The ultimate culinary faux pas
Normally I'm not a bad cook. One day I was cooking grilled trout with fennel couscous for a friend. Our story begins with me chopping lemons for the couscous. Somehow, the hand holding the lemon slipped and I cut my finger instead. There was quite a lot of blood but it didn’t hurt too much, so I thought it would be a really bright idea to just bandage it up until the bleeding stopped, and clean and dress it properly after lunch. I should have realised due to past experience [being dragged kicking and screaming to casualty with a dislocated kneecap that I insisted was “just a bruise”] that when faced with serious injury I tend to have;

a) Impaired judgement; and
b) A stupidly high pain threshold.

Alas, this did not occur to me.

So, we had lunch, which was quite yummy. My finger throbbed slightly, but I ignored it. Then we had some tea. By this time, it was about an hour since I had cut my finger. After hunting around for another several minutes for steri strips, I removed the now blood-soaked plaster to inspect the damage.

I was missing the end of my finger. Oh yes, a substantial chunk of my fingertip had been cut clean off.

It was then that I had a horrific vision of the events of an hour previously. After I had finished squeezing the lemons, I had actually scraped the dregs of lemon juice left on the chopping board into the salad. I had actually served my guest *human flesh*.

Luckily this turned out not to be the case – the missing fingertip turned up in the leftovers, but having been marinated in lemon and olive oil for the last 90 minutes, the chances of having it stitched back on were pretty slim to say the least.

It healed no problem though, and I even played a cello recital only a month afterwards.
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Fri 2 Jun 2006, 12:06, Reply)