Anti-cooking tip.

I don't know if you've ever made a recipe using prosciutto crudo, but if you ever do, don't do the stupid thing I did. 

Ah, yes, that delightful Italianate baconesque smoked pig, razor-thin slices of which are often found wrapped around melon, topped on bruschetta, or infusing salty wonder into recipes like this one. If you've ever eaten it, you know it's the best thing to come out of Italy since Marconi. If you've ever prepared a dish with it, you might be able to guess what double-dumbass thing I did. 

So there I am, cooking away, the prosciutto sitting patiently in its packaging on the counter, waiting to be chopped and then make its big entrance into the pan. When there's a break in the action I peel open the airtight plastic, and -- thinking this was like ordinary bacon -- I take my sharp little paring knife and zip zap zup run a crisscross pattern over the ham, cutting through all the slices. 

And also the razor-thin plastic sheet that separates each slice. 

Now, instead of peeling each bit of porcine goodness off the plastic sheet by sheet, I have to peel each tiny square off a tiny square of plastic -- and with the numerous slices in a three-ounce pack, that means maybe a hundred tiny squares. And I have to work fast, before everything gets cold or wilted and the pasta turns into a solid lump. Prosciutto sticks to plastic like a bum on a guy who's buying, and I have very short fingernails, and this turns into a production quickly. I'd ask my wife for help, but this is a woman who won't eat fish because of the one-in-a-thousand shot of getting a fishbone, so I'm thinking if she knows she might get a little piece of plastic stuck in her throat, that's going to put a damper on dinner. So I peel, peel, peel, cursing myself for a fool like Mr. T at a Fool Convention. 

The thing is, this was far from the first time I've ever used prosciutto, and I was well aware of the plastic between the slices, but I forgot just long enough to make this boneheaded error. 

Somehow I manage to get all the plastic off the prosciutto and serve the dinner with no incident.

Then she mentions that the dish is very salty; maybe it would be better without the prosciutto. 

I hang my head. My work here is done.