So Stephanie has a real serious fear of cross contaminating food, she's almost jewish - not liking other foods touching eachother. Well she's not that bad, but I'm not permitted to cut raw meat on a wooden cutting board. In our home it has to be plastic when cutting meat, or wooden whenever she isn't present, and it's unbeknowst to her.
You see I do not have fear of dying due to the bacteria and other microbes that may dwell in a wodden cutting board. I have grown up on food that was cut up on wodden cutting boards. In fact the old cutting board we had when I was a kid was great it smelled of onions whenever it was wet.
The cutting board was a dark brown, glued together using three leafs, it was round and was routed all the way round near the edge maybe 1\4 deep. You hear some people talking about how well seasoned their cast iron frying pan is, well this cutting board was well seasoned. I say if you cut the board up into chunks and put it in a slow cooker you could make a soup from it that tasted awesome. This baby was the shit!
It wasn't until my early teeage years that I started to get fussy about the foods I ate and the way it was prepared. I started cooking myself when I was 9 or 10. I was always baking stuff, especially Duncan Hines's Devil's Food cakes - in which case I always ate a good portion of the batter if not all of it.
I was always my responsibility to clear up after my mess and when preparing meals it was quite a mess. When it came my turn to use the cutting board I became well aware of the scent acpturing properties of wooden cutting boards. You could imagine this cutting board from many years of use all tattered with bits of wood sticking from it. It's like it was growing hair, not rigid enough to stab you but not weak enough to just fall off. This board has seen many a sharp blade turn dull and has helped slice many a hundred onions and carrots and turnip.
When it came time to wash the cutting board I used to let it soak for a few minutes and then wash it thoroughly, I would scrub it vigorously with wash cloths. Some times I'd soak it and scrape it with a sharp knife watching the wood turn a lighter shade as if the knife were a squeegee. I was adamant on getting this thing clean and it seems the more I soaked it and scraped it with a knife the better it worked.
One day I made a fish caserole and of course when it came to cleaning time I was extra anal. I soaked and scraped it twice, then gave it a good scrubbing. For good measure I figured I would let it soak a bit more just to get out all the possible fish smell, so I did. I also decided to watch some TV while I waited. Well, one show turned into 2, which turned into 3. When I went to give the cutting board the final scrub I looked into the sink to find 3 separately floating pieces of dark wood.
