Avocado emergency nearly cost my finger

‘The knife went straight through the avocado and nearly cut my finger off,’ writes Vivien Bailey, of her attempts to remove the stone. Photograph: Zakharova_Natalia/Getty Images/iStockphoto

I love Claire Ptak’s recipes, but the photograph showing her removing the stone from an avocado – holding the fruit in the palm of her left hand while tapping the stone with the knife held in her right – for her chocolate avocado mousse, made me blanch (Let there be light, Cook, 7 January).

I used this method once after seeing it illustrated in a magazine. The knife went straight through the avocado and nearly cut my finger off, resulting in 11 stitches and plastic surgery on the nerve.

The surgeon told me that there were three types of knife/finger accidents: the oyster-opening one, the avocado one, and the separating-two-frozen-burgers one. A paradigm of the British class system perhaps?
Vivien Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire

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