Fun with Knives

Fun with Knives
16.11.08
Actually, I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t done it before. Slice my finger open, that is. See, there aren’t really cutting boards here. So, when I was helping my host mothers prepare dinner, it’s just our hands, the veggies, and a knife. Sometimes terribly dull, sometimes very, very sharp. And this includes vegetables like carrots and onions and tomatoes. There are some different techniques that I learned to avoid cutting myself, and they worked while I was living with my host family, and cutting veggies the Moroccan way. For example: when chopping an onion, hold the onion in the palm of one hand and chop it up, but don’t go all the way through. Then slice through the now pre-cubed onion. Pretty slick, right? Peeling tomatoes is tricky. Yes, I said peeling tomatoes. Moroccans (or at least Berbers in the two regions where I have lived) have a strong predilection to peeled vegetables. So, not only carrots, turnips and potatoes are peeled, but tomatoes and cucumbers, too. I believe this may have something to do with the general lack of teeth often observed… but who knows! So, to peel a tomato, you really do want a sharp knife, because a dull one just can’t make it through the skin. But you can make do by stabbing the point of the knife in to make an entrance and then pull of the skin from there.
But tonight I was chopping veggies American style, that is, using a plastic plate as a cutting board. And I was chopping fast, thinking about other things, and then I felt my knife hit my thumb tip. No pain, not yet. Too sharp of a blade and too fast moving. My nerves felt mostly the pressure. And there I am halfway through a soup recipe with my thumb. As I want to eat dinner, I keep cooking, and administer first aid to myself at the same time. Hopefully no blood got in the soup, but I guess it doesn’t really matter since only I am eating it anyway… somehow the soup got cooked, and my thumb was washed, allowed to stop bleeding and bandaged all at the same time. The soup turned out well, but the beans still aren’t quite done. I haven’t mastered beans yet. But the real miracle is that I didn’t take off another patch of skin at least while making first aid white bean soup. J