HAND MEAT – The meat hand, something gruesome and delicious!

Megan reports how you can make it yourself! “Since August I’ve had a post it note over my desk that simply said “meat hand”. I mulled over how to make it for a while. I realized that the old formed inside a plastic glove thing wouldn’t work since the fingers would cook so much faster than the rest of the hand. It wasn’t until I saw this hand gelatin mold that I had my plan.” “I shot several angles to show how it has a base built in, meaning I could probably use it to mold meatloaf.” “I made the basic meatloaf recipe from ‘How to Cook Everything’ using a food processor to chop the onions and carrot to a very fine mince so I could fill in the details of the mold without trouble. One meatloaf recipe using 2 pounds of meat will make two hands.” “I sprayed the inside of the mold with cooking oil spray and it came out fairly easily. I put it on top of a rack to allow the fat to run off as it cooked.” “I did a few versions, learning as I went along.” HAND MEAT – VERSION No.1: “The first one was straight meatloaf. I surrounded it with mashed potatoes and kale (or brain matter and swamp greens if you have kids, or just act like kids). It looked ok, sort of creepy.” HAND MEAT – VERSION No.2: “The next time I tried adding fingernails made of onion, which were just like press on nails. To make the fingernails I sliced a thin round off of a single layer of an onion, then used kitchen scissors to trim it into a nail shape keeping the lines in the onion running the length of the nail. I kept the thinnest end of the onion slice at the tip of the nail.” “This time to better define the fingers I piped mashed potatoes around to define the hand shape. I just used a ziploc bag with a small corner snipped off to do the detail inbetween fingers, then I snipped off a larger corner to pipe around the hand. I smoothed down the mashed potatoes with a silicone spatula. The results where pretty creepy.” HAND MEAT – VERSION No.3: “The ketchup covered hand made me pretty happy but… I had this idea. My mom used to throw a slice of cheese on top of her meatloaf before cooking it and the cheese always turned out browned and crispy. I wondered how that would work with my relatively delicate hand. I also had the idea to use the smaller inner layers of the onion to create a cartoon-y wrist bone sticking out.” “I made two versions. The first used white onion and was simply covered in cheese. The second used red onion and was covered with ketchup and then cheese. I used slices of provolone cheese because I knew it wouldn’t slide off completely as it melted. (Maggi suggested it, thanks Maggi!) This time I used the version of meatloaf with spinach, again from ‘How to Cook Everything’. Here are some pre-cooked pictures – see above.” “If I were to do it again I would have put less cheese around the fingers, or rather, I would have put narrower pieces. The cheese pooled inbetween the fingers and made it more difficult to diguise later on.” “This cheese thing, it worked a bit too well. We couldn’t bring ourselves to actually eat either of them (though, we had been eating a lot of meatloaf lately). Here is a picture showing them side by side. They were cooked at the same time and the one with the ketchup beneath the cheese (white fingernails) browned a bit more. You can also see that piping the detail more carefully can make a difference.” “The wrist bone of the white onion was pushed out a bit as the meatloaf cooked.” “The smaller onion piece of the red onion write bone wasn’t as impressive.” “The red onion fingernails were creepier, but the white onion fingernails might get the point across more quickly.” MORE FUNNY HAND NEWS: • The mystery of the five fingers • The hand of God • The six digit man – hand satire from the Bill Gates Medical Center.

The six digit man – hand satire from the Bill Gates Medical Center!

What will be the next step in the evolution of the human hand? All ‘tetrapods’ have 4 limbs with 5 fingers. Even the panda has only 5 digits + an unusual outgrowth of the wrist bone. So, the Leek’s funny idea that man could develop a 6th finger can only best be described as a funny joke … but a mission impossible! Quoted from The Leek: “The Next Step in Evolution: Six Digit Man’ Leads the Way to the Future: Researchers at the Bill Gates Medical Center in Seattle were astonished to discover that a patient, who was recently admitted with severe wrist pains, had six functional fingers in his left hand (see X-Ray image below). The patient, now dubbed “Homo Digitus”, is believed to form the next step in human evolution. “For the last two decades we have been waiting to see how the human race would adapt to working with computers, and finally we were handed the answer” says Genetics Expert, Dr. Harry Ditty. According to Ditty Harry, Hox genes controlling the development of body parts have so far prevented the formation a sixth independent digit. However, it seems that the frequent need to use the key combination has finally triggered the previously unknown “Keystrokes genes” to prevail. Other experts noted that the new finger configuration significantly enhances the versatility of the human hand. “In addition to the existing ‘precision grip’, used when holding a pencil, and ‘power grip’, used when holding a hammer, subjects of the mutation will be able to apply the new ‘anguish grip’, which is extremely handy when using the Microsoft Windows operating system” says Han D. Man, chief handyman at the Hand Institute of Handuras. The patient himself, whose name remains undisclosed, was quoted as saying: “I never imagined the incredible impact I was going to have on civilization. All I wanted to do was to give my computer the finger”. Read further about: The mystery of the five fingers & The hand of God