The smokeless Cafe Diglas. I am pleased to say that we were there on the weekend it it was very busy. Excellent.

I have been doing a bit of Asian cooking lately and find it tedious to cut the vegetables as finely as is needed for some dishes where the vegetables have to be only cooked very briefly.

You know the thing - you cook the dish and throw the finely chopped stuff in at the last minute - its’s like a garnish. Some dishes I use Shallots and Red Capsicums for this.

Anyway - I thought I should buy myself a vegetable slicer so that I could have really thinly sliced stuff - because I want my food to look as good as it tastes.

You know those things that are advertised on TV. There is a man and a woman and the woman watches in awe as a man reduces a mountain of carrots to a pile of finely sliced carrot shavings.

Next he tackles a kilo of potatoes and produces a pile of perfectly formed chips - each one a masterpiece. Give him time he could slice the Brooklyn Bridge out of a piece of Parmiggiano-Reggiano.

So I prowled the shelves at Interspar and acquired this very find piece of kitchen equipment. It is a German engineering marvel. On Friday night before starting to cook I decided to test it with a Capsicum.

Because I had high blood pressure my Doctor in Australia recommended that I take an Aspirin every day. This apparently reduces the risk of stroke. It also means that when you cut yourself you bleed a lot because your blood does not congeal as quickly.

It took me ages to stop the bleeding and there was an immense amount of blood - and it took me a long time to clean it up - it was everywhere. I discovered that I did not have any bandages so used almost every bandaid in the house.

I am now better prepared. I have a better understanding of how the thing works - and how fecking sharp it is - and I have a first aid kit that would happily grace the back of an ambulance.

The loss of a large part of my thumb has helped my weight loss program but exercise is less painful and messy.