It was huge news in Ipswich and beyond when, after six decades of helplessness, I began attempting to cook. Word spread fast; small children regarded me with curiosity at Market Basket. A Boston news outlet sent in a camera team; an astonished master chef in France interviewed me for his blog. (“Ce n’est pas possible!”) The BBC has proposed a documentary called Up From Ignorance.
Of course, anyone who’s ever done any cooking can tell you that it’s really not all that complicated, and I discovered this quickly enough; I’d been avoiding it unnecessarily. It may be intimidating to see the headline “Seared Flat Iron Steak Calabrese With Polenta and Balsamic Reduction,” but you just follow the recipe, you Google terms you don’t understand, you look to YouTube for unfamiliar procedures, like what’s whisking?
If you happen to make a mistake or two along the way, yes, you may wind up with something very much like a cow pie in appearance, but it is unlikely to cause death or dismemberment. The meal you offer might make someone sick, but they probably had a weak constitution already; plus, they will probably recover, because we live in the age of modern medicine.
When a longtime friend visited from out of state and witnessed firsthand the phenomenon of me cooking, she was deeply moved — almost a religious experience. When she returned home, she took extraordinarily generous action, shipping a fabulous gift to celebrate my new life in the kitchen: a brand-new complete set of kitchen knives.
Chef’s knife, utility knife, serrated utility knife, parer, santoku. I felt totally unworthy of such largesse. I also had no idea what any of these knives is supposed to be used for. I still don’t. Especially the santoku.
I did see, however, from the moment I took them out of the box, that all these knives were exceedingly sharp, way sharper than any of the old knives in our kitchen. These new knives were so sharp, atoms were splitting involuntarily. The Geiger counter app on my iPhone started clicking like crazy; I had to turn it off.
With my kitchen experience so terribly limited, I resolved to be on my guard, to concentrate intensely, to avoid slashing myself to ribbons and complicating mealtime by fainting.
Preparing last evening to make a humble cucumber salad (to go with my wife’s sautéed cod fillets, which would happen later), I summoned all my courage, took the biggest knife in the room — the chef’s — and proceeded through the intricate steps of the recipe: cut the cucumber into very thin disks, dice the red bell pepper, chop the basil.
All knife stuff, see?
With every ultra-careful slice of the cuke, I focused with superhuman attention. I did not let my mind drift to its usual pointless milieus: presidential trivia, why Simon & Garfunkel broke up, how Ipswich police drones could stop Riverwalk flowerpot vandalism, this sort of nonsense. Every ounce of my mental acuity — all three ounces, I assure you — were tuned exclusively to the task at hand.
And I do mean at hand.
One false move, you realize — one moment of distraction — and four of my fingers could be displayed on my cutting board like baby carrots at a soirée.
I was determined not to become yet another grim kitchen-accident statistic. Most of all, I did not want this stupid cucumber salad to wind up featured in a column.
I am happy to report that I successfully sliced the cucumber, and if I do say so myself, those slices were the best. They were thin. They were uber-thin. They were so thin they were see-through. I was wielding the chef’s knife with the skill of a surgeon.
Pepper-dicing also went well. First, you core the bulbous fruit. Then you toss the detritus into the compost bin — that stem (like something straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, if you ask me) and all the seedy Alien guts. Finally, you cut the remaining flesh into quarter-inch squares. No problem.
Basil? This is where I needed to avail myself of all my training. Controlling the chef’s knife with both hands, one grasping the handle and the other, flat-palmed, applying pressure to the safe wide top edge of the blade, I rocked the instrument back and forth over the basil, moving the knife ever so slightly with each rocking motion, expertly cutting through the greenery until it was nothing but shreds and shards.
Awesome. Not a column. I had completed the entire cucumber salad prep without sacrificing so much as a single nick of my epidermis.
So, with deep satisfaction, I tossed the processed foodstuffs into a salad bowl and, in a celebratory mood, turned to the sink to rinse the knife.
As my wife gently pointed out later, the knife is just as sharp when you’re cleaning it as it was when you were cutting with it.
The gash is, unfortunately, in my right thumb, which is the digit you use on a keyboard to type the space between words.
This column has taken forever to write because (a) my right thumb hurts like heck, and (b) it’s bandaged so heavily, I can hardly feel the space bar.
And you can’t go without spaces between words, because if you do, italllookslikethis, whichisimpossibletoread.
So I’ve been using my nose to type the spaces between words. Very tedious.
Also, it’s giving me a blister, which looks ridiculous.
Doug Brendel is on the mend in his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, keeping some distance from the kitchen. Follow Doug’s recuperation at Outsidah.Substack.com.
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