Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis: Hi! Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis back. We are making firehouse chili. At this point, we are going to start preparing our vegetables. We have our meat ready to go, the meat is ground beef. All is we have got to do is unpackage it, we are going to get that moving here in a couple of minutes, but now, we are going to start with our tomatoes. We have got our plum tomatoes; we are going to go ahead. What I like to do if I am dicing my tomatoes, these are so easy to dice. What I do is I just take the top off of them, I will split them down in the middle, lay them out flat like this, I go one, two and then I just basically chop them like this, thats it. Thats how easy it is, right there. If you want them a little bit smaller, make a couple of more cuts this way and then we are just going to chop them here, there we go.

This knife is Santoku Knife, which actually has these little ridges in it that keeps the tomato and whatever you are cutting from sticking to the knife, they work excellent, they are fantastic.

So, as you can see, we have quite a few tomatoes here, we are going to cut these up a little bit later on, but basically, I wanted to give you just a quick down and dirty, we are going to take the top off, we are going to split it down in the middle, and then we are going to take, cut it lengthwise and then we are going to just come back, keep your fingers back as you are cutting, and you are going to dice your tomatoes just like that. There we go, we have got a runner; we are going to put them back in, very nice. Keep your fingers back, remember, keep those fingers turn back so they stay out of the way.