New Toys and Hallucinations

Happy New Year! Bobby has already had an eventful start to the year: 8 day skiing trip in the French Alps (hopefully he'll write a post about that soon) and a two week research trip to Porto, Portugal! I have had an eventful start to the year as well, but in a very different way. Let's start with the good news, shall we? I got some new kitchen toys! As you can see here, I am the happy owner of a pastry blender (no more tough, over blended pie crusts, yipee!), salad spinner (no more watery salads, yipee!), a fat separator (more delicious gravies and sauces, yipee!), and a mandoline (no more finger tips, yipee!). This isn't the musical instrument; this is the bad-ass, cut your fingers off just because it can, slice/shred/julienne king of the kitchen tools.

Mandolines are known for primarily two things: a super sharp blade, and a required blood sacrifice. I'm a bit of wimp, and rather fond of my fingers, so I also bought a pair of these great gloves (produced, funnily enough, by Microplane, who also make a kitchen tool that required a finger-nail sacrifice), which are cut resistent and will keep my finger tips safe. Sorry, mandoline, you'll have to get your blood sacrifice from someone else.

The first thing I did with the mandoline was slice some cabbage. Slicing cabbage with a big old chef's knife sucks; it takes forever, it difficult to get uniform pieces, and generally sucks.

With my nifty new toy, though, I shredded a 1/2 head of cabbage in 2 minutes. 2 minutes!!

My new toy allowed me to shave a carrot into these paper-thin slices. What a beauty. I love new toys!

Unfortunately, this experiment with the mandoline was the only time I've been able to use it since it arrived. The day I shredded cabbage and carrots to my heart's delight is the same day I came down with the norovirus. I literally went from being completely fine, hosting a nice dinner party, to vomiting my brains out in a matter of seconds. From Saturday night to Thursday night, the only things I could eat were broth, a few pretzel sticks, a couple of crackers, fruit smoothies, and one bowl of tomato soup. Though a fantastic way to lose weight, the norovirus is not fun, especially when you're home alone. Both Bobby and my Mom ordered food to be delivered to me (thank the gods for take-out wonton soup, smoothies, and Coke Cola), but I just had to hole myself up in the apartment, bear down, and let this awful virus run its course. 5 days later and I'm still on a restricted diet!

Whenever I have a fever, I have vivid hallucinations during the first night. And do you know what I hallucinated about during the first night of the virus: shredding cabbage. Go figure.