Same, but probably not as small as he does. My wife can get the dice on everything very small, she’s an expert. Admittedly, I’m also not quite as patient as she is in that regard either…
Last night I made a red sauce with carrots, onions and celery and when it cooked down a bit, I fished out the pork chops I had in there (I had seared them before in the same pot before adding the vegetables) and just blended the whole mess with my stick blender and dropped the meat back in… That way my wife didn’t notice my sub-par chopping…
My wife has cut her finger tip off several times now using a mandoline - once just picking it up out of the drawer. She shares the same healthy fear and won’t go near it anymore.
Cut resistant gloves are pretty good idea with one of those. I have set of Amazon basics cut and puncture resistant, nitrile coated gloves I use for shucking oysters that are surprisingly nice. Think they were 6 bucks, and fit nice and tight.
That’s awful! What a mean mandoline! She should give it away, maybe after a quick spritz of holy water. Or not, if she gives it to someone she can’t stand.
Mom said she was one of the clumsiest dancers she ever knew, yet never once hurt herself with a mandoline. I think she only had a coupla close calls over the like 4 decades she used them.
It was always a knife what done for her. She’d be in the kitchen slicing up something, stop and say, "Uh oh," with a certain tone and inflection, and I/her BF at the time would jump up and ask, “Do you need to go to the hospital?!” while running for coats, keys, etc before hearing her reply.
Yeah gloves are essential, i cut the hell out of my finger with a mandolin and i wasn’t being lax about it. I was being extra careful and somehow my brain miscalculated the distance between my finger and the blade as i was carefully looking at it is all i can think of.
For general cubing of veggies i use a veggie cutter, but if i need to get really thin and consistently even slices or cuts there’s usually nothing that can replace a mandolin (unless you want to do it by hand and take forever)
The NoCry gloves are a staple in my house too. They also come in kids sizes. Great for getting young kids involved in food prep while adding some extra safety. (I wear them too)
My 4 year old is great with her zwilling twinny kids knife, with the safety features of the knife and the NoCry gloves as a backup she can be involved in a lot of prepwork and the cooking.
The basic sauce is also a great as you can use it as a base for all sorts of variations. Add mirepoix, sub the onion with another allium, add herbs/seasonings tomatoe paste. Lots of dinner options with a couple pantry staples.
It’s also a fun way to teach the kids some creativity in cooking. I consume way too much butter because of that basic recipie
The official excuse, I believe, is that the mechanical action “bruises” the onions, somehow impacting the flavor. It is, however, just an excuse to force the “lesser” chefs to do the ludicrous in order to emphasize how important it is to maintain standards – one never know who is a Michelin reviewer is, or when he or she will arrive. If you always chop the onions for sauce this way, presumably you will do all the other over-the-top things that ensures every meal every patron eats will be not just superb, but perfect, every time. It’s ritual, not a process you’re supposed to think through, based in the hopefully outdated concept that the kind of people you would hire to chop onions were probably incapable of using proper judgement on how to chop said onions. You would therefore give them a very specific instruction set, with no leeway or margin for error, that even the owner’s nephew’s brother in-law can only fail at if he really, really tries.
Some caterers, without that $300/plate profit to look forward to, use food processors, pre-chopped onions, and even repurposed meat grinders to speed up the process, but the fastest I ever saw was an old-fashioned, lever action manual onion chopper (go search “onion chopper” if you want to see what they look like.) With one of these and two assistants peeling and cutting off the bottoms and tops the chef went through a 50 lb bag of onions in about 5 minutes.
The only time I usually need a really fine dice on my onions is for my mac and cheese, because I do want them to melt in the sauce. As far as why I don’t just use a food processor, (a) cleanup and (b) by the time I pull the thing out of its storage location (I rarely use it so it’s not out on the counter), make sure it’s not dusty from disuse, clean it if it is, set it up, run the onion through it, and then clean it up, I could have already chopped the onion by hand. If I used my food processor every day, it might make more sense, but I don’t.
This is why we buy toum (Middle Eastern thick garlic sauce) instead of making it at home, despite its requiring only garlic, olive oil & a drop or six of lemon juice. I always hated cleaning the processor before and after.
What a mean mandoline! She should give it away, maybe after a quick spritz of holy water. 
Or not, if she gives it to someone she can’t stand. 
