Is Giving you wings the new Chasing the Dragon?

While I am only very slightly disappointed that I have yet to meet a strung out co-worker in my short time in the industry, of which I hope to never meet or GASP...employ, I have noticed something happening in the kitchen.

No doubt about it, we are eating and living healthier than we were decades ago. Although we do have some things that problems with regards to eating such as obesity; it's not like we are eating hollandaise on steak at a time when hollandaise was used as universally on restaurant food like ketchup. The more I learn about history of food, the more I realize that while one bad thing is erased from the past...or goes out of style, another unregulated bad habit becomes in vogue. A decade ago we've never heard of trans-fats, but only within the food industry of all things. However like I said as the trends of food flash in and out like oil in the pan, the kitchen also has changed.

While herion isn't the choice of energy for the cooks that I've encountered, I've found a new thing has taken it over. Energy drinks. Not everyone drinks it but it's around the kitchen enough to stand out. There's good old Reggie with his labelled Red Bull in the salad cooler and Bee-Ret with his two cans of Blue Amp lying around the prep counter. It's amusing at most times, in fact I've partaked in some energy drink shinanegins when one was offered to me a few times; often as part of a chemical induced substitute for a pep-talk to rally the brigade before service. I remember the time when on a road trip with Rob he'd had enough energy drinks to even send a humming bird into cardiac arrest. One in particular where upon opening the tab filled the front of the vehicle with a mushroom cloud smell of chemicals that will no doubt be strained right into his brain. I'm glad that with the heat of the kitchen, the fans a running and the cologne of dozens of food smells in the air spares me of having to ever experience that smell again.

While slamming a can of a energy drink might be the new rail of cocaine it's interesting to imagine that perhaps why this cold beverage is used in lieu of a white powder. Perhaps how this generation feels younger and more youthful...even perhaps a entire generation of man-children needing to feel like a kid all the time. It might be the nature of immaturity in the kitchen in general since many were just teenagers when they started. It might even be because of the internet which is a proverbial fountain of youth due to it's ability to always find something entertaining on an innocent low brow level. Whatever it may be, it does make me wonder whether in a decade or so we'll soon learn of the outcome from the consumption of energy drinks leading to long term health problems in a time when it was as casual as hitting up some cocaine in the 70's.

Block 1: Day 10 Stocks, soups, sauces and a hard lesson

Making soups and stocks was pretty easy albeit a bit touchy at times. This week it was all liquids and we made a variety of stocks and soups which no doubt will be for later consumption. It's interesting the pace that you go at with the class although at the same time I begin to feel that we might not be as efficient as we could possibly be. Using far more stock than what we produced earlier in the week, I feel a bit guilty borrowing stock already made by other classes which seems to be more thievery than learning. You never steal from anyone else's Mise-En-Place (every ingredient that you need for your dishes) and this feels like the ultimate form of it.


So we are down to 19 people now and out of all people it was one person who I didn't think would have quit...let's call her Kyle. A hardass or just extremely serious, she had 5 years in the industry before she decided to take the program. She would have been a great person to rely in the program considering her small amount of leadership skills after having the head of the department talk to us about wanting to come together as a group in order to succeed. She had an infection which made her miss 3 days of the course and therefore had to withdraw and attend at a different date. A shame but what can you do?

However drama abounds occurs when hard lessons are learned. The cooking industry is a lot about personal responsibility and a almost slave like dedication to your job where you follow every order and just do it until the end. You're at the mercy of human nature and you just have to weather it. When you'll break from the severity of the industry is up to your own character however true character isn't shown by what you do at work, but what you do outside of it.

And I truly mean outside of it. There's always an expectation to finish work at a specific time, namely within the 8 hours before you hit overtime and drive labour costs through the roof. However it isn't about the overtime. We love overtime. Even though we have a peculiar relationship where we feel guilty for taking overtime or are lightly lectured on the cons of overtime, I love it. I would never go out of my way to get it, but nothing is satisfying like getting overtime for the job that you have to do instead making up for failing to do.

The in the end you finish the job when you finish the job. The schedule is only there to show at BEST when you start and when you should finish; however that's bullshit. You're there 15 minutes early and you leave when you are done your close which is entirely determined by how busy you are and to a certain degree of preparedness in starting your close. We all love to get off at the appropriate time, but due to the OCD nature of the job we instinctualy finish cleaning everything that can be seen when.

However when that overtime hits sometimes and you know that perhaps that you are behind and wasn't responsible enough to plan ahead or just perhaps you feel that it's hour 8 going on 9...you deserve to get the fuck out as soon as possible; you feel that sort of rush of wanting to get out of work. You are in off hours and even though you are getting paid in some respect you are outside of work right now. How you act in finishing your job properly outside of the 8 hour regiment is a true test of character.

Today was a hard lesson for many and a reminder to others. The food industry is a peculiar one because really, a LOT of the industry is made up of youths. Students and high schools looking for their first job, first as a dishwasher and then slowly moving up the line. Far more easier at pub like places like Fogg and Sudds or EARLs (which I seem to find more and more is like the Juniour Hockey League of the cooking industry in the Lower Mainland) where production is done to a point that a monkey could do it. In fact they'd probably let a monkey do it if it wasn't for the absolute foodsafe nightmare that could accompany it. While I maintain that you meet the most peculiarly responsible people in the food industry, a school setting really starts to degrade that mentality. Standing around doing nothing really contributes to being pretty damn lazy, especially for the movement junkies that we become to be. 12:30pm rolled around and there were people who wanted to leave when there was still stuff to be done.

What resulted was a small lecture addressed to the class about when you are finished and it's not always at 12:30pm or the scheduled time. Often a class as a keener, someone who asks the questions that are obvious. They are useful in the sense that they might touch upon something that you didn't think of asking but in the end they are pretty annoying. I don't know it's because they don't know when to shut their mouths or if they just want to show off how eager they are to learn but sometimes the best example of character is to know when to NOT speak and just listen. Our resident keener keener jellybeaner Korey decided to bring up "contradictions" in our chef instructors patterns. "But we left the past few days without you saying anything" she pointed out. While Chef was pointing out that we leave when he officially tells us to leave, Korey was deciding that we should be able to leave on the basis of some unofficial parting of the ways in the past.

Big mistake

Aside from never arguing with the chef in charge, don't assume just because something happened in the past means that it will continue. I knew this shit was going to happen with her. These are one of these people who will hold something against another person due to the idea that what occurred in the past must mean it should occur (or be held accountable) in the future. She's one of those people who can't adapt or more importantly understand that two different concepts could exist for the same procedure. Eventually there will be harder lessons learned and more people dropping out. Let's hope it's sooner for others rather than later.

BLOCK 1: Day 4

The start of my culinary schooling blog. All I learned today was a few knife skills that I already know. Mincing shallots, dicing and julienning onions, segmenting oranges and grapefruits and chopping garlic. Out of all these things, the only new things I've learned is to make for a more even julienne for onions, you separate the layers and cut them so they can lay flat. Orange segmenting which is basically cutting out oranges between each of the membranes for a more pure texture I've done before but it was nice to learn some new things in order to make it smoother.

I'm gotten more acquainted with my fellow classmates, already there are some cliques that are forming. Funnily enough (or luckily enough) when I planted onto my station for cutting, I was at the table with the most girls of the class even though they did not consist entirely of the group I usually converse with. It's hard to imagine with the stringent policy of attendance (3 missed classes = expulsion) that the entire class might make it through. I've heard from one of my co-workers that out of 20 students at the beginning of the year, 12 were left by the end of the program. Since we do have to partner up with people (with an apparent unwritten rule of no "two female" pairs) conversation with the class is good because you get to know their background. You get to know their talents, their skills but most importantly their weaknesses. I've encountered 3 people that I might have problems with (names changed to protect their identities):

AL 1: There are 3 people in our class whose first names start with "A" and "L". I basically listed them off in order of how I met them. AL 1 is pretty cool, working at a place with nigh sous-chef responsibilities. He might make a great partner except for one fucking thing. Talking at the wrong fucking time. While I do like to make conversation, I know when to stop talking and listen to instruction which is every fucking time. However it's not only that, it's more the idea that you anticipate when the instructor is going to speak. There were some times I wanted to tell him to shut up because he's saying something witty while the instructor is speaking which I imagine is partially my fault because I am such a conversational person and thus almost invites this sort of behaviour with people around me. It's this one thing that might lump me into getting into the bad side of an instructor just because my partner doesn't know when to shut his yap.


CHUCK: Chuck I have no problem with. He's a pastry chef and aside from me, was the only other person who took notes during a time when everyone else didn't bring a notebook. Work ethic great...however it only goes so far if he's asking me questions all the time. As much as the industry will no doubt lead me to a leadership position, this is something I don't want to be doing in school. I will volunteer information when asked, but it will get annoying if I have to babysit someone through something. Might be good, might be bad.

NEMO: I'm going to make it perfectly clear.

Nemo is fucked.

I hardly want anything to do with Nemo here. I look at this fucker and I can see that he doesn't have the chops to make it through. How do I know? By his example today. He did two things today that basically made me write him off unless he does something to redeem himself. We were cutting shallots. While we were picking them from the bag, he dropped one, picked it up and tossed it into the garbage. My brain nearly fucking broke.

The restaurant business is possibly the most frivolous and the most stingy fucking industry that you'd encounter. We toss out a LOT of food but at the same time we always ALWAYS look at "food cost" The constant monitoring of food that will never get served to a customer as a result of expiration, bad handling, contamination, rot, burning, overcooking, fucked up ingredients, not up to par, whatever the result. Mainly, anything that you can save to use for food is ESSENTIAL to maintaining the profits of a restaurant. Yes we get rid of a lot of food at the end of the night, but we don't want to be wasting perfectly good food either.

So there was a fucking shallot, perfectly fine still in it's skin. I ask Nemo what was he doing? He replied that it was dirty. That isn't dirty. It fell on the floor. If it was cut and chopped and then fell onto the floor...THEN it's dirty. If it was part of a dish that fell into the garbage can....THEN IT'S FUCKING DIRTY. But as it is in it's most pure and raw state with nature's own protective armour KEEPING DIRT AWAY FROM IT'S FLESH!...it's not fucking dirty. You can pick it up, rinse it off and use it, which is what I did. Shallots are expensive 5 times more than an onion.

Speaking of which, when we came to chopping onions he threw away a entire one. He said it was dirty which I did see some black under the skin for the scant second he held it above the garbage bin before letting it fall into it. I nearly fucking blew a gasket. However it really wasn't worth it. As confrontational I could be with people, especially when it comes to experience that I can rub in their fucking face, I just realize that we are all equals here. What little common sense Nemo has right now will obviously be apparent to future instructors who will either whip him into shape or send him to quit the program. I have no right to take the role of the instructor in order to teach him anything and chances are he'd probably won't listen to me. Especially considering his response to my shallot question.

So that's my 4th day of BLOCK 1. I'll explain all these later since now I have to go to sleep. I'm fucking tired and waking up a 5:45am isn't getting any easier.