. They will taste as sweet. Sliver it onto your pasta, or your salad dressing, into your aioli or vinaigrette, add it into your marinade for fish or chicken, they will all taste wonderful.

Lemon/lime

Ever wonder why everytime you ordered fried mee at mamak’s they always served it with half a lime? It’s not so that the mee will taste like lime, but rather to have contrast in the taste where the lime acted as vinegar. Add some lemon/lime juice into whatever you are cooking to have that contrast and brighten up your dish. Try this experiment, take a spoonful of whatever you’re cooking and have a taste. Then, take the same spoonful only this time add a drop of lemon/lime juice into it and see the difference.

Butter

Butter is my favourite subject. Despite what you think, every dish you ever ordered in a restaurant starts-off with butter and ended with butter. That nice brown caramelize color you see on my onion is achieved by a mixture of butter and oil. I add in butter as a finisher or starter in almost all dishes that I cook. I finish off my pomodoro (tomato) sauce with butter, roasted anything with a touch of butter, all my soups ended with butter, my scrambled egg always starts with butter, my entire life wouldn’t be complete without butter in my refrigerator. Slather some butter onto a croissant and see your world light up like fireworks. Margarine? That’s not food. Never ever substitute butter with margarine, that’s the worst crime anyone can commit. Learn to know how to differentiate between both. If it’s cheap, less than RM5, and you can find the word “palm” and “oil” in the ingredient’s list, that’s margarine. Butter is always made from dairy.

the twenty techniques: #5) Butter

If ever there is a magical ingredient in a kitchen, my pick is butter. Butter is a mystical gift from the cow which makes almost everything taste better. Butter is the most useful and most common fat for cooking and eating, and understanding how to use it makes you a better cook. Fat is good. Fat does not make us fat (eating too much does). Fat is what makes a food flavorful. I suspect that most home cook does not use butter enough. Most of us only associate butter to baking cakes/cookies. We do not truly understand how truly valuable it is.

Thinking about butter allows us to see it, and use it, as a tool. It shortens the dough that will hold your pie filling or form the cookie you baked. It enriches a sponge cake and also becomes part of the frosting on that cake. It cooks and flavors the meat in your roasting pan/tray. Basting the meat with butter simultaneously helps the meat cook and flavors it, then enriches the pan sauce you later make for the meat. The solids in butter take on extraordinary flavors when gently browned. Butter by itself is a ready-made sauce—you use it with pasta, with your steak, with a roast chicken. Add aromatics, such as a little shallot and lemon, and it becomes a more complex sauce. Knead some flour into butter, and the mixture becomes the perfect thickener for sauce. A pastry kitchen ceased to exist without butter. As my mentor and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain puts it, “In a professional kitchen, it’s almost always the first and last thing in a pan.” Butter is a great cooking medium, flavoring and giving color to sautes. Added at the end, it completes a dish, making it more luscious, and it smoothes out the texture and flavor of the finished sauce.

Butter as cooking medium
Raising heat to a butter melts it. The higher the heat the water in the butter cooks off more rapidly. Once that happens, the butter solids browned and coloring and flavoring the food you cook it with. The only thing to do once this happens is to make sure the solids don’t burn. Basting, spooning butter over what you’re cooking, does two things: it flavors the food with the butter fat and the browning butter solids, and it cooks the food from the top down while the hot pan cooks it from the bottom up. For sauteing fish, chicken and beef at hot temperature (try it istead of using oil), use clarified butter. Butter can be clarified by melting the butter over low heat, the solids will rise to the top and are spooned away as the water cooks off until all you are left with is pure butter fat. Poaching is another technique which is wonderful when using butter. Butter is whisked into a bit of water and melted. This dense, flavorful medium cooks food very gently and is thus well suited to cooking ingredients that need gentle heat such prawns/shrimps.

Butter as shortener
If you always wonder why they called it shortener, it’s because they shorten the strands of gluten in the flour which results in tender crumb when you bake the flour mixture, which you want in a pastry crust. Without shortener, they becomes chewy like a bread. Butter is an excellent shortener compared to vegetables shortening or lard, because of the flavor. Try making a pie with both using butter and vegetable shortening and taste the different. Whenever a recipe for pastry calls for vegetables shortening, i always use butter instead. (As butter encourages the formation of gluten, do not knead your pastry too much or it’ll end up too chewy.)

Butter as enricher, thickener and finisher
Most hot, stock-based sauces are improved when you finish them by swirling in a little butter just before serving. This is called mounting a sauce with butter. The butter smoothes out the texture of the sauce, making it more voluptuous and satisfying. It’s a terrific way to enrich a sauce while improving its texture.

Butter as garnish
Using compund butter is a teriffic way to garnish most grilled/barbecued or roasted meats and fish. Simple to make, it can be varied according to your whim. Let the butter soften, then mix in aromatics, fresh herbs, minced shallot, or lemon, rolled into a log using plastic wrap/cling film, then is sliced and placed atop hot meat or fish, over which it will slowly melts. This is a standard practise for most hotel restaurants and it’s a great technique to enhance home cooked dishes.

Salted, or unsalted butter? It’s a matter of preferrence actually. Butter was salted to preserve it, now it’s more because of flavoring. If you do not want too much salt in your cooking and you want greater control of the amout of salt you’re using (especially when making pastry) use unsalted butter. I prefer using salted, due to the flavor and because unsalted butter generally cost more here. What is more important is the quality of the butter. You’ll normally get what you pay, so make your choice well.

The story of fat
Butter is fat, so is oil. When you’re cooking your food, take a spoonful to taste and think. Apart from correcting the seasoning with salt and pepper, and evaluating the acidity, whether you need to add a bit more vinegar/lemon juice, ask yourself if you have the depth of texture and satisfying nature that I’m after? If not, fat may be the solution. Butter is the most common finishing fat used. So does oil. Determine the kind of fat you may requires. Your choice of fat makes a difference in the finished dish. Use butter in a pie will result in rich and flavorful pie crust, use vegetable shortening and your flavor is neutral. Extra-virgin olive oil would be ruined in a hot saute pan. Use it cold or warm for its elegant flavor. So choose your fat according to the results you want.

the twenty techniques: #4) Onion

Onion is chef’s or any cook’s secret weapon. Onion is among the most powerful flavoring devices in the kitchen but because onions are abundant and cheap, they, like salt and water, tend to be overlooked for what they are: a miracle ingredient that transforms food in many ways, in nearly every style of cuisine around the world. Every time i do my grocery i would buy onion, some sort of a fetish, because i have a fear to not have them when i need them.

Onion is unique compared to other ingredients in an interesting way: it behave differently to different ways one might use them. Think about it for a second, onions are not a one-note ingredient like, say, lemon juice. Lemon juice is lemon juice. Add more, or add less, heat up, cool down and it’s always lemon juice. Onion has sort of a control by how much heat you bring to it, and for how long, before you add the other ingredients it will support. Used raw, onions have one effect on a soup or sauce or stock; lightly cooked but not browned, another effect; cooked for a long time but still without color, still another effect; taken further and browned, still another. Poach onions, and they’re different again. Roast them, and they’re a unique preparation. Macerate onions in vinegar, and you have yet another effect.
Onions add both sweetness and savouriness, a satisfying depth of flavor—in varying degrees depending on how you heat them. I remembered as a child i detested onion, i would always tried to separate them before eating any dishes that incorporate them. Now, i can’t be separated from my onions whenever i cook.

As describe by Michael Ruhlman, in terms of onion as tool/technique, there are three main subjects to recognize: the workhorse onion itself, sweating, and caramelizing.

The workhorse Onion
The basic white and yellow storage onion is your workhorse onion, the onion you should always have on hand. When you shop, you should look at the quality of the onion rather than seek out a specific type, look for those with furm bulbs and tight dry skin. I always like my onions big, that way i don’t waste time peeling them. If only a portion is used, i would wrapped the leftover before storing in the refridgerator.

Sweating
Sweating (to release water to the surface if the onion into small beads, using heat) is a technique to gently heat the onion in a small amount of oil or butter without browning it. As the onion loses water, its flavors begin to concentrate, and the heat transforms the sugars in the onion into increasingly complex and delicious compounds. Try the difference, simmer some raw onion in a small amount of water for ten minutes, and do the same with some onion that has been sweated first. The water with the sweated onions will be distinctly sweeter. Use that sweetness to good effect in your dish. Sometimes when you want some raw effect (especially in stock when you do not want them to be sweet, i use raw onion directly without sweating it first). But for the majority of preparations, we need to heat the onions first, and sweating is the most common of these steps.

There are a few critical things to understand about sweating. The longer the onion is sweated, the sweeter and more complex their flavor becomes. This is your control. Sweat them for a few minutes, just until they’re translucent and softened, and they have one flavor. Sweated for two hours, without color, they are deeper, richer, and sweeter. The “without color” part is important. Once they’ve lost enough water and get hot enough to begin to brown, the flavor becomes radically different from that of sweated onions. When that happen, it is another different process by which it is called caramelizing. Understand the impact sweating has and to evaluate what effect you’re looking for. Make a plan based on what you want. And use the onion to help you get there.

Caramelizing
When most of the water in the onion has vaporizes and the onion begins to brown, we have what we called caramelized onion. Caramelized onions are sweet, savoury and nutty. The key to caramelization is time. You can’t caramelize onions quickly. The onions need to cook in stages, and if you try to use too much heat, the onions will burn before they are even brown. To caramelize onions, peel and slice them as thinly as possible. Heat a little butter or oil in a heavy pot or pan, add the onions, and cook slowly over low heat, stirring occasionally. First they will sweat, then they will drop a lot of water so that they’re stewing in onion water. The water will eventually cook off, and the onions will continue to break down and become brown. While there are infinite gradations of caramelization, practically speaking, the gradations break down into two types: lightly caramelized— when the onions are browned but still retain some of their shape—and heavily caramelized—when a big batch of onions is reduced to what appears to be nearly a darkish brown paste. How much you caramelize your onions depends how you want your finished dish to taste.

The amazing shallot
Shallot works just like the regular onion but has a sharper flavor when raw and a greater sweetness and flavor after it has been cooked or macerated in acid. Sweated, they are a great way to begin almost any kind of savory sauce. Add them raw to mushrooms you’re sautéing and they will light up those mushrooms. Caramelized, they add intense flavors to sauces, soups, and stews. Used whole, they are a great component in stews. Use them and you can bring your home cook to a new level of achievement.

the twenty techniques: #3) Water, miracle in the kitchen

Yes, water. Why you say? Consider this, water is so ubiquitous, so prevalent in cooking, that most (if not all) books, magazines, televisions don’t include is as an ingredient in recipes. But without it, you cannot cook (maybe you can, but how then would you clean the dishes to cook thereafter?). Due to its seemingly unlimited nature, we tend to overlook it for what it is: a miracle ingredient we use every daye. Water holds an extraordinary amount of thermal energy and convey its temperature very quickly to food. You’d have to leave your hand in a 100 degree C oven for a long time before you’d feel uncomfortable. Try sticking your inside the same temperature of water.

We need to know the charachter of water before we can fully understand how to use it to good effect to our cooking. Water have such a density that it is relatively slow to heat up, contains so much energy and is also slow to cool down. This density allows fat to rise to the surface of a soup or stock and be skimmed from the top. Water boils at 100 degree C and can exist simultaneously as liquid and solid at 0 degree C. Add salt to such an ice water and you lower the freezking point, making it colder and thereby allowing you to chill food very fast or to transform a custard into ice cream. When water gathers enough energy (by heat), it would not be able to contain its volume, thus turning into vapor, which contain even more energy than it has when it was in liquid form. Therefore, vapor, or steam, can be hotter than 100 degree C and makes an excellent cooking tool. Understanding water’s behaviour makes you a more efficient cook.

We use water as a cooking tool in five distinct ways:

1. As a direct cooking medium (boiling, steaming, poaching)
2. As an indirect cooking medium (water bath)
3. For cooling and freezing
4. In the from of brine
5. As a tool to extract flavor from food and serving as the medium for flavor.

Boiling food, while seems simple enough, does involve some technique. The most common error people make when they boil food is using too little water. Boiling in abundant water is key to good boiling. It’s the energy that water can contain, not the volume of water, that matters. The more enery (more water),the faster you can cook what you’re boiling. Ideally, you should have so much water relative to the amount food that the water does not lose its boil when you put the food in. Pasta too, should be cooked in abundant water as quickly as possible. Steaming is much hotter than boiling, but less predictable. Steamed and boiled vegetables are almost identical, but i find boiling more consistent since you boil at temperature of 100 degree C always, but steaming can always get hotter. We poach food that benefits from moisture but does not benefit from speedy cooking of boiling which would damage the food. We poached fish, egg, delicate mixture of ground meat or seafood, and root vegetables. The techniques of poaching will be discussed elaborately in future posting.

Using water in indirect cooking involves having a barrier between the water and the food, some kind of vessel set into hot water, or having a saucepan with the intended food to cook rest inside another saucepan with hot water inside (a method called water bath). Using water bath takes advantage of water’s capacity for gentle heating to set custards and to cook other egg-based dishes. Part of the advantages of a water bath is that it is continuously evaporating; as the water becomes vapor, it takes the heat away with it. So even as water bath is heated by the oven, it is cooled by evaporation, ensuring that very moderate heat surrounds whatever you’re cooking. Prood of the gentleness of water bath cooking is that a cheesecake baked in an oven typically cracks as it cools; the same cooked in a waterbath in the oven will not.

When water contains enough salt, it becomes a brine. Brine flavors food. Aromatic seasonings in a brine get carried into the meat. We poached almost every food in a brine, such as court bouillon. Broths and stocks are examples of flavor extraction. When most foods are heated in water, the water takes on the flavor of the food. Imagine this remarkable and powerful charachter of water, the same thing doesn’t work with oil, or any other non water-based liquid. Using water, we extract the flavor of other foods (leftover chicken carcasses, for instances) to transfer the flavor into the water (becoming broth) which in turn is used to flavor another food, such as soups. Pour ingredients that are heavily water-based over food, and the flavors merge. Pour some water over sliced onion and carrot, and heat the water, and you’re gonna have a water that’s sweet and delicious from these sweet root vegetables. Use the water to poach a fish. Empty a can of peeled plum tomatoes over sauteed beef chuck, add some onion and garlic, simmer for a few hour, you’ll have a beef stew.

Water is indeed a miracle. It is also like a wild horse, it’s full of potential and such a powerful force, but it needs to be tamed first. Understand and learn how to control water will make you an excellent cook.

the twenty techniques: #2) Salt

Thomas Keller, the fame chef of The French Laundry, restaurant, once asked about the most important thing for a cook to know?”. He didn’t pause long before saying, “Seasoning.”
“Seasoning, meaning what?” when enquired further. “Salt and pepper,” he said. Then he narrowed it further. “Salt, really. How to use salt. It’s the first thing new cooks are taught. How to season the food.”
Salt is not just an ingredient, it’s a technique, an important skill. When something was wrong with a dish, the most common reason was too little or too much salt. Learning to use salt in and on your food is akin to the life and death of a dish.

Type of salt: Course or fine salt.
It’s a matter of preference. Coarse salt is easier to hold and easier to control than fine salt. Salting is an inexact skill, meaning there is no way to describe in words how much salt to use in any given dish. Instead, it is up to the cook, a matter of taste. Also, people’s salt preferences differ, given one’s expectations of saltiness. So always salt to taste. When a recipe calls for a precise measure of salt, a teaspoon, say, this is only a general reference. You may need to add more. How do you know? Taste the food. Measure with your finger, learn to season by feel and by sight. Soon you’ll know how much a teaspoon/tablespoon is like in between your thumb and forefinger. Again, the reason to use coarse salt is that it’s easy to control. But if you feel more comfortable using fine salt, there’s no reason you shouldn’t. I for myself use fine salt when seasoning fish and stock and broth.

Using salt throughout cooking. First and foremost is salt’s use in general cooking. It heightens flavors across the board, from savory to sweet. When the main ingredient goes into the pan, tomatoes for a sauce, say, so does a little more salt. Not too much, but in the end, it’s going to have a little more depth and flavor than had I not seasoned it. If you do all the seasoning right at the end, the flavor will be a little different. Add salt for stocks, soups, sauces, and stews earlier rather than salting at the end, which gives the salt no opportunity to distribute itself throughout the ingredients. You’ve got to give salt a little time to work its magic.

Salting for meat benefited by doing it early, as early as you’re back from the grocery store right before you wrap the meat and send it to the freezer. Salting early has an additional health and flavor benefit in that it inhibits spoilage bacteria. Except for chicken, if you salt a chicken well in advance of cooking, the salt will dehydrate the skin, and the skin, when roasted, will be a smooth, shiny golden brown. This is fine if that’s how you like it. But I like a salty, crusty skin on a roasted bird, so I salt a chicken aggressively, using about a tablespoon of salt, just before it goes into a very hot oven.

Salting for fish, it’s best to apply it using fine salt just before cooking, since the big grains of coarse salt can actually “burn” the flesh.

Salting water, for a big pot, this requires more than a pinch. I add about 2 tablespoons of salt for every 4 liters of waters,or 10 grams for 1 liter, a 1-percent salt solution. The result, whether you’re cooking pasta or rice or any other grain, will be perfectly seasoned. So taste your cooking water for the saltiness. It does not have to be precise, more importantly, the saltiness of that water will transfer directly to the ingredients you’re using it for, either pasta, grains, green vegetables or starchy one such as potatoes.

the twenty techniques: #1) Think

Before i start sharing recipes, tried and tested, i would like to share something that is the utmost important that most cook-books, cooking shows, and cooking websites alike seem to neglect, which is technique. All cooking rests on a set of fundamental techniques, know this fundamentals, and there’s very little you won’t be able to do in a kitchen. But why learn techniques? Take for instance, the typical recipe of cooking pasta, “Bring a pot of water to boil and salt”, seems so rudimentary enough, but then you start asking questions, “how much water?”, “how much salt to use?”.

These are the kind of questions where only your techniques could answer. You felt that you knew what a certain recipe is asking for but the second after you’d be in doubt. I learn these 20 techniques from Michael Ruhlman, an author and a chef, well not really a chef, but this is a writer whom in his quest to understand the world of culinary and in order to write about them, enroll himself in the most prestigious cooking school in the US, the fame, most revered, Culinary Institure of America, dubbed the CIA. Here i am, after understanding his techniques, sharing it with everyone in an attempt to have organization in the kitchen the most important tools of cooking. They begin where cooking begins, with thinking.

Think: Where cooking begins.

Thinking in the kitchen is underrated. When you have a recipe that says, “Combine A and B, add C, stir and bake for 20 minutes as 180 degree C”, do you simply follow the instructions? Cooking doesn’t work that way. There’s too much variables in cooking that can never be accounted for. For instances, try to write a perfect recipe for a simple buttered toast? There’s no exact way to explain the variable temperature of the butter, how thick the bread is, what type of bread, how hot the toaster gets.

Before you being cooking, stand still. Think. Imagine what is about to happen, your next move, what comes next and after. Without thinking, you’d be scramblling for the cook book for every single step describe in the recipe. Even after cooking the same dish over and over again you still feel uncomfortable without the recipe in hand or next to you, you worried that you may miss a step or two. By thinking, you eliminate that barrier. You will cook with a smooth motion, because you have pictured in your mind what step comes after each other, what needs to be done and when to do it.

So before you begin, stop for a moment and think. Visualize the sequence of your action and then begin to work. And as you work, while you’re doing one thing, think about what you’ll be doing next and next and after that. Clear your way. Always be thinking.