If you didn't know before, you do now: I'd purchased this rib eye steak Tuesday. The steak had been in the fridge a couple of days and so it was time I did something with it before it "turned".
As I'd done previously, per Alton Brown's superb direction via YouTube, I fired up the oven to 500°F, threw my cast iron skillet in the oven (for at least 30 minutes to get it to temperature).
Meanwhile, I salted and peppered the steak and lubed it with some canola.
I used a clean, dry dish towel (kitchen towel, tea towel? Now that I look at it, is towel even a real word?) to pull the skillet from the oven and place it over a high flame on the stove-top. Bare-handed, I threw the seasoned steak into the skillet, rinsed my fingers and dried them on the towel.
Sixty seconds later, I flipped the steak with a pair of tongs.
Sixty seconds after that, I flipped the steak with the tongs again, grabbed the towel, wrapped it around the skillet handle and slung the steak-laden cast iron into the 500° oven.
Then I prepped some corn, did some dishes, wiping and drying my hands on the towel hanging on the oven bar/handle/opener.
When the time came to pull the cast iron and steak from the oven, I removed the towel from the oven door bar/handle/opener, folded it in length twice (to yield 4x thickness), wrapped it around the cast iron handle and moved the skillet from oven to stove-top in one fell swoop.
Miraculously, BECAUSE THE WATER IN THE DAMP TOWEL IMMEDIATELY BECAME STEAM WHICH BURNED THE EVERLOVING BEJESUS OUT OF MY HAND! Only because I have had professional cook experience did I not throw the cast iron, steak and all, onto the floor of my kitchen. Well, that and I really wanted to eat tonight.
The steak looked great!
My hand, though, did not look so good.
The most blistered part of my useful, non-paperweight, hand was the fleshy part at the base of the thumb (see blisters above). Other burned areas included the thumb pad and the area directly beneath it (between the two joints), the "top" side of my pointer finger, (top being the area as you look down at your hand with it being perpendicular to the ground), and the fatty part of my hand near my wrist away from the thumb and fingers (bottom of photo just to left of center, you can see it's red there, but the nasty bits weren't included).
You know, all of the places where the handle of a 10-pound 500°F skillet would rest on a right-handed person.
And believe it or not, after only 30 minutes of holding the equivalent of 5 ice-cube trays of ice in my burned hand, one after the other, I managed to collect this photo using my left (paperweight) hand on a right-handed camera! Best of all, the focus is probably better than any of my food photos. *Sigh.*
