How chopping off the tip of my finger got me cooking

It's been a hot summer in New York, which means it's been a slow one in my kitchen. We might as well have turned off the gas for all the love the stove has missed out on the last three months. But it can't be helped. R and I have already cordoned off the bathroom and kitchen with drapes that loosely seal in the coolish air that is pumped with all of its might out of our tiny and ancient air conditioner. Thus, the kitchen has become a summer war zone: We are in and out, collecting only the necessities. 

What is impressive -- or a lucky oddity -- about R and me is that we can survive on very little. For the past two months R and I have soldiered out our nightly meals surviving on one dish: The Greek salad. Those Greeks, they are incredibly resourceful -- packing a hefty amount of calories into a, basically, healthy yet hearty meal. This particular salad was introduced to me by my aunt who picked the ingredients fresh from her immaculate garden. Each vegetable - tomato, celery, cucumber, fennel - is cut the same size and mixed with a meager amount of lettuce (the least interesting part), olives, feta, and, when it's on sale, stuffed grape leaves. The whole thing is doused with some home made vinegarette and it's pretty tasty... the first time we ate it. Actually, it was still tasty when we ate it the rest of the week and the week after that. But when we started to get into the double digits of summer weeks, the epic Greek salad began to lose its flavor.

Don't get me wrong, we peppered in some other meals -- we took a vacation (grilled), spent a few weekends at my parents house (grilled), had a few wedding to attend (poached salmon), and ate out (thai, sushi). But during the week days it's been the same old salad.

That was, until, I chopped the top of my finger off. Chopped isn't the write word, since the weapon was a vegetable peeler, heartily skinned is more like it.

Ew, I know. I apologize.

It was a Tuesday night. R was out of town and I was diligently returning from a drink with a friend to make dinner at home. I had left some ingredients for The Salad at work so I was scrapping together an even sadder salad plate of greens. Without any feta or olives, I was desperate to add something, anything, extra when I eyed a nub of a parmasean rind in the back of the fridge. I managed to peel off a few hearty ribbons of rind into the bowl, but got a little greedy and tried for more when the position of my hand, the cheese-less-ness of the rind, and my overall destracted, hungry state mixed oh so badly. 

I felt it and looked down to find my finger covered in blood. But I had knicked myself on a veg peeler before and, besides, I had just received 7 stiches in my thumb six months before with a huge knife -- I was convinced this was just a nic this couldn't be that bad. R happened to call and I told him I had cut myself and I managed to open the paper towel to examine how bad it was while I was on the phone with him. I scanned the bloody digit and noticed half of my pretty purple mani was missing and started to panic, quietly.

"I'll call you back," I said to R quickly.

I tried to look a little closer but it was hard to discern through the blood. I started to pace, which was when I noticed the other half of my pretty purple mani... lying on our stove top.

I called R back: "Part of my finger's missing."

Silence.

"I'll call you a cab."

So off I was returning to my neighborhood ER from whence I came not six months ago with another bloody digit.

Against my wishes my lovely friend and her husband kept me company through the wait and the grueling stitch-up. There wasn't actually anything to stitch and, not that I could bare to watch, but it involved a few needles, not enough numbness, and a giant match. I buried my head in friend's arm and distracted myself with quiet screaming.

The brisk ER guy handed over a few pieces of guaze and some yellow wrapping that "wouldn't stick to the wound," and we were sent on our way - not before, of course, friend unzipped my business-casual dress so I could get out of the thing before crawling into bed for a restless, painful night sleep.

Weeks: The  vague time frame I was given for healing, first by brisk ER guy and then by brisk, Russian clinic doctor. By the clinic check up I had unwrapped and wrapped the finger up twice trying to quickly cover the black wound with some children's 'no tears' Neosporin spray-foam, but it was hard to not examine it along with my Russian. 

It was also hard to keep the vomit down. And I suspect the same was true for Russian. He pushed it out of his eyesight when it was finally naked and quickly worked at covering it back up first with the used yellow, bloodied bandage I had on there to begin with and then enough gauze to fix an NBA star's knee injury. 

I took my manhandled injury and a general sense of defeat home, and decided it was time to cook. 

Back on the horse and all that.

I couldn't return to the salad. Maybe it was because a salad is what started all of this, but, more likely, it was that I had eaten upwards of 100 salads that summer and that was 90 to many.

Jumping on the end of season bandwagon, I first dove into a corn taco dish. While my local grocery store's fresh corn selection pales in comparison with my hometown's it was still worth a try. The recipe called for a mix of raw (to be sauted) and open-flame roasted. Yup. I had my skeps but the blogger had done it in her tiny NY apartment, so why couldn't I.



With the cucumber-sized gauze wrapping around my injured finger dangling dangerously close to the open flame on my old stove, I dutifully rotated and held, rotated and held, one ear of corn and then another. My hands got toasty as did the metal forks I was using to rotate the thing, but my finger wrap never caught on fire (success!).

The raw corn sauteed along with olive oil, butter, and onion for a good 30 minutes and it was rich and creamy. That mixture combined with the hand-roasted corn and was all topped off with a simple cabbage slaw to make an incredibly satisfying, homemade, vegetarian meal. It. Was. Bliss.



And it didn't stop there. While the corn meal spread itself out one more dinner for two and two lunches, I hurried back to the kitch on Wednesday to drum up some gazpacho. By the weekend it was chicken sauteed with lemons and olives -- simple and delicious.



Mmmm



Since then I have whipped up a veggie-laden mac & cheese casserole for the hurricane that hardly came, a leftovers scramble, and chicken curry (cooking away in the croc pot.

While the salads were easy and took the guess work out of preparing dinner for the week, getting back into cooking has invigorated me a bit - gimpy finger and all. It's incredible the sense of accomplishment that comes with working from a new recipe and presenting a home made meal that is actually yummy. Now if i could just cook said meals without endangering any more fingers, it might be a true accomplishment. But I'll take what I can get.