Covered in Blood and Onions

I stared at the massive bowl of chopped onions and chillies; the onions and chillies stared back at me. I donned my onion goggles, held my puny hand blender aloft like a weapon, and jammed it into the bowl.

What followed was an complete vegetable carnage.

The hand blender made a terrible strained scream, and a geiser jet of vapourised onion forced its way into the air like water from a whale's blowhole, followed by a horror movie-like spray of chilli-reddened onion gore in every conceivable direction. It was too late to stop. I had to continue.

Sanguine vegetable matter continued to fly at me as I gritted my teeth and carried on blending, the cut on my thumb from an earlier mishap with a broken food processor burning from the chilli juice, despite the plaster covering it.

And then suddenly, it was all over. In front of me was a bowl of wonderfully fragrant curry paste; on me was about a third of it. I calmly wiped myself off, sprayed on a bit of perfume to mask the smell of debauchery, and stepped out of the house with bits of onion still on my T-shirt.

How did I get here?

Last week I was bought a food processor as an early birthday gift. I've never owned one before but always wanted one, knowing the amount of amazing things I could do in the kitchen with one. Finally, I could now create almost anything from scratch!

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. A week on- today, this is- I unboxed it, cleaned all the parts up, and plugged it in to give it a test run. I was very disappointed when absolutely nothing happened.

After checking that I hadn't done something silly like forget to turn an extra button on or something, I traipsed down to the supermarket along with my mum who still had the receipt (thank God she's so organised) to get it replaced.

There was only one of the same model left, and it looked like it had already been opened. I insisted on checking the contents of it before taking it home- and as my mum and I were going through it, we both cut ourselves on the processor blade, which had been shoved haphazardly back into box my whoever the last person to handle it was. The blade was also embedded in the processor itself, making it, again, totally useless.

We settled for a refund, I promised to write a disgruntled letter to the supermarket's CS department about the dodgy way returned stock is handled, and we headed home empty-handed. A slightly annoying shame, since I was halfway through making a fancy curry, and needed a food processor to make the curry paste. I had already prepared my ingredients, and there was no way I was making anything less than what I'd planned all week to make.

So now you can see how my train of thoughts went, and how I ended up creating chaos in the kitchen with my too-small hand blender. In any case, I doggedly kept on, eventually got the meat happily marinading, and set off to my favourite shopping centre to invest in a more expensive but infinitely more reliable brand of food processor. A little absent-mindedly though: hence the bits of onion still stuck to me.

So. Now that I finally have my amazing machine, next time I hope to create magic in the kitchen instead of mayhem.

Oh, and the curry turned out absolutely amazing. I should bloody well think so too, after all of that.

~Fin~

Of Street Food and Melting Makeup...

True to form, my first tale of woe will be of one that only happened yesterday.

I was milling around in Camden Town yesterday evening, waiting for the precise moment to start walking to London Zoo for the summer Zoo Lates event (one thing about me- I hate, hate, hate to be late for appointments and meetups, often resulting in me being somewhere ridiculously early and then having to find ways of entertaining myself- thankfully easily done in Camden Town, on this occasion). I noticed it was getting a bit breezier now, so I put my cardigan on, but without buttoning up- it wasn't that chilly (trust me, this is a key bit of information for later).

Having grabbed some food from one of the stalls and found a nice bench to sit and eat at, I suddenly remembered that the shirt I had on was white- not a crisp white mind you, but white with grey pinstripes. White enough to make a bad impression of a messy eater, in any case. Noting my poor choice in food in terms of stain factor, I ate the fluorescently orange (and very delicious) sweet and sour chicken with utmost care, and for once, successfully.

Making a note of the time, I decided to touch my makeup up a bit, being forever conscious of my oily (and therefore shiny) skin type. I checked myself in my compact mirror. Alright, was my internal assessment, but a bit reflective around the nose and forehead area: better sort that out before I meet the guys. I fished out my trusty tube of Benefit The Porefessional primer from the depths of my bottomless bag (I always make a point of buying bags with TARDIS technology), unscrewed the lid and carefully squeezed a tiny blob onto the back of my hand.


At least, I intended to squeeze out a tiny blob.

What I actually squeezed out was a whole lot of runny mess, and all over myself: the primer had melted in the warm weather. Cursing, I hurriedly screwed the top back on and made that pose everyone does when suddenly covered with wet stuff (you know, the 'looking generally down at yourself in disbelief with your elbows at your sides but your forearms stuck out like an incredulous velociraptor' pose). It wasn't looking good- now my shirt was streaked with light peachy marks. Could be worse, I thought to myself, at least it's nowhere near as noticable as sweet and sour would have been. I managed to mop myself up well enough with some tissues, but couldn't help noting that I hadn't solved my shiny face problem yet. It occurred to me that I should have kneaded the tube before using it. Silly me! It had been in my bag for a while, after all. I picked the tube up again, and squished it around.

I didn't realise that, in my previous haphazard hurry, I hadn't screwed the top back on properly.

So here I was, shiny-faced and with primer makeup on practically every part of my body except for my face. A bit fed up now, I managed to smear a bit of the stuff straight from my shirt onto my face, re-mopped myself up as best I could, and decided it was time to get myself to the zoo.

I should have just kept walking, in hindsight. Instead, I stopped by a churros stall. I noticed they were doing large, filled churros instead of the traditional thin ones that you dip into chocolate, so I went to get one, deciding that it would cheer me up. And it did, for a while.

I got about halfway through it until it very quietly and very messily exploded.

Now thoroughly fed-up indeed, churro-less and looking like the posterchild for a Persil advert, I resigned myself to the fact that I'd now be meeting my friends looking utterly ridiculous. I whipped out some more tissues and started cleaning the sticky stuff from my bag, and as well as I could from my trousers. I sighed, preparing myself, and looked down to properly assess the state of my shirt, which was of course terrible.

It was then that I noticed why it had suddenly gotten breezy earlier.

The middle button of my shirt had been undone the entire time, exposing, in all its green and spotty glory, my bra.

Which was now also splattered with chocolate.