photodump time so you will all sit and wait painfully for my journal to load

Did I mention Ashley and I broke up? Not on the blog, I guess. We did, about a week ago, but it's all good because we're super awesome buddies anyway. I usually try not to mention sensitive topics like this on the Interwebnet but I thought it necessary before I write the following.

To sum up what's been happening this week, I met the cashier at The Beehive on Friday night who gave me a note recognizing my interest in coffee and suggesting that we indulge in such a bitter brew together. I thought it was a smooth pickup line--anyone who enjoys a cup of joe and decent conversation is cool in my book. Went to hang out with her yesterday but she was working again, so we only got to talk occasionally. Hoping to arrange a more relaxed rendevous sometime when, god help me, I'm not busy.

In other news, I've been having an absolute fucking blast at work, giving some love to otherwise ugly plate presentation:





I have also, of course, been at this "Beehive Coffeehouse", the men's room of which is pictured in the previous post. I have been riding the T:

Exploring the city I live in:

Rocking the local political scene and staying alert on the issues with my good friend the Post-Gazette:


Today I am fairly bored. I went on a psychadelic fun photography adventure for something to do. First I went to Point State Park to take the obligatory autumn leaf-changing photos, as well as some city skyline/Ohio river valley stuff.






See? I told you it's awesome. Once I'd seen all there is to see at the Point, I headed to the North Side to take some cityscape photos and take a daytime look at the place I'm hopefully moving into in late November.






I arrived at the future snack shack as soon as my camera batteries died. Check it out:
Okay, so it's not the Ritz-Carlton, but it's a decent neighborhood with a nice big park and a grocery store. And the house has windows, something that will probably not cease to amaze me for weeks and weeks and weeks if we land this deal.

Bored. 25 minutes before work and nothing to do. Wasted as much time at starbucks as possible. The reason I've got so much free time? Purchasing agent certification test at 1:30 took me about 20 minutes.

This weekend should be nice though. I'm closing tonight, but like last night, I'm working with one of the new guys so I don't have to go it alone anymore. Tomorrow I get off early, and there might be some interesting nightlife. Might go to the southside tonight, since the Beehive, my new favorite hangout, is open til 2, and to be honest, I want to make some new friends who have some interests/perspectives in common with mine own. This weekend, Prana is having its halloween party with something like 35 bands. Promises to be much better than Hiphop night. Also, Ariadne auf Naxos is playing at the Benedum and I want to see it.

Me, John, Jenn, and Jess, my hopefully future roommates, are making progress on obtaining our new pad. According to the financial aid department, they only pay rent directly to a few places/organizations, but if we want to use our loans to pay for our place, we can get refund checks for our dorm rent (and probably the meal plan, because it sucks and I'm probably going to quit eating at the school). The thing is, the woman who spoke to use from the school was being kind of an asshole, so we're not really sure if they'll pay for it or not. Either way, we know we can get it done, whether we use our loans directly or indirectly (refund checks or through PCI). If we don't get refund checks in time, I make enough money to pay rent for awhile. I went to the place we're looking at the other night. It's not in a bad neighborhood, it's near lots of bus stops and it's by a grocery store. And it's big. And if we get it, I'm calling it the Food Shack because we're all cooks.

I caught your eye but I was studying wine

At left: bathroom at The Beehive coffeehouse on the South Side. At right: Converse All-Stars. Oh yeah.








~she's cute
in a stainless steel sort of way.

Library right now. A third of the class is taking the cooking practical--you have to make veloute, espagnole, hollandaise and rice pilaf--a third is deep-cleaning the kitchen (I did that yesterday), and my third is off until noon. Woo.

I might be renting a three-story house with three of my good buddies, just across the bridge on the north side. My tuition would cover the rent, about 350 a month, which is less than the dorm. Plus, there won't be anyone to check my bags every fucking time I walk in, we've got our own washer and dryer, I have my own room, and the stove is gas. It's actually a really good thing I didn't sign the new lease for the dorm--I might be outta there by the end of November.

And now I'm going to go rock out at Starbucks where there is a fireplace.

less than 50% peanuts

Hip hop nights at Prana are no good. I'm too pasty to even be allowed in. I like it when there's no one there but the weird employees at 1 AM.

Awesome day today at work. Me and both the new guys had the kitchen tonight, and it was pretty dead until around nine. We had a reserved party of 15 coming in, and we weren't sure if they were getting dinner or not, so of course, they did. I had four steaks and seven filet mignon on the grill at the same time. It sounds pretty crazy, but we were so well coordinated on all the dishes we had the foot-long ticket sent out in 17 minutes. I learned tonight that when we get slammed with orders it doesn't have to be absolute chaos, with yelling and anger and needing to hire new people.

Your Personality Is

Artisan (SP) You are both grounded and flexible. You adapt well to new situations. You are playful and free spirited - but you are also dependable and never flaky. You don't do well in conservative, stuffy situations. It's probably very hard for you to keep a normal job or stay in school. You are always up for fun and adventure. Most people are too boring for you. You take risks and bend the rules. And if things don't work out, you chock it up to life experience. In love, you tend to take things quickly - but you have a huge problem with commitment. At work, you need to make your own rules. You're best suited to be an entrepreneur. With others, you are animated and physical. You prefer doing something with friends to just hanging out. As far as your looks go, you tend to be buff and in good shape. Your spend more time on your body than your clothes. On weekends, you need to keep active. From cooking up a storm to running a 5K, you wear yourself out.

The Three Question Personality Test

You Are Internal - Skeptic - Powerful

You feel your life is controlled internally. If you want something, you make it happen. You don't wait around for things to go your way. You value your independence and don't like others to have control. You are a total skeptic when it comes to luck. You believe that people use luck as a crutch to avoid responsibility. You control your own destiny. The universe has nothing to do with it. You believe everything can be explained - and you tend to over analyze situations. When it comes to who's in charge, it's you. Life is a kingdom, and you're the grand ruler. You don't care much about what others think. But they better care what you think!

The Three Dimension Luck and Power Test

i am a liberal democrat atheist who supports abortion rights, embryonic stem-cell research, sex/drug/alcohol-education, evolutionary theory, & cooking

Definitely a great week. Lots of great production in class, challenging (yet not overwhelming) work schedule, payday today. Makin the bucks.

Speaking of work, grill dude was fired and now I am grill dude. Or, really, I'm still just one of the cooks but I'll be working the grill a lot more now, which makes things a lot more interesting, since I'm dealing with the really important part of entrees. I have to be sure to not give people e.coli, but be careful not to turn their burgers and steaks and fish fillets into little charcoal briquets too. The responsibility is a little more unnerving, but if you keep calm and multitask like crazy, you can't go wrong. Today I had a ticket for three filet mignon: one medium rare, one medium, and one well done. I wasn't going to complain because the temps were on wild ends of the spectrum (old grill dude did that and is now having some problems with his work study program)--I just designated which pieces of meat I wanted for each level of doneness, and threw them on hotter or colder areas of the grill accordingly. Once they were attractively marked up, I memorized which was which and threw them in the oven to finish while I made the plate setups. I took out each filet at a different time, then once they were all baked, melted gorgonzola over all three at once in the salamander, then threw them on my mise-en-placed plates.

Not only did everything look amazing today (golden brown salmon fillet with textbook grill marks underneath the raspberry sauce laced with balsamic vinegar and almonds), it was done exactly the way the customers wanted it, and all on time (past fifteen minutes on a ticket and you're late). Nothing was sent back and nobody got yelled at for stupid bullshit. Piece of cake--it's all about method and execution, and a little bit of enjoyment.

how do we work the freight elevator

Made some rice pilaf with curry, onions, mushrooms, and garlic today, while group production included cream of broccoli soup and chicken tetrazzini. Cooked some very German-style sauerkraut with sausage, apples, raisins, onions, garlic, and really hot mustard. Grinding coffee beans with whole cloves I stole from the soup kitchen. Been eating very well lately.

Getting cold. Really, really a good thing because stepping out of either the work or school kitchen feels really damn good. Low forties at night, and the wind is absolutely tempestual downtown. I love being able to wear warm weather stuff--back home I was lucky if I could go outside at 2 A.M. and want to wear a scarf and hat in December.






































~close your eyes and I'll kiss you 'cause
with the birds I'll share

blue fuzzy mittens

Well, that's the end of another 35-hour week. Now I've got it easy--still closing every day that I work, but I've got Tuesday and Wednesday off. Thank you, new guy.

~wash, rinse, sanitize
wash, rinse, sanitize
wash, rinse, die.

those caramelized apples are off the chart

Work was an absolute clusterfuck tonight. O&T was completely sold out on reservations and it was me working with grill dude and the new guy. Manager closed the kitchen at eight after swearing a lot at grill dude for undercooking a bunch of meat (i.e. YOU CAN'T MOTHERFUCKING COOK ANYTHING). As I did my job quite well, I was not the victim of any of this, and as an added bonus I got off pretty damn early due to the closing.

Doing some more creative things at work though. Instead of the everpresent "blackened chicken salad" or "barbecued chicken sandwich" or "chickened chicken-fried chicken" we've actually been cooking some specials with variety. I flipped some roasted peppers, onions, montreal seasoning and some beef around awhile ago for a bangin fajita special that got some damn good feedback. Today the new guy saw the maddening load of granny smith apples in the beer cooler and made a grilled chicken salad with caramelized apples, candied pecans, goat cheese, and a dressing he made from deglazing the apple pans. Manager says he'll run my strawberry/lime glazed garlic-roasted salmon fillet special if I make the glaze for him to taste. The idea behind that is to use the extra juice from our buckets of strawberries which would otherwise go down the drain (causing about a 50% yield, I might add).

~she is fucking good at baking

brew your coffee with ground cloves

~destroy the world
that we took so long to make

Yeah, I have a shirt that says 1337 CHEF on it.

a pursuit of intellectual proportions

Olive or Twist's kitchen has made a mess of my Vans, though despite the wear and tear, you can still see my checkerboard shoelaces.

I swear I'm the only person in this place that loves test days. The tests are just so Goddamn easy--we spent two days of review in wines as if to scare us to death about having to memorize German vininfication styles like Trochenbeerenauschlese (not that it really bothers me, t he two years of German turned out to be a pretty damn good idea). I got out so early today I've got an hour and a half to chill before work, which I get out of early tonight. Last night I was out before 9:20 because it was so damn dead--we've got a different manager on Mondays than usual and she actually has the sense to close the kitchen if we get paid to do nothing and eat/sometimes drink extra stuff forever (I try to leave names out when I talk about work, but I find it too amusing not to mention this--I'll pick up a glass on the salad line, thinking it's mine and full of Dr.Pepper and orange soda, and take a big swig of Yuengling quite often).

current events:
I made a strawberry/lime/butter reduction the other day as a sauce for a roasted salmon fillet rubbed with olive oil and paper-thin garlic shavings.

I am eating mixed nuts.

I would love to go to Erie in the winter and learn to snowboard, but it most likely won't happen considering my current schedule.

I have a gray scarf that I get to wear now because it is cold here. From the waist up I look like the drummer in an emo band, and from the waist down I look like.. I don't know. Wear extremely baggy checkerboard pants for awhile and tell me what you look like.

I was going to see Carmen, the ballet, but to save money the PBT used prerecorded music instead of live musicians. 150 people protested down the street. I'll just wait for Ariadne auf Naxos on the 30th. I never got to see Rigoletto due to work, but I've seen it already, so it's okay.

A week ago O&T ran completely out of flour. I had to run to my dorm room, get my bag of Pillsbury Best and bail us out because we had nothing to bread calamari with. The day before, we had run out of tempura batter (nothing more than eggs, flour and water). We made more with cornstarch. Absolutely disgusting.

In the past three hours I have consumed one and a half pots of coffee and I feel great. I am the Brent Sienna of PCI.

photodump

notes on photos: hardcore kerry/edwards truck (fotoshop is broken so I can't flip stuff around right now), harbormaster graffiti under the bridge, nocturnal spider attack, very fine orange bell pepper, really old porsche on 6th street bridge car show. Going to take my tripod somewhere soon and get some night skyline photos; they nearly turn out great when I try to take them but I can't hold the camera still enough for the long exposure.

today is my day off for tasty grocery shopping

It's cold now. Rainy. The long summer has exhausted itself and given way to one of the things I came here for. I turned the lights out in the kitchen, threw another hopelessly ruined apron in a bucket in the basement, and clocked out at 12:30 into a regular Houston winter. It felt too damn good outside to just walk home and sit in a windowless white room, so I took a shower, put on a scarf, hat and gloves for probably the first time in my life, and took a good long walk.



~a reason to fight
and thirty-eight nights
when she started walking
we never looked back

because, you know... he has magical powers

Wines is pretty sweet. We drank a cream sherry the other day that was about 20% alcohol, and despite what you might think, it did have a decent taste to it. I think port is Monday. Yesterday we had a brut Freixenet champagne. I have to get 80 bucks to my teacher on Monday so I can get the study guide to totally be a Certified Specialist of Wines. Once I pass that exam I'll get to put CSW after my name.

I should get some burning software and some CD-Rs so I can burn some stuff to listen to while I'm working. We've got a small stereo in the kitchen but we usually just listen to the radio. It can be good or bad depending on who's the DJ, but it'd be nice to have some metal during those rushes. When I close it's strictly blues--NPR plays blues every time I close.

~your soul
served on toasted ciabatta bread

mahadeva

Damn, damn. One of the cooks at work hasn't been showing up for his shifts, so once again I gotta work double time to cover the place. Instead of closing tonight and getting off at nine tomorrow, I'm closing both days by myself. I really hope Mike, the GM, is there to help me out, because I'll be managing the kitchen alone quite a bit during these evenings, which is stressful at best. It doesn't matter though--just two more really late nights ahead of me and I get my day off, and I'm really happy today anyway because it's freakin' payday. And I have a lot of hours on this pay period.

Class was nice today. Vegetarian chili, lentil soup, fresh tomato salsa, and mushroom risotto with parmesan. Turns out I made the best risotto in the class, so I felt pretty good when chef asked everyone to come over and taste mine to see what it ought to be.

~you're ruined your own lands
you'll not ruin mine

today is the last day of warmth

Tasty Chinese food day, though I didn't manage to get any pictures taken. Lots of dramatic wok-flipping and super hardcore won ton rolling though. Incredibly inept kid at my table took an hour and a half to cut up mirepoix for stock (the simplest task we could think to give him), and once he actually had it on the stove, he simmered it while everyone was cleaning the kitchen and then poured it through a strainer right into the sink. This is a guy I started out making a genuine attempt to work with, as I do with everyone--but we can't help but hate the asshole now. He's not gonna cut it in meats and seafood.

My day off was really nice yesterday. I went to Kaufmann's with Ashley with some coupons and bought some of the 80% off stuff. I got a black pinstriped Brandini blazer and a really nice sweater for twenty bucks. I will be needing it soon.

~Alderaan's not far away
it's Californication