CHARGED

EDUARDO GARCIA CAN CHOP AN onion faster, better, and more uniformly than you or I. With one hand. The fact that he cooks with a prosthetic where his left hand and 10 inches of his left forearm used to be makes his mad kitchen skills all the more impressive.

“I got a lot more rustic,” Garcia, a trained professional chef, outdoorsman, and occasional triathlete, says of his post-accident cooking style. He had to adapt—a lot — after the freak backcountry electrocution in 2011 that nearly took his life and then changed the course of it.

Garcia, a trim 38-year-old with bright hazel eyes and thick dark hair, is making breakfast in his home kitchen in a Montana community not far from Bozeman. His wife, Becca Skinner, is getting a few photos. His pit bull-collie mix, Veda, is flopped on the kitchen floor. It’s a relaxed vibe. Lopping off the stem and root ends of a red onion, he peels and starts to slice. “I’m not so worried about everything being the same size or not.”

During the time when he couldn’t cook at all, after 21 surgeries and several years of rehab, Garcia lost his “knife callus,” the toughed-up nub you get from holding a chef’s most essential tool in the same spot for hours and hours every day. Now, instead of the usual 10-inch chef’s knife workhorse, his