A Wandering Mind and Daydreams Should Never Friend A Knife

Saturday afternoon, after Jack and I ran our multiple errands and had lunch, we returned home so I could resume studying and he could watch old movies.

I studied my assigned reading in baking, safe food service and stock production! My mind was now a veritable cornucopia of thoughts ranging from baking conversions and making a brown stock to the prime temperatures needed to ensure that the microorganisms in food have a full blown hootenanny. (I must confess that I've always wanted to use veritable cornucopia in a written passage, but never did I think I'd get to use it in the same sentence with Hootenanny ! Monday is starting out much better than anticipated!)

Once the studying was complete, it was time to get the cocktail hour of our evening underway. The nibbles planned for this evening included a classic shrimp cocktail and some sort of cheese and crackers.

When the cooked and frozen shrimp were mostly defrosted, I noticed that there were some odd white markings on the little critters which I couldn't identify. At first, Jack and I thought that it was due to the shrimp being overcooked prior to freezing. While staring at the thawing crustaceans sitting in the colander in the sink, my mind went back to my safe serve homework. Which disease was it that could make you sick regardless of whether the ocean tidbit in question was cooked and then frozen and then reheated? Even more troublesome was remembering what the symptoms were if you were infected? Was it merely fever and chills we'd have to endure or was it the very disturbing and painfully upsetting stomach issues?!?!

After throwing the mostly thawed shrimp into the garbage, we decided to abandon our cocktail hour and I started chopping carrots to go with our soon to be grilled steaks.

I'd chosen carrots as a side dish because I thought I'd be a responsible culinary student and practice my knife skills. Jack was happy because, well, he likes carrots. So, I started peeling a pound or two of carrots and begin practicing. All was going well and I began to feel as though I'd not only retained all the recently learned skills, I had now mastered them.

If you've never spent a significant amount of time cutting one vegetable, I will tell you that it is no different than any other tedious and time consuming task such as filing or rolling up a jar of pennies. It's not terribly difficult and after one file is filed, one role of pennies is rolled or one carrot is chopped, you set yourself up to do it all over again. And again. And again. To make this time go faster, your mind goes on a trip if you don't have music playing or someone to talk to which keeps your mind it in it's place, namely, on the task at hand. It's here at this point that I started thinking of the diseases conjured up by the white markings on the shrimp. Which then made me wonder if the same markings would appear on cooked lobsters or crab. The crabs made me think of a recent episode of The Deadliest Catch I watched where these crab fisherman were out in these awful seas with seventy foot waves all so that I could make crab cakes. Mmmmm, crab cakes, when did I have them last? That made me think of what the filming of that show must really be like and did these rugged men worry about how they looked on camera? That led my flibbertigibbet of a mind to shaving and razor blades because I remembered one guy on the boat was clean shaven and then the others we're all scruffy which made me then wonder how in the hell you shave on a boat being hit by 70 foot waves with out cutting your face up, AND, if you did cut your face up, would you then put toilet paper scarps on all those cuts and risk being ridiculed by the other fisherman or would you man-up and show how burly and manly you were while the salt water spray burned and potentially scarred your face?!?! I was now no longer in my kitchen cutting carrots, but, on a boat in the middle of the treacherous sea off the coast of Alaska searching for the answer to this life altering question. Once I solved this most dire equation, I would share this highly prized information to my new fisherman friends, thus saving many a nicked face, countless roles of toilet paper and then be showered with an endless supply of Dungeness Crab.

I took a triumphant breath and realized I was back in my kitchen. I THANKFULLY stopped what it was I was doing so that I could look and see what it was I was REALLY doing. The very sharp and shiny blade of my new knife was in place to slice not only my carrot but a sizable piece of a finger. I put my shiny new knife down, looked in the living room to see if Jack was awake (he was passed out napping)and stepped away from the cutting board and went on to our front porch where there was no chance of my taking off a finger. It was here that I sat, looking at my finger and being very thankful that it was still in one piece. My mind then prepared for departure on it's next voyage to the thoughts of what would have happened if I had chopped my finger off just moments ago! Would I have screamed like a five year old? Would I pass out from the sight of my finger laying among the carrots? What would I tell Jack? Would I be able to play the piano again? Oh I really should dust the piano after dinner. And then SMACK! My inner voice, very in touch with reality and tired of being led on daydreams and random thoughts by it's flakey neighbor, bitch-slapped my wandering mind and screamed at it to sit down, shut up and let me finish the friggin' carrots and get the steaks on the grill for dinner.