100 Words, Food, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Monday Mystery

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Main character: Relatively intelligent woman with cooking skills

Location:  A kitchen loaded with pots, pans, utensils and cooking toys

Weapon:  Kitchen Pro 2000

Plot:  The main character, despite being careful, always manages to cut herself when using her mandoline.  The latest attack by the mandoline occurred not when she is actually using it but as she is moving back to the sink to wash a dish.

Mystery:  Why does the mandoline have it out for her?

Any kitchen mishaps you’re willing to share?

50 thoughts on “Monday Mystery”

    3. Bill’s picture is great but if you’ve never seen a mandoline in action, here is a video. My mandoline isn’t nearly this “robust” but you they are by necessity quite sharp and you can imagine looking at this guy how easy it is to injury yourself, especially if you are using your hands, like the idiot in this ad. I ALWAYSl use the guard piece, although I manage to get cut anyway. I’ve even cut myself while putting it back into its box. If I didn’t really love the matchstick cut, I would never take it out again!

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    1. Yikes. Mine is not a serious slice. Not deep but it is almost a half inch long. Didn’t bleed as much as I was expecting.. paper towel contained the “spill” until YA brought me a bandaid.

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  6. I’ve sliced a finger on a mandoline (new tech) but I’m pretty old school. I’ve sliced fingertips two or three times with a good old chef’s knife. It happened when I was in a hurry and believed my knife skills were much keener than they actually are.

    Other mishaps include overfilling the blender and blowing the top off. The corollary to that is not having the base screwed on tight, then lifting the blender out of the stand and watching the contents leak out of the bottom.

    Then there’s setting fire to hot pads–I’m good for about one per decade. I stopped counting the times I burned my fingers on cast iron panhandles, oven racks, and metal pot lids. Finally, let’s not forget those teaching moments when we are slicing and dicing a hot pepper such as a jalapeno–without nitrile gloves or other protection–then we get an itch in our eye and unconsciously rub it without thinking. LOADS of fun that. 😦

    It’s a wonder I still bother cooking my own food. But I’m too frugal to eat out all the time, and take out pizza just doesn’t do it for me.

    Chris in Owatonna

    *BSP* I’ll be the guest author for a live Zoom even, Bookstube MN, on Thursday at 7:00. I’m also working my booth at the Hopkins Raspberry Festival Marketplace Fair on Saturday from 9-4 on Main Street in downtown Hopkins MN. For the particulars, please visit my Events and Appearances page on my website, chrisnorbury.com. *

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    2. I love that you’re actively doing all of these activities to promote your novels, Chris. It sounds like you are actually enjoying getting to know your readers.

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  7. OT:something Sherrilee brought up yesterday. I would earnestly say to anyone, if you are picked out of a random crowd for searching, it’s probably because you DON’T look suspicious. I cannot get my wife and mother in law to see this. They’ve been picked on at airports when obviously hampered with injuries, kids, whatever. If people like that never get searched, then of COURSE drug runners or whoever will want to use them. Sandra gets too full of her persecution theories to listen to this.

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  8. I’ve had my share of mundane and common kitchen mishaps, though I’ve never (yet) caught a potholder on fire. But one stands out, though I don’t know if you can call it a mishap, I did it very deliberately. I

    t happened while I was working in the hotel kitchen in Greenland. All morning long, a big nasty fly was pestering me as I was preparing the lunch smorgasbord. I had swatted at it and shooed it away numerous time, and by the time I was done and cleaning up the prep area I was determined to get him. I didn’t have a flyswatter handy, so I grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on: a heavy, wood rolling pin. I watched carefully for the fly to land and when he did, I whacked him good with the rolling pin. The trouble was that he had landed on my shin, but that didn’t register with me until I had hit him. It didn’t help matters that I missed. First and only time I used a rolling pin to try to kill anything.

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  9. Morning –
    Finally, a benefit to not cooking much; the chances for injury are reduced!

    I’ve burned myself a few times, I always use a towel as a hot holder (aka Jacque Pepin) as my hands are too big to fit in the mitts.

    I’ve said before, I feel a strange attraction to spinning or rolling blades, so I have to remind myself not to stick my fingers in there. A pizza cutter will be the death of me yet.

    We’ve burned a few things, and there’s been a few cuts, but nothing stands out – or at least that I remember.

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        1. It was quite a weekend – so might be hard to spot. We were messing with spelling words with a “y” instead of an “i” because Fenton had used the word “tyre”. After a bit Fenton said “I wonder if John Dyer could help us out of this myre?”

          Bill – how are you getting photos uploaded… I’m technologically challenged today.

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        2. Sherrilee,
          For the mandoline I just copied the address of one on Amazon. For my own photos I use the address of images I upload to my Flickr account.

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  11. My mandoline just sits in a cupboard now. I used it once, thankfully no mishaps, but I’m afraid my luck will run out too quickly. And I almost never have a use for it – my cooking for one is pretty basic. I should donate it to free up cupboard space.

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        1. In fact, if Jane ever thinks of getting one, I will install a circular saw in the kitchen, and leave Isaac and Jane to their own devices, knowing they are safe.

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  12. I have a primitive, kind of bare bones version of a mandolin that I inherited from my first mother-in-law. It can’t be that sharp anymore, but I’ve cut myself on it a number of times. I just hate it when blood gets into the soup…

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    1. There once was a Greek pork soup made with blood, called Black Soup. Also many recipes for coq au vin call for the blood of the chicken in the recipe. Maybe it adds something. Vegetarians will want to avoid it, though.

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  13. We used to have a mandoline but it never was the tool of choice. I just like doing my slicing and matchsticking with a knife. It’s meditative.

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  14. I burn myself frequently, especially when I take things out of the oven. I have had teen girl clients ask me if I was a cutter, since I have all these scars on my arms from oven burns.

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  15. I remember an incident when my mother accidentally burned something she was baking for our dinner, and although she was usually pretty unflappable, in this case she was uncharacteristically angry at herself. She had taken the dish out of the oven, closed the oven, and was assessing the damage to the dish on the counter near the sink. I came into the kitchen and was looking at the oven, which was a built-in oven at eye level, with a glass door. I could see flames. This didn’t seem like a good development, so I told my mother that there was something burning in the oven. She didn’t turn around, but snapped at me in an exasperated voice, “I know it’s burning, I can certainly see that and smell it.” My mother was almost never short-tempered, so I was a little taken aback, and was quiet for a minute, watching the wavering flames. Finally I said, in a small voice, “No, I mean something’s burning, like flames, in the oven.” She came running, then, and grabbed a tongs to pull out a burning potholder that had fallen onto the heating element. She was having a bad day. I think I was maybe eleven or twelve. I wasn’t much help in a crisis.

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