I will be away from my blog for a bit. I have 5 younger sisters and the 4th sister was in a tragic car accident with her husband on Sunday of this week. She is in critical condition with multiple internal injuries, a fractured neck and back, broken ribs, broken arm, torn ligaments in knee, and other.

We have left our house and are living in Seattle for now while we stay at the hospital with my precious sister. Her husband is in Port Angeles with minor injuries (thank God!) and will be released on Friday – when he can come join his wife of just 5 weeks.

On the gluten-free note, life in the hospital is interesting when you’re a celiac. It’s a bit of a wasteland. Great weight-loss tool when combined with the inability to eat due to stress and worry. Thank goodness we’re in Seattle where there are GF options out and about!

This is a mandolin. It has a sharp blade and easily and quickly slices fruits and vegetables into uniform size.

One mandolin minus…

To push the vegetables down the mandolin, you are supposed to use this pusher/guide thing. It has little prongs to firmly grasp the food and you can safely run this over the blade until the veggie is completely sliced.

One pusher/guide..

Plus the dressings above … EQUALS

This.

I probably can get by without the tip of my right ring finger. Typing might be a bit of a challenge even after this bulky bandage comes off, but as that finger isn’t super important, like a thumb or index finger, living with a scooped out finger tip should be just fine. Right?

I am a certified kitchen klutz.

If it’s hot, I’ll burn myself.

If it’s sharp, I’ll cut myself.

If it has a round blade, I’ll try my darndest to sever a majory artery or an entire finger – just from cleaning it after slicing bread.

And if it’s a mandolin, I’ll decide not to use the pusher/guide and take off chunks of flesh each and every time I use it.

Last night was fish fry with thin sliced deep-fried potatoes. I was on the third spud when I lost concentration — and the tip of my finger. It took 40 minutes to get the bleeding stopped enough so we could bandage and wrap it up and I could get back into the kitchen to finish the dinner. Of course, the mandolin was put away for the night, the potatoes that were already sliced went into the garbage (there was a, uh, well, it wasn’t all potato in that bowl any longer) and out came the food processor to finish the job.

My poor husband has put his foot down. No more mandolin if I don’t use the pusher/guide. He’s had to clean up far too many of my “kitchen incidents.” Between the knives, the bread slicer (affectionately known as the “thumb slicer”), and now this wretched mandolin, he’s something like a first-responder EMT now. As you can see from the dressings above, we are prepared as not a month goes by w/out some near-catastrophic kitchen injury.

And so, because this is my 4th mandolin injury in the past 6 weeks, I’m inclined to agree with him – from this point forward I shall endeavor to remember to use that pusher/guide.

I believe that this is the closest I’ve come to actually requesting a ride to the ER. I’m not a big run-to-doctor type of person so when I slice and dice and burn and gouge myself, I usually just suck it up and apply pressure until bleeding stops. This one actually scared me…

To all my readers, if you are thinking of purchasing or using a mandolin, I encourage you to seriously reconsider. Or at the very least, follow not my example and use the blasted pusher/guide!