Following an unexpected injury, curry cravings put bedsheets in the line of fire/drips.
If you take a quick glance at the inside of her refrigerator (pictured above), you might be jealous of our Japanese-language reporter Ikuna Kamezawa. Just look at how well stocked it is with beer and canned sour cocktails!
But Ikuna ran into a serious problem with her fridge the other day. As she bent at the waist to slide in another bottle of water, she self a searing pain, the result of throwing out her back. She’s still in the recovery phase from the excruciating injury, with her movement severely restricted and her doctor telling her to avoid sitting up, and also not to lie on her stomach or flat on her back. So that pretty much leaves lying on her side as her only option.
Cooking is pretty much out of the question, so for the first few days Ikuna subsisted on store-bought breads and snack foods she had on hand. With her recovery still ongoing, though, she’s been ordering food from Uber Eats, but while that spares her the discomfort of having to cook, she’s still got to deal with the challenge of finding things she can eat while lying down in bed without making a God-awful mess of her sheets.
Sandwiches would seem like the most obvious solution, but honestly Ikuna is getting sick of them. In addition to her physical ailment, she’s now grappling with mental and emotional fatigue, and her cravings for a hot, full-on fortifying meal are growing stronger and stronger. That’s why she decided to order herself up a complete Indian curry set.
This…doesn’t seem like the wisest choice, does it? Curry can be a messy thing to eat even if you’re sitting upright at a table, and the probability of spills and stains can only be higher if you’re eating it while lying down in bed. Ikuna was determined and delirious enough, though, to go through with this questionable choice of fare.
She started with the salad, thinking it would be pretty easy to eat since, unlike the curry, it’s a solid-state food. However, she hadn’t considered that though a single solid is pretty easy to eat while lying down, because a salad consists of a great many small slices and shreds of various vegetables, it requires quite a lot of effort and concentration to eat in the posture Ikuna is stuck in.
The tandoori chicken, thankfully, was much easier to work with, thanks to the larger but still bite-sized strips it had been cut into. Likewise, the naan bread was no problem, since Ikuna could tear it into whatever size and shape was easy for her to transport to her mouth.
But now it was time for the main event, and the main challenge: the curry roux. Setting aside conventional table manners, Ikuna thought the easiest plan of attack might be to just try drinking the roux directly from its container.
This turned out to be a very bad idea, since it required twisting her hips and lower back in a way which, while ordinarily not a problem, caused intense pain in her current condition.
Next she tried spooning some curry into her mouth.
This went better than trying to drink directly from the bowl, but it was still very difficult, especially since Ikuna had to twist her neck to go from looking at the container as she filled the spoon to looking upward before she let the roux slide into her mouth.
At this point, Ikuna was ready to give up on keeping her bed clean. She wanted to eat the curry, and if she had to spill half of it onto her sheets and face in the process, so be it!
But then, just before she was consumed by her desire to consume curry, Ikuna had one last idea. She reached once again for the naan, tore off a length…
…and used the bread as a spoon.
This is, after all, a traditional way to eat Indian curry. Considering how tricky the curry had been to use with an actual spoon, though, Ikuna wasn’t sure this was going to be any more effective, but it turned out to be about 10 times easier!
Unlike with a spoon, with naan you’re eating both the curry and the curry-delivery tool, which means no worries about leftover curry dripping off the spoon as you take it out of your mouth. That makes it easier to eat while facing to the side, and since the naan absorbs some of the curry into its dough, there’s less sloshing around of the roux in transit too than with a spoon’s slippery plastic or metal.
In the end, Ikuna was able to finish every last bite of her curry meal without even a speck of food or sauce falling onto her bed. That’s a feat she couldn’t even pull off when trying to eat a hamburger in this position, and so curry is getting a spot on her meal candidate list until her back gets better (and if she does end up with some curry stains, at least there’s a way to deal with them).
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