Sunday, March 29, 2009

Bloody Blood Oranges


Mmmm....Blood Oranges. I think I have at least one once a week while working in the kitchen. They are so vibrant in colour. I love it when you can see the marbling of orange and red and purple. It looks like someone stabbed a knife into it's juicy rind and cut the fruit's vein and it started bleeding - hence the name Blood Orange.

One of the desserts we serve at the restaurant is a lemon chiboust with blood orange segments. I was segmenting blood oranges for this. To segment oranges you need a really really sharp knife. I was using a sharp knife when a couple of my colleagues handed me what they thought were better knives to use. They were right. The boning knife was super sharp, nice and thin. It sliced that bitter skin off like a hot knife through butter. It wasted no pulp whatsoever. It definitely helped me work quicker and made my life easier. Well, up until the point when I used the knife to flick off a tiny piece of pith that was still stuck on the orange and as I flicked, the knife nicked my fingers and I started to bleed. Waaahhh :( Ok ok. It really was not that big of a deal as you can see in the picture. It is basically like a deep paper cut. As I went to get a bandage, one of the cooks was working by the first aid drawer. He helped me get the bandage and that stupid finger condom that would not stay on. As he was doing that, he showed me all his battle wounds. I swear, the cuts and burns he had were kind of scary.

Anyhow, I survived. Of course no blood contaminated any of the fruit that was going to the restaurant. I cleaned the knife and my workstation. Ate the blood orange that I was working on while I cut myself. And continued on like nothing happened. I only hope that I don't get any cuts worse than that. Owweee!

2 comments:

  1. hmmm... finger condoms...

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  2. I can't really tell...Why didn't you add some red-orange food coloring to make it more believable. =)

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