Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Bare hand and cast iron pan without a potholder is not a good combo!



Do any of you also have Aloe plants growing in your backyard?
When you make a stupid knucklehead move like I did, than you should!
Since here I sit with my left thumb holding onto a decent size chunk of some that that Hubby kindly ran out to get one from our yard to aide in relieving my writhing in agony! I am therefore writing with one hand tonight, not an easy task/accomplishment!

To be fair I told Hubby to put the cast-iron pan in the oven to finish up our dinner in a four hundred degree oven for approximately fifteen more minutes. Hubby in his all non-Kosher Catholic glory had us, his Jewish gal and himself both enjoying pork chops for years and years and tonight he decided to bread them with egg and Panko (check it out if you don’t already use it), our go-to breading decision for the healthier minded concept for doing this sort of thing; that is when we don’t just sauté them in lime juice and olive oil with a dash of garlic and dill…
Any-who, I asked Hubby if he had seasoned the Panko, and he said no, so I thought once the chops were done that I would make a nice sauce from the drippings along with white wine, lime juice, dill and a bit of garlic powder, smidge of butter and thickened with a sprinkle of all purpose flour.
Hubby removed the pan from the oven using the oven mitt and put it atop the stove burner; he instinctively put the mitt back in our basket used for that, and after the two chops were removed to a plate…What was I thinking; it was clear that I was NOT thinking at all, since I grabbed the handle to pour my separately prepared concoction into the pan!
The sensation of pain was instantaneous and for someone like me who is used to pain daily this was no fun! On a chart of 1-10, one being a minute tingle and ten being through the roof ouching; I do believe this fell between an eight and a nine!
But I am tough and have been burned stupidly before… a pack of matches in my hand and a nasty wind coming up from no where!
That time I stuck my blistering hand in a glass bowl brimming with ice water and cubes, oddly enough it too was my left, since I am right handed and that stuck with me all these years and that was back around 1975, if I recall.
I was walking ‘number one son’ to his Montessori school in a private home in the neighborhood and foolishly tried to light a cigarette with a cold wind at my back, damn that was dumb! But then I was young, now I am just foolish, an old fool.

There were probably more times over the years that it happened, but not that severely. PS when I took my hand out of the ice water the pain was much, much worse and so I opted to keep it in. Now we know that was not the best way to treat it, but somehow it healed without scars, wild! And right now my left hand is allowing me to use it again too tonight; the thumb was the worst and still is a bit tingly, but not too bad now. Anyway, this was not as severe just a reddening of the skin, no blisters.
Perspective, at that time, that was the worse pain I had ever felt, except for labor pains, of course.

Thinking is an important thing to do especially whenever cooking which I used to love to do and it was always quite rewarding and enjoyed by all who tasted what I made… another thing I miss doing without second thoughts…

Moving on…
Today I had a very nice experience with a friend/ mommy from my very long ago past… contacted me!
When we moved in to that first owned home of ours that we lived in for six years, our townhouse condo we had quite a lovely group of moms and kids to enjoy being in, with that commonality of learning from one another; we were five gals with approximately two kids each that would meet once a week so the children could play and we could chat at our teas…We did this for New Year’s Eve too; the children would sleep in the bedrooms upstairs as we partied downstairs at each others homes with Hubbies of course too, over the years, in walking distance from each others homes it was great! Sharing and enjoying being together with women that knew what you too were going through, even sharing the children’s clothes they had outgrown.

And so when this woman that I hadn’t seen or heard from since 1978 or there about, Gosh, it was wonderful!
We all moved out of our first homes to different larger homes and she had had another son, three in all, and they gave her six grand-babies, all quite adorable and dare I say they look like their grandma!
She and her husband were the opposite of us, she is an Italian Catholic and her husband is a Jew, and so we had another commonality.
We had gone through so much growing during those six years as anyone can well imagine… we had kept in touch for a while but the distance and lifestyles had changed considerably. Her husband was in the music industry in NYC, Arista records part of United Artists, one of his many groups he had under contract was Led Zeppelin, true, not name dropping and their kids would be wearing their rock group tees on any given day and we had been invited to concerts way back then, but never did go… Many of our neighbors went from domestic vehicles to Audis and BMWs etc. and bigger and better homes from our starter home neighborhood.

Her husband had been ill on and off all of his life; seriously, with many surgeries and so I was happy to hear that he is still hanging in there! Hard to bring up that topic, but we asked how everyone was doing and all our children faired very well with their choices of careers.
And in spite of my TMI spilling of trying to catch up with all her and my news for over thirty plus years, she was so gracious and said that she was always available to talk. She had taught as a Special Ed. teacher, first as a substitute and then retired last year. They still lived in the neighborhood that they had moved to in New Jersey, but also scaled down to a tinier home, twenty years ago, due to her husband’s ills.

She spends a lot of her time helping out with her sons’ children, but I did notice she had gotten to Italy with some lovely pics of the region; two of her sons live nearby her, and one is a state away. Her two eldest were on either side in age as my number one and our younger son and her younger one were a year apart too!

All in all it made for a nice day!


On that upbeat note, allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you to count all your blessings and share those overages and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

Speaking My Mind: Which way will the war go?

Speaking My Mind: Which way will the war go? :   My eyesight is going again... in case you missed it... Netanyahu snaps back against growing...