She was right

Stephanie Alexander in her excellent first edition of The Cook's Companion warns against mandoline slicers. She says they are far too dangerous for the home kitchen and recommends buying a "simple and ingenious" alternative. I have never been able to locate one of these, as Stephanie does not give its name and describes it simply as a "Japanese shredder and slicer".

I covet(ed) the ability to do paper-thin potato slices for pizza and crisps, make neat juliennes of carrot and daikon. About a week ago I bought myself a small inexpensive mandoline.

Last night I decided to make pithiviers for dessert. It was awkward slicing the apples with the hand-held finger guard until about halfway through, so I decided to take the first few slices off each piece by holding it directly in my hand. You all know where this is going, don't you?

I've lost the top 3mm off my right-hand middle finger but didn't hit or chop the bone, so emergency just patched me up and sent me home. Right now I can't drive or type properly, or swim until it heals "in its own time" as the emergency doctor told me, and I will forever have a flat-topped finger.

And of course, a few minutes beforehand I had been lecturing the kids about never touching the damn thing, because it was so sharp! (At least the pithiviers, which I cooked when I got home from emergency, were fabulous.)

Excuses, excuses

On the one hand, the oven has been repaired and I tracked down almond meal at the nuts-and-pulses stall at Prahran Market. (Does anyone know anywhere else it's available?) On the other hand, the forecast is for 38 degrees and it took several attempts to make Toll House Cookies rather than Toll House Cookie Slice Sort of Baked Stuff Totally Filling the Baking Tray.

If we baked, Cheekus Weekus would help rather than playing on the Wii and Running Boy would probably help too, if running electrical appliances was involved. Princess Pea would drift in to reality from being lost-in-a-book, currently New Moon. But then they all like to play Sport Resort together and surely that's good sibling togetherness that should be encouraged while it lasts?

It would give me a chance to show my best friends, who are superb cooks, that I am not a total loss to baking. It would also give me a chance to prove conclusively that I should stick to soup.

I would gain the high moral ground by involving everyone in a Good Family Activity while the CFO is out having the pool pump repaired (the latest appliance to fail), so that I can then lecture him, or at least know that I could lecture him, about putting the kids in front of the TV while I am at work/out doing needful things. They might just all look at me blankly and whine about the Wii turning off.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained...I will try a flourless orange cake!

Oh and by the way - a post or so ago I said the guinea-pigs loved hiding under the pool blanket. They're not aquapiggies: the pool blanket is spread out over the back lawn for cleaning and ariing before we install it.

The Moz

Possibly I was very naughty in a previous life, or perhaps I have been poor at assisting old ladies across the road.

In the year we have lived at this house, the dishwasher failed (on its second use), and was so bad that the repair-man wouldn't even take a callout fee. He told us to junk it. The tumble-dryer died. The (two year-old) washing machine danced its death across the laundry floor. An electric heater (new that winter) decided that "off" was discretionary. A pipe burst in the solar pool heater, sending a glorious waterfall down a bedroom wall. Two notebooks and a desktop computer stopped working for no particular reason, and a new laptop never worked at all. The DVD player would only operate in black-and-white. After two repairs, the mechanic conceded that possibly our ice-cream really was like concrete, rather than me being a silly fussy woman, given that the freezer insisted on setting to minus thirty degrees. (To compensate, the fridge section was keeping meat and dairy nice and warm.)

The door fell off the oven one night while I was hosting bookgoup. This really didn't bother me too much as it was so filthy that I had refused ever to use it. (The vendor appeared not to have cleaned the house at all between auction and settlement. More on this another day.) It did bother me though that the inner heatproof door on the new oven shattered into tiny pieces two months after purchase.

But worst of all? On Saturday morning I found that a kamikazi woodbeetle had self-immolated in the water-level window of the electric kettle.