Knife skills, and getting set up

Most kitchen accidents happen with a blunt knife. A sharp blade goes where you push it; a blunt one skids off the skin of an onion and into your hand, which is why a knife that frightens you is usually one that needs sharpening rather than replacing.

You need one knife to start with. A chef's knife of 18 to 20cm will do everything on this site apart from filleting a fish and slicing bread. Hold it with your thumb and forefinger pinched on the blade itself, just in front of the handle, rather than gripping the handle like a hammer. It feels wrong for about a day and then it feels like the only sensible way to hold a knife, because the pinch grip is what gives you control of the tip.

The other hand matters just as much. Curl your fingertips under so the knuckles face the blade, and let the flat of the knife rest against those knuckles as you cut. The knife cannot reach what it cannot see. This is the claw, and it is the whole of knife safety in one movement.

Put a damp cloth or a sheet of kitchen paper under the board. A board that slides is the second most common cause of cuts, and the fix takes four seconds.

Now the part that changes how cooking feels. Chop everything before you turn the hob on. Professional kitchens call this mise en place, which only means having your things in place, and it is the single habit that separates a calm kitchen from a frantic one. Once a pan is hot you are on the pan's schedule, not your own, and trying to dice an onion while garlic burns behind you is how a good recipe goes wrong. Small bowls, a plate, the chopping board itself, anything will do. Read the recipe through first, then prep, then cook.

Raw meat gets its own board, or gets cut last and the board washed in hot soapy water before anything else touches it. Everything else can share.

Cut sizes are not fussiness. Pieces of roughly the same size cook at roughly the same rate, so an evenly diced onion softens evenly instead of giving you a mix of raw and burnt. Even is what matters, not small. If your dice is a bit rough, the dish will not care.

A few cuts cover almost everything. To dice an onion, halve it through the root, peel, lay it flat, cut down towards the root without cutting through it, then slice across. The root holds the whole thing together while you work. To slice a round vegetable, take a thin piece off one side first so it sits flat and cannot roll. To chop herbs, gather them into a tight pile and rock the knife through them rather than sawing, and stop as soon as they are cut, because over-chopped herbs bruise and go dark.

Keep the knife off the plate rack and out of the drawer with everything else; a blade that knocks against other metal goes blunt fast. A knife block, a magnetic strip or a plastic guard all work. Run it over a steel every few uses, and get it properly sharpened once or twice a year.