Oops! At least we had Spaetzle…

If you double click on this you will see a kind of blurry, cell phone pic of my right pinkie, the day after.

The day after I thought I would have the perfect, restful Sunday afternoon with nowhere to go.  Hah!  I was slicing onions to go in my pork paprikish, which was going in the crockpot to allow me more time to relax on my perfect Sunday afternoon.  I was slicing onions because Tom loves onions in things and even though I could live without them, I thought they would make make the dish have more appeal to him.

Slice, slice, slice, on my mandoline slicer, when oops, my hand went right through the center of the vee-blade, snagging my pinkie on the way down.  In disbelief, I wrapped my finger, put the whole contraption back together, and in the interest of science, DID IT AGAIN!  Much more slowly, but my hand again went through the safety catch.  The whole safety thingie was broken.  I threw the whole thing in the trash.  Gone.

The bleeding didn’t really slow down but I figured I better get the dinner together put it in the crock pot.  I sliced the remaining onion with a knife and then did the two things that I usually do when faced with a potential ER visit.  I Googled and I showered.

Googling “Sliced finger injury” told me that I needed to go to the ER if a) the bleeding didn’t stop within 5 minutes and b)I couldn’t hold the wound edges together enough to APPLY GLUE to seal it shut.  I failed on both accounts, so… I took a shower.

I was thinking that if I needed stitches, I might be told not to get them wet, so into the shower I went.  Holding tightly to the wrapped right pinkie, and trying to shampoo with my ailing left arm, I rapidly rethought this decision and pondered the irony that further injuring myself would show.

I got to the ER at 1:30 and was “fast tracked”.  I am pretty sure this is a misleading misnomer, but I left at 4:30 and 3 hours for this ER is pretty much lightening speed.  The good doc took one look, told me that I made a good decision to come, it was pretty deep, would need at least 3 stitches and was not “glueable”.  Bummer.

I came home to smell of my dinner bubbling away.  Tom said he wasn’t going to eat any.  Huh?  I sliced my finger putting onions in it for HIS benefit!!!!  But, alas, he wouldn’t even try it.  More for me then, and it was delicious!  Bubbles helped me make spaetzle to go with it.  What a comfort food that spaetzle is, and we make it perfectly, together.

My finger hurts, it looks gross, but I am done whining about it.

Comment not related to above:  the most googled term in all of my postings is “large dead dog”.  Who are these people?   Do they have large dead dogs to dispose of?  Are they just morbidly curious?  Interesting.  I do still miss my white pig.  But Merlin is a sweetie, and a keeper.

Everyone Needs a Spaeztle Maker!

Bubbles and I were delerious yesterday over the quality of the spaetzle that our new spaetzle maker produces!  Spaetzle should be a new comfort food.  Hot, mouth-watering, right from the pan,  YUMMY!!

I Googled “using spaetzle maker” and found a plethora of recipes and ideas.  For example, you can bake, pan fry, and sautee spaetzle for an unlimited array of dishes.  We buttered ours and added parmesean cheese.  We also only made a half batch just to try it out.  Boy, do I regret that.  I should have made a double batch.

The “old” way to make spaetzle was to push the dough through a collander with a wooden spoon over a pan of boiling water.  It was laborious, fraught with danger and yielded precious little.  The “new” way still involves boiling water, but the loaded hopper wastes nothing and glides over the pot effortlessly, allowing glistening blobs of gooey noodles to fall into the cooking bath.  The whole batch is done in about 5 minutes (or less).

The irony here is that I can only eat a very small amount of spaetzle at a time.  There is little protein in spaetzle, although I am now wondering how much protein powder I could add without altering the taste too much.  Hmm…

We are still looking for Lily.  Especially after dinner when everyone has scraps.  No more “Sit, Stay, and Catch”.  No more smiles.  No more “spank my butt”.  No more white pig.