A very enjoyable Labor Day weekend with Kat and my parents, my Dad's parents, an aunt and uncle, one cousin and his friends (it's always so much simpler than it sounds) culminated in the gift of nine leftover pieces of cornbread. I'd been craving it, so mom brought it; we'd planned to serve it for the big meal but we forgot it; so it came back to New York with me.
And what goes best with cornbread? Chili! Yum!
I decided to forego the meat, since it was already a bit of a stock-up week at the grocery store. Ironic, in hindsight.
The recipe was nothing special, though it called for two whole cans of diced tomatoes and a can of tomato sauce, which seems a bit excessive. As usual, I added carrots and checked out what I had in the fridge. Two killer Goya chili peppers went in the pot before I decided to do something silly: add the leftover cabbage from my last batch of ramen salad.
Dun dun duuuunnnnn!
Out came the cabbage onto the cutting board. Out came one of the kitchen's awful, inadequate knives.
Chop, chop, chop, scoop, dump.
Chop, chop, chop, scoop, dump.
Chop, chop, chop--RED!
It happened so quickly--one moment my thumb was in tact, the next I wasn't quite sure. I stuck it under the tap first, out of habit, but that just made me look like Moses with rivers of blood running down into my palm. I soaked most of a paper towel before the pressure slowed the bleeding, but the most shocking part of the whole experience was that I got a bit lightheaded and had to sit down! That annoyed me--clearly it wasn't blood loss, and I'm not too happy to find out that I apparently do something as impractical as get faint at the sight of a good quarter of my thumb's surface area flapping in a gush of blood.
When I'd stopped bleeding enough to hold the paper towel on my thumb with the fingers of the same hand, I awkwardly got a squirt of antibiotic ointment onto a Band-Aid and got that onto my thumb. Then it was back to the kitchen.
I wasn't about to keep chopping the rest of the cabbage, which means I didn't even get rid of the dang thing for my troubles. I awkwardly got the cabbage I had chopped so far up into the pot before realizing that I probably should have checked it first, to make sure there was no blood or bits of skin anywhere. The recipe's three cans of tomato products ensured there was no way I'd be able to tell now. Oh well.
As I am so fond of polls, I told the story at work and asked whether it counts as cannibalism if you're not sure whether or not you might accidentally eat a bit of your own flesh. A coworker contributed the following video:
That grossed me out more than the entire first series of Hannibal, which is saying something. Though I did note that the camera cut before either of them actually ate the supposed bit of the other.
Oh, and the chili? It's good enough, but it would be a lot better with (a lot more) meat.
