Careful, That’s Sharp!

I never realized how much I use the ring finger of my left hand until I lopped off a piece of the tip today, the victim of my latest kitchen accident. I try to remember to curl my fingers around the food I’m slicing, but I get sloppy and in a hurry and before I know it, WHACK! Off comes a body part.

I blame my father. He lost the top of his thumb and a good chunk of his pointer finger in a jointer accident when I was 5 years old. He was making something in his workshop one night and got all “I don’t need a guide for this piece of wood,” then WHACK! Off came his fingers. Mom woke me up the next morning warning me Daddy’s hand was bandaged and to not use him as a jungle gym for a few days.

You’d think that would have taught him a lesson, wouldn’t you? Ha ha ha! If only that were so. Twenty years later, I got a call from my mom:

“Hi, Lynn. Before I tell you what happened, Dad’s fine…”

“Oh good lord, what did he do now?”

“Well, he was sawing a piece of wood and he slipped and cut off the top of his other thumb.”

*eyeroll*

This was a few years AFTER he sliced his hand open with an axe while chopping fire wood. Here’s how our conversation went after that little incident:

“Dad, you need to go to the hospital for stitches,” I said as I tried to bandage his gaping, bleeding wound.

“Ah,” he said, waving me away. “I’ll just wrap it up real good.”

“Dad, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

“Ah,” he said, waving me away. “It’ll stop.”

Fast forward 15 years.

“Lynnie,” said Dad, rubbing the scar on his hand. “I should’ve gotten stitches.”

*eyeroll*

What is it with men and their fingers?

One of my late father-in-law’s favorite stories to tell was about the time he cut off his pinkie finger when he was 5 years old. It was the Depression, his family didn’t have much, and the harvest was in full swing. No one was going to stop picking corn to take a little kid to the doctor. So his mother picked up the finger, sewed it back on, wrapped it up tight, and he had a somewhat fully-functional finger until his dying day. It got a little numb and cold in the winter, but otherwise he had no complaints.

My uncle Arthur lost his ring finger when he was stepping down off a ladder. His foot slipped and as he tried to grab a higher rung to stop his fall, his wedding ring got caught on something. As he fell, he left his finger behind. That had to hurt.

At least my kitchen accidents mend. So far anyway. The tip of my right thumb has no feeling anymore, but at least it still looks like a normal thumb.

So in the interest of safety, I turned to the Internet to see if there were any handy how-tos or gadgets to help make my kitchen experience less dangerous.

I found a very strange looking Finger Shield, the Tower Slicer, and ooooohhhh! Pampered Chef makes a finger guard! I love me some PC. (Note to self: email Carr, PC consultant extraordinaire.)

Not only am I dangerous with knives, I’m notorious for shredding the crap out of my knuckles and finger nails when I use a hand grater, too. But this might help: the Microplane Cut Resistant Grating and Kitchen Glove.

(And just for run, see how many typos you can spot on this site: How To Slice Vegetables.)

*sigh*

What I need is a mandoline. (Not to be confused with mandolin, which would be impossible to play with sliced up finger tips.) But which one do I buy? There are so many out there, so many choices, so many (yikes!) price ranges. Do any of you use a mandoline? If not, how do you slice and dice and julienne without cutting yourself? My fingers are crying out for help! Especially the one that types the “s,” “w,” and “2” on my keyboard. Who knew we use our left ring finger so much?

One more thing, could someone please fetch me a Band-Aid. I seem to have bled out of this one. And while you’re at it, could you tell me how many Points there are in blood…

Skip, Jump and Eat Cauliflower

Allana Kellogg, who writes the blog Veggie Venture, did what no other human being has done: made cauliflower palatable, dare I say undetectable, to my daughter Cassie, a cauliflower hater since birth.

Kellogg posted the recipe Cauliflower Spanish Rice on her site last month and I’ve been a fan of both the recipe and Veggie Venture ever since.

It was my Texas-born husband who introduced me to Spanish rice and its relative, red beans and rice. But I eat rice infrequently these days because the starchy carbs leave me, how do I say this delicately, quite “swollen in the abdomen” and the scale revolts. However, like discovering squash as a substitute for pasta, I can now have “rice” again through the magic of cauliflower. After all, it’s not the rice I love so much, but all the flavors that combine to make the overall rice dish. From this recipe will come all kinds of experiments in my kitchen.

CAULIFLOWER 'SPANISH RICE'
Hands-on time: 25 minutes with occasional attention required throughout

Time to table: 1 hour Makes about 5 cups

1 head cauliflower, cut into florets

1 tablespoon olive oil (I left this out)

1 onion, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped (I used a red pepper)

2 cloves garlic, chopped

8 ounces canned tomatoes, chopped

Salsa to taste (about a half cup)

Salt and pepper to taste

COOK THE CAULIFLOWER by steaming in a vegetable steamer or boiling in salted water, cooking to the 'al dente' stage where it's cooked through but not soft. Chop fine.

MEANWHILE in a large skillet, heat the olive oil on MEDIUM til shimmery. Add the onion and pepper and cook, stirring often, until golden. Add the garlic and cook for a minute. Add the tomatoes and stir in. When the cauliflower is cooked, stir it in and continue to cook, breaking up the cauliflower and tomatoes with the edge of a spatula while stirring. After cooking awhile, stir in the salsa. Keep cooking, keep tasting, adding more salsa and salt and pepper as needed. The dish is 'done' when the liquid has cooked off, the salsa and seasoning are perfect, and the rest of supper is done too!

NUTRITION ESTIMATE Per Cup: 92Cal; 3g Tot Fat; 0g Sat Fat; 0mg Cholesterol; 257mg Sodium; 15g Carb; 5g Fiber; 7g Sugar; 4g Protein; Weight Watchers 1 Point

Claire loves it, too!

She also loves making Grammy Lynn work a little extra harder on her rehab exercises. I’ve been using the green Theraband for two different shoulder exercises, but Claire insisted on using the green one yesterday and handed me the blue one, which has more resistance. I used it and felt the effects today, which isn’t a bad thing. I just think it’s funny that it took a 21-month-old to remind me that I need to increase resistance once in awhile, lest I become complacent.

(For the record, Claire also insisted I wear that hat. )

I didn’t get a formal cardio workout in before the g-kids arrived yesterday, but keeping up with Claire is a workout all by itself. I think she needs to produce an exercise video: “Chase Away the Pounds with Claire.” She runs and runs and climbs and climbs and expects you to keep up – that would be the cardio portion – and then she throws in “uppie, uppie” and her patented “hold me under my arms and I’ll become limp weight as you jump me up and down” technique – this would be the strength training portion of the video. Do this for at least three hours and I guarantee you’ll lose a pound or two.

Who said workouts had to be formal and dull?

Today, I read this quote by Victor Frankl: “Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and therein lies our freedom.” And I realized that that “space” for me yesterday was Claire and Luca and Cassie. My response to the stimulus of all the stress and work this last week is much healthier today because I took the time yesterday to just be. Just be a mom and a grandmother. Just be carefree and let their joy wash over me.

It’s amazing what a little cauliflower and some skipping and jumping will do for our souls. I hope you find some time to skip and jump and just be in July.

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Random photos:

Claire (not amused) with her first pigtails. She kept them in for all of 3.25 minutes.

Luca after I cleaned up a massive explosion down under. I think my quote was, "I've got a handful of something" as I picked him out of his carrier.

Luca is starting to smile and coo.

Claire stacking my PB2 jars.

The Law of Karma

When I was a little girl (waaaaaay back in the early ‘70s), I watched “The Doris Day Show” and Doris sang the theme song “Que Sera, Sera” in such a breezy, lilting way that I believed every word of it:

When I was just a little girlI asked my mother, what will I beWill I be pretty, will I be richHere's what she said to me.Que Sera, Sera,Whatever will be, will beThe future's not ours, to seeQue Sera, SeraWhat will be, will be.

Life was destiny and fate and a big jar of peanut butter. But as I got older, particularly since I turned 40 almost six years ago, I began to understand that there’s a lot about life I am responsible for, separate from “que sera, sera,” the things I cannot change or prevent.

The word “karma” is often (mis)understood in our culture as “what goes around, comes around,” and we hear it most often used to explain someone’s ill fate or as future punishment for wrong doing, a “karma’s gonna bite him in the ass” kind of thing.

But karma isn’t schadenfreude, which means to delight in another's misfortune, nor should it be seen as destiny or fate. Karma isn’t positive or negative. It doesn’t have a conscience or the mind of a deity. We create it. To an extent it is “what goes around, comes around,” but it’s so much more.

I had a helluva time last week dealing with things within my control and things outside my control. So it was like a drink of water in the desert (or “fate,” perhaps?) that I read this teaching by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron:

“According to the law of karma, every action has a result. If you stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, if you overeat for the millionth time in your life, if you get drunk, if you get stoned, you know that’s going to depress you and make you more discouraged, if it’s just this habitual thing that you think is going to make you feel better. The older you get, the more you know how it just makes you feel more wretched. The law of karma says, ‘Well, how do you want to feel tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now, ten years from now?’”

Now here’s the kicker:

“It’s up to you how to use your life. It doesn’t mean you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself. The law of karma is that we sow the seeds and reap the fruit…So when you find yourself in a dark place where you’ve been countless, countless times, you can think, ‘Maybe it’s time to get a little golden spade and dig myself out of this place.’”

So I found my little spade (it’s in the garage next to my bound-and-gagged fat chick and Negative Nelly) and dug in the ground until I could say again for the MILLIONTH time, “I’m the one, ME, Lynn Haraldson-Bering, who controls what goes in my mouth, how I move my legs and arms, and what I see in the mirror. I’m the only one who can either allow what someone else says to turn me upside down or to see that their words are their truth, not mine, and to see the beauty in differing points of view.”

Guaranteed there will be a next time and a next time and a 2,000,000th time that I’ll have to find that spade and dig myself out of that space. But each time I do, it gets a little easier.

If there’s one thing the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson can teach us it’s that we don’t know if we’ll be here tomorrow. So as long as we’re here, we can use the time to made amends with our bodies – to learn and to grow and to heal, to NOT put that food in our mouths and to GET on that treadmill or elliptical, and to LOOK in the mirror and SEE beauty simply because we are who we are with all of our stretch marks and flab, because there is also lovely skin and cute freckles and sparkly eyes and a good hair day once in awhile.

“Que sera, sera” only works for things beyond our control. To help me remember this, I bought a piece of wood carved with the saying “What will be is up to me” and I keep it on the shelf in my office that holds other important reminders: photos of my children and grandchildren, and a card from my husband that says, “Do you know what I love most about us? You.”

Today I choose to stay present and to stay on course for where I want to be tomorrow, five years from now and ten years from now. Today I will remember the rule of karma.