Striving for imperfection

[cabrales]

Mandolin very sharp, Adam very drunk. It took a few slices of Adam for me to notice what was going on. I now have some really cool parallel cuts on my fingers.

Adam -- Were the cuts relatively shallow?  :confused:

[Adam_Balic]

Yes, thank you Cabrales.

[cabrales]

Oh, good.

[John Whiting]

Instructions for richly flavored non-vegetarian crudities: Use a Bron Mandoline without the safety guard.

[Miss J]

Something which didn't happen to me, and has more to do with the consumption of food than the preparation of it, but is a brilliantly bizarre story nonetheless:

My boyfriend and I were at his parents' place for a nice Saturday lunch. It was a sunny day and we were eating outside on the patio, which was a bit small for a round table with four people around it. At the end of the meal, Boyfriend gets up to clear the table (what a good son) and is forced to "hop" from one foot to the other behind my chair, as there is very little room to move. HOWEVER, at the PRECISE moment that he starts to transfer his weight onto his right foot, a butter knife falls from one of the lunch plates he's carrying and, for a SPLIT second balances with the tip of the blade upright. And through an incredible act of Sod's Law, his bare foot comes down on the upright knife with the full weight of a 6.3" bloke behind it. :wow:

At the hospital, the staff was so impressed by this that they took polaroids of his foot with the butter knife sticking out of the bottom of it. They have a copy on the nursing station wall to this day, with the caption, "Death Foot."

We are very careful with butter knives these days.

Miss J

[Adam_Balic]

Instructions for richly flavored non-vegetarian crudities: Use a Bron Mandoline without the safety guard.

Yes, the chap at Dehillerin tried to sell me a guard, but I pooh-poohed the idea.

[John Whiting]

Yes, the chap at Dehillerin tried to sell me a guard, but I pooh-poohed the idea.

Are you the guy they call Three-Finger Adam?

[Matthew Grant]

No matter how many times I do it I am bound to do it again:

Brown meat in Nice heavy black iron pan, place pan in (very) hot oven), Remove pan after cooking and place on stove top, remove meat and set aside to rest, return to pan to make sauce carefully grabbing pan handle as firmly as possible without cloth. Voila! Perfectly cooked fingers, thumb and palm.

I am slowly becoming oblivious to the pain and always have the ibupofen handy in the kitchen

[Adam_Balic]

Maybe you like the pain?

JW - Nah, I imagine that they just refered to me as another foreign idiot who was begging to have his fingers cut up.

[B Edulis]

Instructions for richly flavored non-vegetarian crudities: Use a Bron Mandoline without the safety guard.

Yes, the chap at Dehillerin tried to sell me a guard, but I pooh-poohed the idea.

The only reason I haven't chucked the guard for my mandoline is that I like what it's called: the "chariot." Makes it all seem very Roman....

[Liza]

"Swing low...sweet chariot..."

[Wilfrid]

Matthew, I'm prone to that too.  And it's always a really heavy cast-iron or Le Creuset pan, so I grasp it very firmly indeed.  Yaroo! (as the fat owl of the Remove, would say...)

[jeremysco]

I was cooking pheasant casserole and it being about 10 at night thought that I would leave it on the gas hob on very low all night.

I went to bed and so did everyone else in London. This meant that the gas usage dropped and so the pressure soared. Low bubbling became a roaring flame. I woke up at 6am with a house full of fowl (geddit) smelling smoke and eventually a drycleaning bill for my flat mates suit. He had pressed it the night before and had hung it up in the kitchen ready to go to an interview the next day. He didnt get the job.

[ngatti]

They still talk about my mashed potatoes.  

I'm a new guy in the kitchen and decide I'll help cook family meal.  I insist on cooking the mashed potatoes. "Hey man!, my mashed potatoes are the best!" sez I

So I fill the robotcoupe with potatoes.  Add cream and butter and let'er rip...on high speed...For a good long while.  After all the smoother the better...right?

WRONG!

Twenty years later and they still talk about how I taught everyone how to make wallpaper paste.

Nick

[tommy]

Matthew, I'm prone to that too.  And it's always a really heavy cast-iron or Le Creuset pan, so I grasp it very firmly indeed.  Yaroo! (as the fat owl of the Remove, would say...)

i generally stay away from "me too" posts, but... right after i got my new all-clads, i started doing my famous "roasting in the pan and then making the sauce on the stove-top trick".  of course, when i grabbed the handle of the (heavy) pan once it was on the stove, i received a very interesting blister about 4 inches long across my hand.  looked like, well, you know.  at the time, i was also busy not doing very well in a drumming gig, and subsequently had a very painful set the next night.

[tommy]

edit:  ironically, my "me too" post came through twice.  oh the embarrassment.  

[netrover]

Slicing carrots the long way, the knife rolled off a carrot and cut deeply into my middle finger. A trip to the emergency room got me into stiches. Why? The attending doctor was a young lady named Dr. Pepper.

Oh, yeah, turns out I severed a nerve. My finger tip is now numb forever. Farewell to guitar strumming days...

[tommy]

at the risk of posting too much, a la wilfrid, i just remembered my first "kniving course"...  

there were a bunch of "beginners", and of course i thought the most of myself, having been a pretty decent cook for years.  well, after about 2 minutes of carving up a raw bird, i cut my finger, blood and all....limping up to the teacher, with my tail between my legs, i got the following tidbit, at a very loud volume:  "well, some has got to be the first".  the rest of the class was relieved.  and, of course, i felt like a complete idiot.  there's nothing like bleeding in front of 30 people to slap some modesty on one's ass.  

[sandymalloy]

I actually tried to separate 2 frozen crumpets with a steak knife (fortunately not the serrated kind.)  Knife went right into the webbing between thumb & index finger.  (Still hurts to think about it!)  Glad I was not wearing a bloody apron.

:-)

The co-worker I called that day from the hospital did something very similar a few years later.  So I felt a little less stupid.

In fact, this whole thread makes me feel like I've got lots of company.  Some great stories here....

[Wilfrid]

at the risk of posting too much, a la wilfrid

Just look at the numbers, dear boy, look at the numbers.  

[B Edulis]

Okay, here's a really weird one. It involves other bodily fluids. If you're squeamish, now's the time to skip the rest of this post.

It was Thanksgiving weekend, and I turned on the oven to warm up some leftovers for dinner. Pretty soon I noticed a smell, a very familiar odor to anyone who's had mice traipsing through their stove, or who's walked past an alley on a baking hot NYC day: the smell of steaming urine.

I opened the bottom door and pulled out the broiling pan and discovered the source of the smell, and lots of it. The culprit was definitely human. There were three people living in my loft at the time -- me, my significant other, and a wonderful roommate. I started hopping around about the incident and neither of them would admit that it was even urine -- which I also thought was really strange. It was really a mystery, but I pieced together what I think had happened.

Our roommate was a lovely guy, and he only occasionally over-imbibed. But when he did, he was prone to strange behavior. He is an American Indian, he had told me that alcohol had unusual effects on many of his relatives. One morning we found him sound asleep in the bathtub -- with all his clothes on.

I think that in the middle of the night he got up, headed for some white porcelain with a hinged cover, and did what came naturally.

I never said anything to him -- it was obvious he didn't remember it, and it wasn't like it, or anything like it ever happened before or again. Of course, I was the one who cleaned it up -- yechhhh. But it was one of the most bizarre kitchen catastrophes I've ever experienced.

[Adam_Balic]

Have reached new level of stupidity. Roasting a leg of lamb for Sunday Lunch, lamb Very expensive (US$50) so I used a meat thermometer. Lamb done, so I grab the Thermometer with bare hand. Large sizzle, much like when the Nazi grabs the Egyptian medallion in the Indian Jones film. Friends were laughing so hard they were sick. May cries of "it's a THERMOMETER you idiot, there is not excuse for not thinking it was hot!". Lamb was good.

[Lesley C]

A friend once made saltimbocca for 50 using toothpicks -- mint-flavoured toothpicks! You can't imagine how awful it tasted. Some idiots actually came back for seconds.  

[Sandra Levine]

Cuisine at the cutting edge

[Ron Johnson]

If you accidentally knock your ten inch chef's knife off of the counter while you are clearing the cutting board, please suppress the reflex to try to catch it before hitting the floor.  I learned that it falls point first and a well-sharpened Wusthoff will pierce the palm of the hand to a shocking depth.   It is also helpful to suppress the next reflex, which is to extract the knife as this greatly increases the loss of blood from the wound.