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
