Week Eight: Now You're Cooking; Or, How to Decorate a Floor

Now that the bulk of our holiday preparations are behind us at the Center, I was able to spend a good portion of my home management time this week cooking meals of my own choosing. Predictably, results were mixed.

On Monday, I made my Nana’s trusty old vegetable soup recipe. Not much to it – chopped and peeled some potatoes and onions, added some frozen vegetables and okra (always the secret weapon), seasoned with pepper for some kick. The potatoes didn’t soften quite as much as I would have liked, but other than that, things turned out well and I now have a freezer full of soup. Which is pretty handy for days like Thursday, when the temperature was quite literally zero degrees when I awoke.

On Tuesday, I reached my greatest height yet on the culinary mountain. I made my mother’s chili recipe, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t come out tasting more or less as I remembered. I had the pleasure of cooking in my own kitchen at my apartment, since I was assigned to work there with minimal supervision instead of the large kitchen at school. Needless to say, it’s quite a bit more pleasant cooking in a familiar space, without four or five other people also bustling about blindly.

I was feeling pretty good about myself after my chili success, so I decided to take on a fairly ambitious recipe for chicken tikka masala on Wednesday. I was back in the home kitchen, this time because of a flood at the center; and my instructor was on hand to oversee my progress. I struggled through making a sauce and marinade for the chicken – measuring, whether spices or liquids, is still a real challenge for me – but after awhile, I had a cookie sheet loaded up with bite-sized chunks of chicken that had marinated in a blend of yogurt and spices.

Then I dropped the tray of chicken face down on the floor while trying to move it from the countertop into the oven.

There were no survivors.

I can’t really attribute this to my vision – it was just pure clumsiness. The lack of sight did make the clean-up a bit more grotesque, though – there’s nothing much to do but to feel around until you’re confident you’ve picked up every last bit of dropped food. I had to abandon the recipe, but I’m planning on trying again at school tomorrow during my home management class.

Later that same day, incidentally, I decided to heat up some of the soup I had made Monday. I had a pot going on the stove and, while that cooked, I began transferring the rest of my soup from a giant Tupperware container I had borrowed to get the soup home from school into several smaller containers of my own. I put one such container in the freezer and closed the door, evidently knocking something that had been sitting on top of the freezer down onto the stove in the process. I didn’t lose the entire pot of soup, but a good bit of it exploded off the stove and all over the floor. Seven hours after I had been on my hands and knees picking up marinated chicken, I was back sweeping around with paper towels and looking for potatoes and okra. Again – not a sight thing, just an indication of my general Schleprock status in the kitchen.

And I’d be remiss in not mentioning that, as I was pouring water into our coffee maker Thursday night to use it for the first time since we moved in back in October, I suddenly heard water cascading all over the counter and floor. Sure enough, there were two large holes in the side of the coffee maker, and once the water inside had reached their level, it began pouring out as I was trying to fill the reservoir.

Ah, the joys of the kitchen – with or without sight.

Other than that, the week was fairly uneventful. A couple successful travel journeys, memorizing more Braille contractions, continuing to work on using the JAWS screen reader software to help me navigate the internet. It turns out that, while the software is pretty powerful and helpful, its effectiveness is determined primarily by how well a given website is coded. If accessibility isn’t a priority for web designers, sites can be inaccessible to blind users with screen readers. I knew this to be the case, but it’s nevertheless surprising and disheartening to discover that, for example, a bare-bones, text-based baseball site that I enjoy reading is nearly impossible to manage with a screen reader.

I should also note, if only for a laugh, that I received what I believe to be the worst directions I’ve ever gotten this week. I was on a group independent trip with two other students to a strip mall about seven tenths of a mile from school. We were looking for the bagel shop, since it was 9 AM and we had time for a quick breakfast before returning to the center.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, finding the business you’re looking for is pretty much trial and error when you can’t see. This is particularly true in a strip mall, where you don’t even have clues from the address about where to expect a given business to be.

The first store we went into was a pizza place that had not opened yet. Then, while my fellow students walked in one direction, I pursued a hunch that there were other stores in a location they hadn’t checked. Sure enough, I found my way into a Subway sandwich shop. It turns out that my sandwich artist’s artistry did not extend to the art of giving directions.

I explained that I was looking for the bagel store. After a couple “it’s right over there”s – common, but nevertheless always surprising given that I am wearing a blindfold and obviously (I would think) can’t see what direction “over there” is – I received the following riddle: “OK, so you know where we are now?” (Not really, but go on.) “OK, well…the bagel shop is the opposite of where we are.”

No thanks to this cryptic clue, we found our target a couple minutes later. But it never does cease to amaze me how bad we as humans are at giving directions. I guess the conclusion might be that we don’t necessarily “know” where we’re going so much as we continuously rediscover it, chiefly through seeing clues and responding to them. It’s the particular challenge of a blind person to really internalize these things – to know, for instance, how many blocks it is until you make a left turn to go to the bank, rather than just looking for the familiar intersection. It’s a big part of the reason why I find the sleep shade experience to be sort of exhausting: you’re constantly making maps in your mind, and remembering every little detail of where you are and how you got there. It isn’t so much challenging as it is fatiguing.

Anyway, I’ll have one more week of heavy brain lifting and then it’s off to the four winds for the winter holiday. I’m hoping to write every week while I’m away, so stay tuned. And, as always, please feel free to ask any questions you might have – I’ll need topics to write about while not in school.