I burned my fucking left hand

Happy Friday, beloved readers. Today we reach the halfway mark of Nick’s recovery - 5 weeks down, 5 to go till he can bear weight and get his mobility back.

I’ve been cooking and baking a ton to make sure there’s lots of yummy food for him to aid in his recovery (and general sense of wellbeing and mood.)

Yesterday I made hot honey chicken (recipe at the end of the post.) We’d seen it on America’s Test Kitchen and it looked good to Nick and easily doable to me. Had to order one specific item - Frank’s Hot Sauce, original. Had to be Frank’s, apparently. No other brand would do. And honey - you need raw, unfiltered honey. Happily a baker always has that sort of thing around. Good thing too because I wasn’t able to find it through my usual Instacart orders (that’s primarily how I’m doing food shopping these days, plus runs to the local Mi Tierra.)

In the afternoon I started cooking. It’s not a hard recipe - at all. One of those where you brown the chicken on the stovetop and finish it in the oven. Done that a million times, easy peasy. A simple sauce, a nice salt cumin rub, all good. It was going to plan.

After the chicken has cooked in the oven (hot oven - 425 degrees) you take it out and let it rest in the sauce for 10 minutes before proceeding.

And that’s when it happened. Like a noob, I just reached for the handle of the all-clad skillet, forgetting that it had just spend 25 minutes in a blazingly hot oven.

I heard it before I felt it - that icky sizzling sound of flesh burning. I didn’t smell it but only because the aroma of the chicken was everywhere, and it was strong.

Fuck. I danced around for a minute or two, like I was in a cartoon.

Then I grabbed a paper towel, filled it with ice and held it in my left palm while I finished cooking.

You didn’t think a burn would stop me from cooking, now do you? I keep cooking and baking with burns and cuts, fingers wrapped and held aside while I do the work with my other hand. The food must go on.

So it did.

I ran it under cold water but not for long enough, and the redness started to show right away. And then I got all the burn pain you get. The heat, the stinging, the burning. In about 4 or 5 different places on my hand (picture grabbing a skillet handle and you’ll see all the contact points. I burned every one.) I remembered that old wives tale about using butter for a burn, but then I remembered that that was BS. No butter.

But I’m ok, of course. Sucks that this happened to my left hand when my right is already under serious pressure from the shoulder. The damn shoulder. On that topic - I tried PT but couldn’t continue. Way too painful.

So here I am on Friday morning, with an aching right arm and a burning left hand. And it’s cool. I’m ok. It’s fine. Cool is a vibe, right? It’s how you carry yourself, how you react to things, it’s an energy you give off that others want to be part of. That’s cool.

I’m pretty cool. Not perfectly cool but pretty cool.

But man o man!

And though both injuries were active this morning I was not going to let that get in the way of what I needed to do this morning. Walk Bear, obviously. Make tuna salad for Nick’s lunch (promised I would; I try really really really hard to keep my promises.) Lots of chopping which was a little challenging but surmountable. Take out the trash. Take out the recyclables. Take out the compost - I’m generating so much food waste these days that compost goes out every day.

But you know what? It’s ok. Nick’s getting better. He has more energy and feels stronger. We’ve even started playing backgammon again, though not as late and not for as long. And for now that’s fine. I need the board moved closer to me because of my shoulder, but yesterday I had that PLUS the burned left hand so it was basically a wash - which side hurt more. But who cares? We’re playing and starting slowly to get normality back. The worst of his surgery and recovery are behind us.

When Nick tasted the chicken last night he wasn’t sure at first if he liked it. Completely different flavors than he’s used to. But it grew on him and now he’s a fan. A big fan. I sautéed some spinach with olive oil and garlic, and we still had some of the bread I’d made earlier in the week. So a good meal, plus two more meals from the chicken. Worth the price of the burn, I’d say.

Here’s the recipe, and it’s definitely going into the rotation around here.

Ingredients

¼ cup honey

¼ cup Frank's RedHot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 teaspoon ground cumin

3 pounds bone-in chicken pieces (2 split breasts cut in half crosswise, 2 drumsticks, and 2 thighs), trimmed

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 2 pieces

2 teaspoons lime juice

2 scallions, sliced thin

Instructions

• Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Combine honey, hot sauce, and garlic in bowl; set aside. Combine salt and cumin in separate bowl. Pat chicken dry with paper towels and sprinkle all over with salt mixture.

• Heat oil in 12-inch ovensafe skillet over medium-high heat until just smoking. Add chicken and cook until golden brown on both sides, about 4 minutes per side. Transfer chicken to plate, skin side up.

• Pour off fat from skillet. Return chicken to now-empty skillet, skin side up; pour honey mixture evenly over chicken. Transfer skillet to oven and roast until breasts register 160 degrees and drumsticks/thighs register at least 175 degrees, 17 to 22 minutes. Let chicken rest in skillet for 10 minutes.

• Transfer chicken to shallow platter. Bring juices in skillet to boil over medium-high heat (skillet handle will be hot). Cook until slightly thickened, 1 to 2 minutes. Reduce heat to low and whisk butter and lime juice into juices in skillet until butter is melted. Spoon sauce over chicken. Sprinkle with scallions and serve.

Wishing you all good weekends, beloved readers. Appreciate you.