So You Woke Up Disabled: Get Yourself A Veggie Stabber!

In today’s instalment of So You Woke Up Disabled, something to help you work safer in the kitchen.

I call it the Wolverine or the Veggie Stabber. I guess it’s real name is food slice assistant.

TL;WR: Something that helps cut and slice things safely if you have hand weakness or poor motor control. Also helps anyone make even slices in the kitchen regardless of physical abilities. See it here: https://a.co/d/aWi7CzA

When I’m tired, my list of deficits includes weakness in my left hand. At the end of the day when it’s time to make dinner, my left hand has usually left the chat. My husband has great knife skills and is happy to chop whatever I need, but he works a couple of very late shifts every week. I don’t like asking him to chop veggies before we can eat very late, especially when he leaves at 5 am and isn’t home until about 830 pm on those late shifts. I also like things that let me be a fully functional adult most days, so I got me a veggie stabber.

Thankfully, I’m right-handed and my deficits are all left-sided.

But if Left Hand signs off for the day, I can’t hold anything in order to chop or slice it. I’m risking my fingers because I can’t keep them out of the way if I’m also having any tremors.

I love to cook. I love watching cooking shows too, so I can’t remember which show I was watching but one of the chefs was using something to make uniform potato slices for chips. They’d stabbed a huge potato and were able to hold the stabby implement away from the knife, then used their knife between the tines to make slices all the same thickness.

Pro-tip: Cutting is easier and safer for everyone, able-bodied or disabled, if your knives are very sharp. But I digress…

I looked at this thing and thought, I bet I could hold that even if I didn’t have any fine motor control or hand strength at that moment. I could even use a bit of body weight to pin it in place because my fingers would be far from the knife blade.

Did I spend a few minutes when it arrived pretending I was Wolverine with adamantium claws? Yes, yes I did.

Now that I’ve more or less accepted I’m permanently disabled, I’m focused on finding adaptations so I can do things I want to do independently. I can use my unaffected right hand to skewer whatever I want to slice, then hold it with my left to make perfectly even slices. I sure couldn’t do that even before I entered the neurological free-for-all phase of my life.

It’s pretty affordable at under $15, and it was a great buy. Here’s the link again to the specific one I have: https://a.co/d/dYONqfR

Read the first instalment of So You Woke Up Disabled here

The above Amazon links aren’t affiliate links and I don’t get any type of kickback for recommending them. They’re just things that improve my quality of life and make day to day tasks a little bit easier. It took me three years to figure out what to do when you suddenly wake up disabled. Now I blog the ‘handbook’ I joked about having back then.