slicing veggies...

... at work can be very tedious. Even with a hand-operated slicer, made of cast aluminum with a crank handle you turn as you force items through the slicing blade. Not complicated, very few moving parts, but time consuming when you consider the prep. for each item that involves washing and trimming before you can start the actual slicing. With the end product available for purchase: several combinations of fresh squash, as well as an assortment of fresh bell peppers with onions.


I have written about this onerous task before as I would start the process for preparing trays of sliced bell pepper rings. The finished product is placed on a small black Styrofoam tray and shrink-wrapped before being weighed on the scale that prints a label.
I stand there at the work table, having washed the dozens of colored peppers: red, yellow, orange and green,, cutting off tops and cleaning out seeds before slicing, as I ready them for slicing into rings. When each hollowed out pepper is fully prepped and I move on to the next color group, I turn them upside down, sitting on the cut edge of each pepper. So there on my cutting board are often as many as a dozen multi-colored bell peppers, large cup-shaped vegetables, overturned, ready to be neatly sliced into rings and placed on the black styro. trays.


Always making me think of that carnival game where you have to guess which cup the pea is under. As you stand there on the noisy, saw-dust covered crowded path between the head-spinning mechanical rides, you are invariably tricked by the sleight-of-hand movements and slick-talking carnival worker. Confused as your eyes try to keep up with the cup hiding the miniscule bean, hoping to out-smart a professional sneak.


When I was a work on Sunday, my task was to prepare the cut vegetables, prep.ing peppers and squash. The veg. are usually in a huge, room sized walk-in cooler, so I roll my little work buggy with grey plastic tub into the coldness to load up, then clean before slicing. All the fresh produce has to be washed first: fill a large stainless steel double sink with a disinfecting wash and dip everything into the water before moving to the work table to cut. Possibly due to recent reading material, stories about WWII, filled with spies, U-boats, shipping disasters, life-boat boardings, open-water rescues: I found myself thinking of dropping depth charges. Having recently read about barrels being rolled off the edge of the ship and into the sea, I began experimenting with tossing the peppers into the vast South Atlantic ocean, as the multi-colored peppers went into the sink full of anti-bacterial rinse water. Watching the sloppy, splashing 'explosions' of water as each pepper hit the surface, envisioning those fifty-five gallon drums loaded with deadly explosives, sloshing water out onto my apron and onto the floor. And in retrospect, thankful for built-in floor drains...


In my little hypothetical 'war game', blowing the bad guys out of the water in little mini-geysers as they exploded and splashed out of the sink. Yay! We won! The world is once again safe for democracy....