Waitress: Hey, on table 24, they want the omelet really not well done.
Me: ok.
*Sauteed Mushroom and Spinach omelet delicately cooked. Flipped and folded with Monterey Jack. Ready to plate. *
Waitress: That guy just asked for no mushrooms in the omelet. Does that work?
Me. mmmmmmuuurmer.
Result: Customer gets new free omelet. Omelet goes in trash.
A kitchen, like any business or organization functions like an organism. And as an organism it exists with the context of a species. Within a species there is a spectrum of behaviour. The diversity of behaviour is motivated by natural selection as defined by late consumer-capitalism. Ergo, within any pool of organizational entities there are a variety of managerial/logistical/operational methods to accomplished the stated goal of the organism, with some failures and some successes – ideally for the greater good.
I’ll touch on this in the future as part of the organizational aesthetics/evolutionary psychology/capitalism category; but the central point is that different restaurants develop different ways of doing the same thing – ie: cooking food for people with semi-disposable to disposable incomes.
One of the things that I find somewhat interesting is that the new restaurant I work in has no recipes. Not a single recipe is written down. Not to mention that not a single item in our inventory is labelled. Think about this; we keep everything in five gallon buckets… chicken stock, sugar reduction, oil, soups, stew and whatever else is made in nearto 5 gallon quantities. Sometimes it’s chili, sometimes it’s grilled chicken, maybe it’s some weird sauce or left over specials from friday night. There is just no way to know what is in our walk-in fridge or freezer.
So here’s a recipe for ya’ll. in the spirit of the new place I work in. You’re only allowed to read this once – pretend that someone is saying the words listed below and that you can never ever ask them for this series of words again. If you do… you’re fired.
(ps: Made this soup up a couple hours ago. Very nice with a dark rye toast and whipped cream cheese.)
Orange Sweet Potato Soup:
Ingredients in order of use.
Butter (or oil if wanting a vegan type of thing)
Spanish Onion
Celery
Garlic
Carrots
Orange Zest
Thyme
Rosemary
Sweet Potato
Water
Juice from zested Orange
Sautee
Add Water
Puree
Add Salt & Pepper to taste.
There are no quantities. Figure it out. Add your own flavour. Enjoy.
ICYF
Ok. So I’m going to try something a little new. Normally I am just whining about my job, but I thought I’d put together a little step by step today. A couple of caveats however – I’ve never done this kind of a play by play and forgot to take photos of a couple of the steps – particularly when i started dealing with a bunch of raw chicken. But I also forgot to take a picture of the finished meal, which I ate with my room-mate. I also took all the photos with my computer… not a Nikon D7000. Delicious.
So to set the mood; its monday, I woke up late, went to (non restaurant) work job thing. On my way home, did a little grocery shopping with the intention of testing out the recipe below. So Voila. Bon Apetite.
Ingredients:
2 Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast
2-3 Red Bell Peppers
3 Shallots
5 stalks of asparagus
goat cheese
1 bunch of rosemary
1 bunch of Thyme
Generous pinch of salt
Black pepper
3 cloves of garlic
Spring greens
So the key with everything while cooking is ‘ mise en place’ – francais for ‘everything in its place’. So the first thing we’re going to do is prep all of the components. This way your not waiting for your peppers to char, or hectically chopping your onions while something else is burning.
1.) Take your red peppers and throw them on a grill. You want to rotate them every couple of minutes until the entire pepper is charred black. So get these guys going first.
2.) Now we’re going to start the goat cheese spread for the interior. So make some nice little piles of chopped Rosemary and Thyme. Now finely dice a couple of shallots, a couple cloves of garlic and combine with the goat cheese. Add whatever salt and pepper that you like. If your goat cheese is cold, leave it on top of the oven that you’ve started pre-heating at 350 degrees.
3.) Prepare your asparagus (asparagi?). So take the bottom inch and a half off of the stalk. Then on a steep diagonal, slice the stalks.
4.) Now, this entire time you should have been turning your peppers on your grill. As a note, if in a bind you can just throw a pepper on to the element of a gas stove top and let it go for a while. Remember – when they turn all black, they’re not burnt, you just have to take the charred skin off later on and you get that amazing roasted red pepper taste. So let them go for a while.
5.) Bring in your peppers and let them cool a bit.
6.) Get your chicken breasts. Take a super sharp knife (because you sharpen your knives on the regular, huh?) and butterfly open the breast. Open it up so that you have the maximum amount of surface area. Then take your meat-tenderizing mallet/rolling pin and start bashing out your chicken breast. The idea is to flatten out the breast and expand the total amount of surface area without getting so thin that it won’t hold together.
7.) Now take your roasted red peppers, which you’ve skinned – and put a couple pieces on to the chicken. Follow it with the asparagi and drop a couple nice spoons of the goat cheese spread .
8.) Now, the burrito phase. Roll the flattened chicken breast around the interior. I used toothpicks to hold the roll together, but I wish I had used butchers’ string. I think it would be more pleasant looking and more professional. Regardless, there’s a good chance the chicken will hold once cooked, but you need something to maintain the shape before hand.
9.) Take each rolled chicken breast and place them into a pan with hot oil. Just a bit. We want to pan sear each side of the roll before putting them in to the oven to cook through.
10.) After 20 or so minutes take your cooking tray our and cut into the chicken to check it for any pink.
11.) Whip up a quick dressing for your spring greens and serve. Take out the tooth picks, but if you used string – leave it on. It looks good.
Also, if you are serving guests, consider cutting each roll on a diagonal and standing them up on the plate. If you add some potatoes or a serving a rice or something, consider only serving half a breast. We drank a bottle of cheap red and I suggest Belmont kings for dessert.
Voila.
xoxo
ICYF.
Open Sunday omelet with baby arugula, bacon, brie and avocado.
Margherita Pizza, heirloom tomatoes and young buffalo milk mozzarella. Vacation.
Hi, Bonjour,
So a funny thing happened with this blog; I was working at a shitty restaurant and it inspired me to start writing about the culinary-industrial complex. Then I started working in a decent restaurant that was nothing to complain about and I stopped writing posts. This job was actually quite fun for a bit, but ultimately uninspiring. Then I didn’t work in a kitchen for a while. And I was happy.
Then I needed a second (third) job – and started working in a kitchen again.
So I suppose I will be entering in new blog posts soon.
Sigh …
Hi there,
So you may have noticed that there a few aesthetic changes here on ICYF. Well….
The thing is… I’ve been a bad blogger and aside from the general sins of not posting very much in the past little while, I’ve also dropped the ball and not let ya’ll in on your favourite cook’s updates. So basically… I quit. I quit working at the shit-hole wings joint. It came suddenly and without warning.
This rejection of trivial wing-cookery represents a meaningful surge from the avant-garde of the workers’ struggle into the cushy, fat lined pockets of the rich franchise-restaurant owning class of our society; a bold strike into the heart of apathetic food assemblage; a sign of the coming death rattle of the culinary industrial complex. AKA: Marx would like totally die of jealousy if he saw how bad ass this prolitariate was whooping the bougies.
As I typed the email to my manager, I could literally see the last breathes expunged from the sick and failing body of the disgusting apparatus of pointless consumption. The dead and infectious, carrion laddled carcass of the pig-hippo cross breed lies at my feet; I pity the pathetic creature as its muscles spasm and it mouths tahe words, gasping ” I’m sorry, I’m sorry….kill me. Kill me.”
Then I took another kitchen job.
So there are going to be some changes. I’m not sure how this whole thing is going to go. Not working at a shitty shitty restaurant anymore somewhat pulls the sarcastic rug out from my feet. Sometimes its easier to justify a job you hate… you can create a demented little mythos around your suffering and justify your complacency (just like politicians do) . And in some ways it was easier to work in the shitty place and not care. Just do your time, mentally check-out and ride the chicken-wing wave…
But now, my good friends, its all about the avocados and scallions.
Cheers, ICYF.
Hey folks,
So it occured to me that I have spoken in past posts about the fake-meat quality of the shitty restaurant I work in. And this is by no means exclusive to my situation. There are shitty franchise restaurants everywhere that pretend to be something their not. Most commonly they are branded as family establishments, comfort food or mom and pop. They try to tap into the alienation of modern man in a society that seems to rush past with all its computers, emails, financial derivi-whats and civil rights. These eateries hark back to a simpler time and tell you so in their advertising. Notable examples: Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, Cononel Saunders (take note: these examples do actually reference a time before civil rights).
This is nothing but a marketing tactic. But, the second half of the twentieth century is kind of like the big victory for marketing. There is no scientific or quantitative evidence that advertising works. Actually. None. But the experience of corporations and marketers is that it does and that its worth putting billions of dollars a year into these campaigns. One report out of the UK claims that for every pound ( £) of value an advertising executive produces, they destroy 11£. This is done by “creating insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress among the population”. Essentially, advertising convinces one through aesthetic and emotion as opposed to argument, and the same applies to food marketing.
However, the loyal readers of this blog need not to worry. I have taken the time to put together a short guide to shitty restaurants. These are basically things that one should look out for when selecting a restaurant. Follow this guide and you may never accidently eat at a shitty restuarant again. With no further adieu:
1.)
This first one is a given; if you’ve seen other restuarants of the same name and brand its a no-go. If a restaurant has mutliple locations they have to maintain consistency, and probably will also want to maintain that consistency as they expand into new geographical areas. This means they’ll have to be purchasing they ingredients from a large food distributors or supplier like GFS which I wrote about earlier. The mightier their expanision plans, the larger their food supplier needs. Imagine the logistics of serving the exact same meals across an entire country and the sacrifices one would have to give up in terms of freshness, pesticide usage, local produce etc. You’ll be eating food designed for a long shelf life and not your palette.
2.)
As you peer in through the window of the restaurant, try to gauge the level of easily visible branding on a scale of 1-10. Anything above 3 is suspicious. If not a shitty restaurant, its a little too self-involved to really trust. Examples would be sports jerseys with the restaurant brand on it for no rational reason. Or glasses and other lame souvenirs for sale emblazoned with the logo. If you are going past a restuarant that you suspect is a shitty restaurant and there isn’t a lot of overt branding, but the establishment is clinging to the national mythos of a financially destitute European country (Greece and Italy are the big ones in this field) with flags and the team photo from the 1982 world cup, be on the safe side and avoid it. Unless of course your server is over 60 and came in from a perpetual smoke break to serve you, the only customers there; then it is, of course, legit.
3.)
If the restaurant has a catchy slogan underneath the name, like “Big Steer Steak House; Cowboys call it home” or something stupid like that and there aren’t any cow boys around avoid it.
4.)
If you are inside the restaurant, having not picked up on the exterior symptoms of shitiness, and accidentally order food and then need to go to the bathroom and notice that the restaurant has extended their marketing slogans into the washroom….don’t even wipe. Just get out of there. If a restaurant is going to advertise to you within their walls (you’re already there) and while you are evacuating yourself, well then, they have no respect for you anyway and their food will reflect this.
5.)
If the restaurant has little slogans plastered around the walls that read like this: “After easting at the Big Steer, many a cowboy done called it a day” or “Only thing that packs a kick more than this here horse is The Big Steers special hot sauce. Careful now, partner.” and they seem to not really refer to anything or anyone real…. get out of there.
6.)
If the menu looks like it took longer to graphically design than it did to actually write. Leave.
7.)
If there is any kind of promotion on, aside from special of the day; Leave. Especially if its a promotion brought to you by a beer company, leave. The bullseye of promotions are ones that couple a sports team, a beer company and sad plate of food. Think: “The Molson Canadian Awesome Brew Toronto Maple Leafs Half Priced Shoot-Out Wings”….its just wings, a beer and a sad little man who played hockey in highschool giving advice to NHL players through a television screen between creepy comments to the 22 year old waitress from Stootsville or something.
Well, that’s the basic. We’ll have Shitty Restaurants 102 in time, but I think I’ll let ya’ll chew on that for a little while partner. Ya’ll come back now, you hear.
ICYF
so, i’m working the other night; friday, all by myself. its about 11:30 and all of my colleagues have gone home. this is my favourite time at work. there are not many orders coming in, i can goof off a little and get crazy (ie: making paper airplanes out of the branded wax papers we use to line the wooden wing bowls…ca-razy, no?). sometimes though, i’ll just clean really fast and then sit down and read for a bit – or increasingly, go on the internet with my gf’s ipod touch. anyway, so on this particular night i was cleaning stuff. we use spray bottles of sanitizer (note: i’ve mentioned before that about half of my job as a cook at this ‘restaurant’ is cleaning. this is because we don’t really cook anything – we just heat up and assemble food, but its also because we are a relatively big franchise operation and if a location was shut down for health code reasons, or even given a conditional pass, HQ would freak the fuck out. so we clean more than we cook almost as a business safty.). The sanitizer is this nasty pink stuff that burns your hands if you make it too concentrated. We’re always fighting with bar for a bottle of the stuff because for some reason there is only ever one bottle that we can find. so i go out, grab the bottle from the bar and start heading back to the kitchen when…. oh man….i run into someone i know.
there i am, with my toque (i will not wear a hairnet, plus toques emphasize the strong lines of my jaw), branded t-shirt and apron, splashed with hot sauce, at 11:30 in a sports bar looking miserable. there he is, sitting at a table among friends, looking dapper, enjoying a leisurely friday evening, not a worry in the world. the inequality of the situation was palpable. then there’s all the awkward hellos and “yeah, you know this is just like, you know my day job…you know?” and his feigned response of “well, the wings were great!” and then i signalled to him that i had a secret…sshhhhhhhhhhh,….”i’ll tell you our secret recipe. we drop them in really hot liquid fat and then put sauce on them” and there’s a chuckle, but my attempts at humour in the situation are undermined by the large colourful logo right over my -of all places- heart.
i knew this feller from highschool. we weren’t great friends, but there was a aura of mutual respect me thinks. now, i run in to him occasionally but try to only mention all the artsy stuff i’m working on and downplay the poverty sticken lifestyle and soul stomping job. now…i am caught red handed as it were (there was probably hot sauce on my hands.) it was kind of like realizing the i knew the gentleman i was giving a lap dance to. errrr…..well this is awkward.. you want fries with that shake?
I bet you didn’t know that Jay Z was actually putting the puzzle pieces together in that lyric; its not just an ill lyric, its also a brief foray into the politics of the American Federal farm subsidies programs. Local states corn holing pork barrel budgets and helping out the little guy. They’re snakes alright. I do believe, however, that I’ve already covered a lot of this topic in my discussions concerning the nature of the culinary-industrial complex, but thanks Jay.
If you’re interested in this graphic above you can check out the NYT article here that I stole it from. Its cool article, but the comment are strangely informative and offer awfully convincing counter points. I would like to see some pyramids that compare YouTube and New Times comment sections.
In other news: I was excited by the real time posting, weren’t you? I think though, due to the difficultly of typing with greasey chicken wing fingers on those silly iPods, I may set up a twitter feed that you can access with your twitter, or through this site. Expect BIG changes soon, friends.
ICYF
