The Chicken-y Cutting Board

My mom has been long forbidden to touch anything in my kitchen, for a variety of reasons going back since I was in college. So, when they come to visit, usually either myself or my sister is watching her like a hawk to make sure she isn't trying to do something like sneak vegetables into our soups or put my knives back without cleaning them.

One of these visits, I was preparing a chicken, sausage, and white bean soup. It's a great wintertime slow cooker recipe, and I was trying it for the first time. The ingredient list called for fennel, which was a vegetable I had never cooked with before.

The strange vegetable known as fennel.

Being most familiar with Asian cooking throughout childhood, this was an ingredient I had never cooked with before. Thankfully, my cookbook had thoughtfully included a section on how to prepare a fennel bulb for use. As instructed, I cut off my fennel bulb's leafy frondy stalks, and discarded them in the trash. I then took out another cutting board and cubed the chicken breast. As the chicken was browning, I took my chicken-y cutting board and knife and stuck them in the sink to be washed.

"Ach! What's this?" I then heard my mom exclaim. She was looking in the trash bin.

"What?" I asked.

"This! So much in trash- so wasteful!" She held up some fennel stalks, having picked them out of the trash.

"Mom, that's fennel. That part isn't edible. You can cook fish on top of them or use the leaves for seasoning, but I don't have any plans for that before they'd spoil," I explained. Puzzled by the prospect of throwing so much greenery away, I had looked it up myself before I had started cooking.

"Mmm..." she muttered.

I turned back to cooking, turning the chicken cubes to brown and adding in more vegetables. When I turned around again, my mom was on the other side of the kitchen with her fennel stalks, using my chicken-y cutting board and my chicken-y knife from the sink to cut the fennel stalks into pieces. And then sticking those pieces raw into her mouth.

"MOM!" I yelped. "You can't do that! I cut chicken on that cutting board with the knife!"

My mom looked up. "What? Why not?"

Incredulous, I asked, "Why not?! Haven't you heard of Salmonella?! You're going to get sick!"

"Nooo," she scoffed. "I have a strong immune system." She continued working at the fennel with the knife and putting pieces of it in her mouth.

"Mom..." I started.

"Ai, you worry too much," she interrupted me.

I sighed and continued cooking, thinking to myself that this was yet another reason why she was not allowed in the kitchen.

Salmonella! (Source.)

As a side note, she didn't get Salmonella. Lucky for her. Although in a perverse way, I wish she had, because then I WOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT!!! (But she would not have learned a lesson from it, because she is incapable of learning from life experiences...)