To understand the depths of the stupidity here you must first know that I’m a mind of the first water, a peerless wit and a crackerjack doer of things, never mind that Mrs. Evil Captor frequently seems to regard me as an idiot savant on my best days, with no savant at all on my worst days.
Not only that I am a former Boy Scout who has won, not just merit badges, but medals for my camp craft. I have been trained in how to handle a knife, and you won’t see me whittlling wood or peeling vegetables with the knife coming back toward my body, or trying to cut something by main force rather than judicious use of the knife.
Furthermore, you should know that I am a guy who knows his way around a kitchen – I can grill most anything and if I want some cornbread and redeye gravy, I can make them without injuring myself in any way, though I’m not like some proud, perhaps insanely reckless folks on this thread who insists on flipping things without the aid of a spatula.
So when Mrs. Evil Captor asked me to convert a loaf of day-old White Mountain bread into croutons for some fondue, it was no problem. Had I not frequently grated cheese for fondue without any injury to my fingers?
I decided to use the same technique on the White Mountain bread that I have used with great success in dicing onions. I laid the bread out flat on the table, and cut a grid into its surface, leaving somewhere between half an inch and a quarter inch of the bread uncut at the base to keep it all together for the next stage of the operation, which involved holding the loaf of bread on end and slicing down across the grid I had cut into the bread, allowing the croutons to fall to the table – just like the final stage in dicing onions.
So, here we have, by a very logical and seemingly well-thought out process, me slicing down across the bread. I had to hold the bread in a very firm grip because it was a round bread with a crust that had been allowed to harden (easier to spear with a fondue fork, y’know) on a hard wooden surface, with a surface that was alternately yielding and resistant depending on how freely the crouton grid I had cut was moving. I had to press down hard to keep that round bread from slipping and rolling out of place on the hard wood.
I don’t know exactly how it happened, but at some point the whole loaf just scooted away from me and I managed to cut a 1/4 inch gash in my indes finger. It bled like a sonfabitch and turned some interesting colors, but didn’t require stitches and healed quite nicely, because being a Boy Scout I know all about First Aid.
But the thing that boggles my mind is – what the HELL was I thinking? Cutting something on an unstable surface, using brute force to hold it steady, holding a round, flat object on end and expecting it to somehow remain stable against every inclination of geometry, friction and the laws of motion? I knew better than that! It goes against every bit of knife safety training I’ve ever heard or read. Yet, there I was, sawing away, expecting a loaf of hard bread to behave like an onion. And the hell of it is, I generally cut the side of the onion that’s on the table so it has a flat surface to rest on – and onions are a HELL of a lot easier to cut than a round loaf of day-old bread.
This was my only real injury-provoking kitchen accident, though Mrs. Evil Captor takes some kind of weird delight in playing up the occasional mishap as if it were a big deal. Why, just this Thanksgiving I made a minor faux-pas by finishing off the turkey I cooked on the smoker in the oven (high winds making it hard for it to get the turkey up to the correct temperature). The faux-pas involved not putting any kind of pan under the turkey to catch the drippings. Despite having been in the smoker for hours, the turkey turned out to have a LOT of drippings still left inside it, which we first noted when our place filled with blue smoke. Thinking rapidly, I pulled the batteries out of the fire alarm (I knew what was going on) before the haze got too thick to see through, and simply opened the kitchen door and put a box fan in front of it to suck all the smoke out. In a short time all the smoke was gone and the place was filled with invigoratingly cold air and our turkey was cooked thanks to my quick thinking.
Despite the fact that no on was injured, Mrs. Evil Captor told all her friends and relatives about it, especially the part about her telling me twice to get a drip pan to put under the turkey beforehand, not acknowledging that I had thought she wanted the pan for display purposes after the turkey was cooked, rather than for safety purposes beforehand. How was I to know about these minor points of cooking punctilio?
Faced with this kind of solid logic, Mrs. Evil Captor will just go on about all the other times things have caught fire, melted or just smoked (that’s all – just smoked!) due to minor kitchen improprieties on my part. She’s so shameless, she’ll even bring up the time when I was in college – a mere child, really – and I accidentally knocked out power to my wing of the dorm by attempting some novel but completely scientific and logical ways to cook a chicken pot pie without using an oven.
Even my parents, who should be expected to back up a guy, will jump on the bandwagon and reminisce about the time I was left at home sitting on the living room sofa reading and they came back from a trip to find the living room TV on fire and the room filled with blue smoke, with me still reading. No matter how often I have explained to them that I was only holding the book a few inches from my face so there wasn’t that much smoke for me to see, and it was a very engrossing book, they still feel that I should somehow have noticed that flames were shooting out of the back of the TV set and the room was filled with billows of smoke. But I was a mere high school student then, what was I to know of the obscure arcana of fire safety?
Yet despite the ill-informed opinions of my wife, my parents, and most people who know me, I want to assure you that I’m a paragon of safety and thoughtfulness, and that one incident with the bread is the only instance which mars my otherwise near-flawless record, and constitutes my only really stupid injury.
