By Carol Braithwaite

(Editor’s Note:  This article is reprinted from the Winter 2014 issue of The Focus, the newsletter of the NFB of Alabama.)          

In case I run the risk of reinforcing for anyone reading this article the myth that blind people are by virtue of their blindness dumb, inept, unsafe to themselves, or a danger to others by being in charge in the kitchen, that is NOT my intent.  I strongly disagree with this myth because I have learned that good training of a blind person makes them just as able as a sighted person to cook.  I just want to share with you some funny things that have happened in my kitchen, with the hope of illustrating what happens when a person with low vision cooks with the same techniques as if they had full vision without knowing that there is a better way.  Sighted people and blind people alike have bizarre stories to tell.  We are all human, and as the old bumper sticker from the sixties said, “…it happens.”  With that said, read on.   

I began adventuring in the kitchen early.  My parents knew that I had limited vision, but they believed I should do anything a fully sighted person could do short of driving anything with wheels and a motor.  Even though I was visually a bit klutzy, Mom was patient and let me try.  Mom taught me to bake sugar cookies and brew hot tea at age 8 and she allowed me to serve snacks to my friends in the neighborhood on her treasured childhood aqua china tea set.  Special times.  My Scout leader taught our troop to make Bisquick doughnuts at my house.  Watching those puppies puff up as we dropped them into the Dutch oven full of hot grease was awesome.  Life was good.  My fudge, the result of a flopped icing recipe at age 10, became legendary in our extensive family and is still asked for today.

I decided to make oatmeal for our family of seven one Saturday morning.  I got involved in watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, the oatmeal boiled over, and I cleaned up the mess only halfway and boiled another pot.  As the old gas stove heated up, what had leaked down beneath the burners into the stove’s infernal guts adhered permanently to whatever it contacted.  My mother discovered the charred goop a couple of hours later, and as I remember, I narrowly escaped a beating with a pancake turner and spent the rest of my Saturday scrubbing cold fused oatmeal off 25 stove parts.

Mom had to spend five nights locked in a downtown hotel during jury duty for a murder trial when I was 12.  I was the designated cook for my dad and us five voracious Watson kids.  My dad could barely boil water, so I did what I had watched Mom do — skillet fried pork chops, green beans, boiled new potatoes, fruit salad.  We all chewed hard and got the meat and crunchy beans down.  Potatoes and fruit were great, except I forgot to pit the cherries and my dad broke a tooth.  He praised me anyway.

Before I married, I worked for some months as kitchen help at a Bible study center in North Carolina.  I was a whiz at making bread, pancakes and biscuits from sour dough starter, which I had to “feed” weekly with some sugar, flour, and milk.  My biscuits would come out golden brown, uniformly round, and about as fluffy as hockey pucks, but they had great flavor piled with blackberry jam.  The head cook begged me to tame the starter or banish it the day I forgot to use enough of it up and it blew the lid off the container and left stalactites and drool all over the fridge.

I was a really experienced cook by the time Tom and I got married in my mid-twenties.  I had learned to make all kinds of bread successfully.  Tom and I together made my own recipe of apple butter and my grandmother’s dark marmalade.  We canned them for Christmas presents for our family and friends that first Christmas as newlyweds.  Canning is great fun.  The first time we had a friend over for dinner, though, I let the water boil out of the steamer full of fresh zucchini squash and by the time she arrived, I was fanning smoke out the frosty kitchen windows and she had the rare treat of hearing the dinner veggies flushed down the toilet.  Celery, tomatoes and onions were quickly chopped and seasoned as a replacement and my pride was baptized in mirth as we tried to eat while holding our noses.

Once our children started coming along, life got really interesting at mealtime.  Our son Rob at age two got into my sewing supplies  without my knowing it and somehow transferred some needles and thread into empty Tupperware containers in the bottom kitchen cabinet.  When I stored leftover vegetable soup in some of the containers, I did not notice foreign objects in them.  The next time I served soup Tom pulled a needle out of his mouth and I followed with a long red thread hanging out of my mouth — attached to a needle lodged under my tongue!

Ah, yes — soup stories.  There was the time I had my family’s favorite beef barley soup simmering in an open kettle on the stovetop.  Rob, a hulking teenager by then, came through the kitchen sniffing the aroma and stopped to stir the pot with the ladle.  Suddenly he exclaimed, “What’s this, Mom?  Sock soup?” and pulled a nylon knee-high out of the broth.  No worry — it was clean laundry I had lost as I headed from the dryer to my sorting table in the garage.  The knee-high had just gone airborne as I whizzed by.  Anyway, boiling things always kills them germs!

My crowning escapade with soup occurred one weekend when I invited my parents to come for homemade split pea soup and cornbread.  I had soaked dried peas for an hour and boiled them with carrots, celery, onion, bay leaves and ham.  It smelled scrumptious!  But it tasted a bit different.  My dad asked if there were lentils in the soup.  I looked puzzled and asked why he wanted to know.  He said he just wondered what the dark chewy things were. 

I got to the bottom of my bowl and realized there were a lot of them.  By then my husband Tom was finishing his third bowl.  With horror, I began to realize the “lentils” were weevils!  My mother realized it at the same moment and gulped, laughed and said, “This is the first time I’ve had third-world soup!”  Now I put any dried beans, rice, flour and the like that might have potential hatching-out critters growing up in them into the freezer.  The whole world is blessed with unwanted protein in our food, folks, but luckily in the U.S. we have the luxury of arresting some of it in the larval stage.  Yuck!

Another time we invited the head of our home-schooling association to stay for dinner one night.  I had made a good Southern meal of baked chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, black-eyed peas, sticker salad and cornbread.  Conversation was lively around the table.  Marjorie suddenly yelled, “No, Mom!  Don’t eat that!” and plucked a large stewed cricket out of the forkful of greens I had raised to my lips.  We only encountered one in that pot that time.  I always wash my fresh collard greens in a laundry bag in the washer on the cold rinse cycle to remove any dirt and grit, and I always tear them before putting them into the pot, so I don’t know where that critter came from. 

As we collected more kids underfoot, serendipities got pretty frequent.  My vision was worsening steadily and my tactile sense was not as developed as it is now.  I would miss those blasted stickers the grocers started slapping on every apple, pear, plum and tomato I bought.  They ended up incorporated into our salads so frequently that to this day the family refers to my fresh creations as sticker salad.  I also got more vigorous in putting salads together as I hurried to multi-task my way through meal preparations, homework supervision and answering the inevitable dinner hour phone calls.  Marjorie, our middle child,  recently said as she peeled fresh spinach off the sink backsplash and window over her sink where I had prepared salad, “Mom’s given a whole new dimension to the meaning of the words ‘tossed salad’.”  No, I’m not a tidy cook even now — but I’m good!

One summer day I learned the hard way that I MUST check the contents of the oven before turning it on.  Our youngest child Erin, then age four, was a fervent admirer of Barney, the singing purple dinosaur.  She had put her plastic Barney in the oven on a cookie sheet, and without peeking in there first, I preheated the oven for roasting potatoes while barbecued chicken was on the outdoor grill.  A vile smell began wafting out the kitchen window. 

I ran to find its source and noticed smoke oozing from around the oven door gasket and an orange glow through the window in the door.  There lay a purple puddle with two eyes staring upwards mournfully.  “Oh, Lord, get me outa this fiery furnace!”

Now I teach cooking classes to blind people as part of my rehab teaching profession.  How did that happen?  First, I refused to take myself too seriously and chose to laugh along with my family and guests at my culinary mishaps.  A good sense of humor went a long way towards keeping me from being intimidated by myself and ditching the idea of cooking.

More importantly, I learned from my friends in the National Federation of the Blind that being blind was not the root cause of my difficulties.  My problem was not that I was blind, but that I was using the wrong techniques to handle my blindness.  I wish I had known as a child that I was depending on my vision for doing so many tasks that I could have performed best using non-visual skills.  I did not have the opportunity to get the training in non-visual skills I needed.  All I knew was to do what I could visually as a sighted person would, grin and bear it if I goofed up and was made fun of, keep trying to do normal tasks “normally” (meaning visually), and avoid the ones I was pretty sure were not possible without full vision.  This approach served me pretty well, since vision loss was a slow progression for me, but my life could have been more self-confident and free. 

 If NFB-style training under a blindfold and with a cane had been available and considered needed by my parents, I would have known early on, for instance, to tactually check to see if there were any needles in my empty Tupperware containers or if I had little things crawling around in my package of dry split peas.  I would have been taught not to use my vision to remove stickers from the fresh fruit.  And I would have put my hand in the cold oven to check for any stowaways such as a plastic Barney before pre-heating the oven.

Most importantly of all, if the better way of non-visual  skills is not taught and used, the blind person with some usable vision tries to function as a person with full vision.  This leads to lack of self-confidence, worry and sometimes failure.  A blind person’s inability to succeed while using full-vision techniques leads to being ashamed of being blind because they have not learned to do all things as well as  fully-sighted people.  They have not learned that it is respectable to be blind and how to convince the general public of this.  I am so grateful to the National Federation of the Blind and to my encouraging sighted family who know that those of us who are blind, given the right training and unbiased opportunities, can be competent, independent and joyful people — whole people who just happen to have the characteristic of blindness.