What I love about baked potatoes is that they bend to your will, or, more accurately, your fridge. Whatever random semi-expired leftover ingredients you can scrounge in the back of your fridge, there you are. Bacon, capers, parsley, zucchini, fish, onions, all of it can go in! Just as long as you have cheese for melting over the top and sour cream for dolloping, you can’t go wrong with a baked potato.
Unless you want your oven on for a billionty hours, boil your potatoes first. I stick mine in a big pot without washing them. I mean, they’ve already been scrubbed free of dirt and now I’m basically sterilising them, right?
I chop up the bacon and onion and fry them off with garlic. When the potatoes are soft, I scoop out their guts and mash them up in a big bowl with all the other stuff. The mix won’t all fit back into the potato jackets, but the remainder will make excellent patties with a bit of a fry in the pan.
I set the oven to 180 degrees. I have no parsley so I rough-chop some spinach. Ignoring all the bacon, dairy and potato carbs, this is a pretty healthy meal. Score one for Ma. And I’m a superhero with a knife, I’m like Black Widow, slicing and dicing with mad skill –
uh-oh.
That’s quite a lot of blood. Deep enough for instant gushy blood, not just the pale whitish dismay of severed surface flesh that blinks at me in shock for a minute before seeping. More uh-oh.
I stagger to the back door and wail “I’ve cut myself!” Just in case, you know. If I bleed to death over the spinach in the next ten minutes, I don’t want to become an unsolved murder mystery.
The boys bound in, dripping mud. My husband is morbidly triumphant. He follows the blood from the kitchen through the living room to the back door and back to the couch. Somehow he’s been expecting this from me for the last sixteen years. He’s never fully trusted my knife block. Unfairly, because they’re German and really quite excellent and were half price in a Myer sale.
Lots of shouting of “Elevate it!” and “Keep the pressure on!” The boys are so excited. The eight year old grabs all our tea towels and puts them in the freezer while I lie on the couch, dramatic and dripping. “First aid kit!” “Don’t climb on Ma!” “Do we have ambulance cover?” The information has bled out of me.
My thumb is bifurcated, gaping at me like Pac-Man.
“Just need a lie-down,” I wheeze.
The eight year old takes our tea towels out of the freezer and uses them to wrap up my hand. Sweet holy duckballs, I haven’t washed them in decades. I’m going to die of septicaemia.
The three year old maintains a respectful distance from the victim, takes aim, and throws a truck directly at my head.
It’s his favourite truck. My boys are doing their absolute best to take care of me. I’m so moved.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I say through tears, battling the agony of a truck-sized dent in my forehead. “I’ll go to the ER.”
My husband will drive me. I won’t let him drive me, he has to wrangle baked potatoes and two small hungry demons in human form. We’ll call an ambulance, isn’t this what they’re for? A cut finger. No, no they’re not. A taxi? A mule? I can’t drive myself.
I drive myself. Is this illegal? My right hand raised, my left doing the gears and the steering wheel. I’m fine, except flicking the indicator nearly sends me into a ditch. I’m also out of petrol. This shit doesn’t happen to Black Widow.
“What are you in for?”
“Chopped my thumb off,” I wave cheerfully at the taxi driver smoking in the ambulance bay. He gives me a thumbs up. Insensitive arse. I march myself inside the ER.
Add grated zucchini too, stuff mix back inside potatoes, top with cheese and back in the oven. Bake them at 180 degrees.
What about all the blood on the spinach? I can’t use that.
We’re carnivores. We eat blood all the time. Don’t waste the spinach.
These kids are bouncing off the walls. When are you coming home?
It’s pandemic hospital Armageddon, I might never come home.
But I’m seen in only two hours, fast-tracked on the “idiots with obvious and preventable injuries” stream. It’s just me, a lady with a sprained ankle and a teen basketballer wearing his little finger backwards.
“Avocado?” says the doctor, studying my thumb with admiration.
“What?”
“It’s usually that, or pumpkin. Was it pumpkin?”
“Spinach,” I say. So disappointing. I’ve been bested by a bunch of leaves.
She can tape it up without stitches, she thinks. More embarrassment. I could have band-aided it at home.
“I really just needed the break,” I tell her as she kindly cleans and swaddles my thumb with multiple layers of padding and gauze. The last few hours lying unmolested on an ER stretcher have been quite restful. Black Widow never hides from her loving family by taking minor injuries to hospital.
Out the door now. Did they eat the baked potatoes?
Yes. They love my potatoes. I’m the world’s best cook.
On the way home, I buy a gluten free cheese and cracker packet at the servo for eight dollars.
“Been in the wars?” says the girl behind the counter, waving at my gigantic white thumb.
“Thought I was Black Widow,” I say glumly. I take my dinner and drive home, one-handed. 180 degrees.
Looking for baked potato recipes with a little less carnage? Try this collection from the BBC; https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/baked-potato-recipes
Like to read more of Elissa McKay? Visit here; https://mountainashchapter.com.au/?author=2