Why Avocado Hand is the least of your worries
It’s not just slicing fruit that’s risky. Cooking anything can be lethal, says Debora Robertson
When we hear a doctor saying, “There is minimal understanding about how to handle them”, we have every reason to be afraid. But this doom-laden sentence does not refer to a rampaging virus or the coming zombie apocalypse. It refers to the wholesome avocado.
In an interview last week, Simon Eccles, secretary of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons, put us all on notice: avocados are out to get us. Brunch is ruined.
Mr Eccles explained how he now treats up to four people a week for “Avocado Hand”. When slippery fruit meets sharp knife and hard stone, intricate surgery is often required to mend the deep lacerations. Sometimes patients suffer permanent nerve damage. Mr Eccles wants avocados to carry warning stickers.
But as anyone who has so much as boiled an egg knows, kitchens can be very dangerous places for many reasons.
My sister-in-law, who throws herself down mountains in the name of Good Times, considers my love of cooking to be sweetly tame. She doesn’t realise that daily, I battle flame, sharp objects, scalding liquids and my own idiocy to bring dinner to the table. I have burned off my fingerprints by lifting volcanically hot pans with damp tea towels, lacerated my hands by catching falling knives, pierced my feet when I failed to catch the falling knives, and set myself on fire.
I take comfort that I am not alone in my “kitastrophies”. It can only be a matter of time before “gastro ward” in fashionable postcodes denotes somewhere the greedy go to recover from RSI (Repetitive Spiraliser Injury) or OCD (Overactive Cuisinart Disorder).
Eight cases of kitchen perfidy When good appliances go bad
You think you know where you are with a posh appliance, but however much you pay, they still require you to pay attention. I heard of one woman who almost throttled herself when her scarf got tangled in her mixer, in a neartragic Isadora Duncan-style incident. A friend was kneading dough in his Thermomix, only for it to walk itself off the counter and land on the dog.
Dinner by a thousand cuts
I’ve cut myself with blunt knives, sharp knives, oyster knives and carving knives. I’ve shaved off knuckles with mandolines and grated thumbs on Microplanes. I draw comfort from Ella Risbridger, writer and creator of eatingwithmyfingers.com, who chopped off the top joint of her finger trying to make oat flour with a hand blender: “They stitched it back on but the feeling never came back properly, which is actually very handy as I’m always catching it when chopping.” Silver linings.
And it burns, burns, burns
Sometimes, the act of creation makes us feel like gods, impervious to injury. I have been known to plunge my finger into 115˚C caramel just to see if it tastes right. It’s also what made my friend Laci pick up a molten marshmallow, giving himself third-degree burns. “In A&E they couldn’t stop laughing and told me never to go camping.”
Corned beef thumb
The people of Argentina continue to undermine us by stealth, in revenge for Las Malvinas, by refusing to get rid of the stupid key with which they insist we open their tins of corned beef. Be prepared to risk life and quite literally limb to get the damn things open.
Chilli willy, and other acts of self harm
We think we know better than food and we don’t. We think we’ll remember chopping chillies. We won’t. Then we go to the loo, and well, it isn’t the relieving experience we’d hoped. But we all do things against our better judgment, particularly in the kitchen. Food writer Nicola Miller once tried to prise a crab claw open with her teeth, scratched her gum and gave herself such a serious jaw infection she needed four lots of antibiotics to clear it up. We don’t know better than food.
How much does pasta hate us?
Yes, yes we all know pasta that makes a quick, inexpensive dinner. But I’ve lost count of tales of dropped pans, wobbly colanders, volcanic lasagne burns and all manner of dinner time misery. So thanks for that River Café, Jamie Oliver, Antonio Carluccio and all the other penne pushers out there.
Taste explosion
Remember when we thought it was cute to boil stuff in tins? In an earlier inCarnation (see what I did there?), simmering condensed milk to make fudge – now more fashionably dulce de leche – was all fun and games. Then you forget about it, the pan boils dry, the tin explodes and you spend the rest of your life cleaning up a kitchen that’s stickier than a beehive.
Cooking on an open flame
Let’s be frank. A lot of cooking is done when we’re half cut, which is asking – indeed, begging – for trouble. One friend set fire to her hair twice: once when she was hungover, trying to light the stove; a second time, when she sprayed a pan on a lit stove with cooking oil. Another burned off his eyebrows when lighting raki. We have much to fear from the nostalgic return of crêpes suzette.