Pride cometh before an amputation: a public service announcement

Sorry for not posting in a few days, but last week was kind of hectic. We had our written and practical exams for the first module, which meant a lot of studying and practicing at home, in addition to freelancing and whatnot. We haven’t gotten our written exam grades yet, but I’m confident I did well. I ended up doing fairly well on the practical, losing points mainly on my mayonnaise, which had too much mustard in it. And my knife skills were deemed “perfect” by Chef M, netting me all 10 points on that section.

Perhaps it was some resulting hubris, then, that led me to partially amputate my finger on Friday while prepping steak and pommes persillade. As I was slicing up the parsley, I turned away to say something to a teammate about another recipe we were working on, and … off came a huge slice from the side of my left index finger. The result was a severe avulsion of my index finger, which I was told will grow back but will be unsymmetrical. So much for a backup career as a hand model.

Long story short, the Aspiring Chef had to go to the nearby Beth Israel medical center to get his mutilated finger sanitized (very painful), numbed with Novocaine (strange feeling of “heavy weightlessness,” as if my finger suddenly did not conform to Newton’s law), and cauterized (my favorite part was when the Eastern European doctor warned me that it might smell like BBQ in the room).

But this might be a good time to reference the three rules of knife safety:
-- Always curl your left hand fingers when cutting (and use the knuckles as a guide)
-- Never look away when cutting
-- Keep your knives very sharp, because a somewhat dull knife can skate off the surface of some food and bury itself in your flesh.