The knives I use in my cooking are from a simpler time. The cerrated knife I bought when I started university. The other cerrated knife that came with the house. Their blades a default three/four inches long. Their capabilities by and large good enough for anything I've attempted so far.
So when I look at the blades in the shop, I feel a kind of inadequacy. I stand and wonder what world their purchase would transfer me to - a world in which onions would just fall apart as I gave them a poke, where potatoes would slip out of their skins with a little applied pressure, where fish would fillet themselves as I glanced them with the knife. Of course, this is probably the image the knife manufacturer's are trying to project, creating a confusion of knives in the hope that people will conclude their usefulness, and be left with the necessity to add an avocado knife to their collection of kitchen gadgets.
So I thought I'd turn to the other cooks amongst my readership: knifes - essential implement or con?