Static Zombie

Bleed For Your Dinner

I decided to capitalize on today's holiday by breaking in part of the All-Clad set I got for my birthday (thanks, mom!). I cooked up a lamb tagine (recipe courtesy of The Best Recipe: Soups & Stews from the good folks at Cook's Illustrated) which turned out to be dee-lish. The secret ingredient? Human blood.

I used a different knife than I normally use-- thicker, sturdier, and sharper. All to the good, no? No. It has a tendency to slide as it cuts. As I minced some garlic, for example, I noticed that rather than slicing cleanly through the clove, the blade sometimes sheared away from it partway through the motion. Perhaps I'm just used to manipulating a thinner, duller knife, and the sharpness of this one requires a different technique. Or perhaps the knife is being guided by an otherworldy force-- the soul of a man slain at the forge where the knife was made, now forever trapped within the blade and inflicting minor cuts in mute outrage over being forced to spend eternity inside a freaking kitchen knife instead of something cool like a katana or chainsaw.

But my money's on technique.

I've chopped hundreds, perhaps thousands of onions in my life. Tonight, when coarsely chopping the first onion, the knife slid off the onion and sliced my finger. Nothing too bad, a fairly shallow cut at the base of the nail of my left index finger. I cursed, sucked on it, rinsed it off, and made a mental note to be careful with this knife, which gleamed balefully in the pale fluorescence of my kitchen.

And so on to onion number two. Holding it gingerly this time, I proceeded to chop with careful, deliberate motions. Which made absolutely no difference, as the knife slipped again and carved a deep gouge in almost precisely the same spot as before, but on my middle finger this time. More cursing, more sucking as I cast the knife away like a viper into the sink. The smell of brimstone rose from the pipes-- a stygian stench of rot and decay that threatened to pull my soul into the depths from which it came. Or just the remnants of last night's dinner in the disposal-- a quick flick of the switch washed it away. I made a brief detour into the bathroom and thanked the nice people at Microsoft for handing out first aid kits at the company picnic this summer.

A couple of hours later I took the almost-finished tagine from the oven to add some last-minute ingredients. That done, I grabbed the lid to recover the pot and return it to the oven. And discovered that 45 seconds is enough time to completely forget the laws of thermodynamics-- and not nearly enough time for a stainless steel lid to release the heat it builds up from two hours in a 300 degree oven.

And so, with two bandaged fingers and a seared thumb, I savored every forkful of tagine this evening as I researched Seattle-area knife-skills classes on the Web.

Posted by Peter at January 1, 2004 10:03 PM