put a little english on it

Man, nine and a half hour shift today--I haven't been home since 8:00 this morning because I had to go straight to work from school.

School was awesome today though. I woke up, felt incredible, and stopped at the Starbucks at the end of the block where all the employees know my name. They didn't even charge me for coffee today. People here are so damn nice. I love Pittsburgh. But school was great. I took the cooking practical yesterday (I'll save that for another post), so I was supposed to be deep-cleaning the kitchen today, but I ended up doing prep for the chili we're having on the last day. I weighed the 18 pounds of meat we ended up with for the recipe, and using mathematical skillz, adjusted the rest of the recipe in proportion to that. It came out to be 25 bell peppers (sm. dice), five pounds of onion (sm. dice), 6.5 tablespoons of serrano and jalapeno peppers (mince), 20 garlic cloves (crushed and minced), as well as 30 ounces of chili powder, 20 ounces of cumin, and ten bay leaves that I had to toast in a rather large saute pan.

The high-volume prep was fun (and ironic, with me recently making fun of Emeril's incredible ability to make a few portions of a meal in an hour) and yielded me a big 2-inch hotel pan full of trinity. Tomorrow the meat will be seared in a tilt skillet, and then all the junk I cut up will be sauteed with it--this is done with a boat paddle. About six gallons of veal stock will be added, and over the course of several hours it will turn into the stuff dreams are made of.

Work has made me angry lately. Someone is stealing things (mostly meat--a whole striploin among other things) and there was a big heavy locked door installed at the top of the staircase. Every time we need to go downstairs to get something, we have to get a manager with a key.

But work was also cool today because I worked alone for a few hours, and banged out a nine-dish ticket (to go, which is not as easy as it sounds) all on time by myself. I remember when I first got here and worked Mondays by myself, I would get orders for, say, a filet mignon and mashed potatoes, and maybe calamari at the same time, and I'd freak out because I didn't know how to come up with a plan (or grill things properly). Now I know the menu like the cracked and bleeding back of my hand, and I know exactly what to do first, what to do simultaneously with other things, and what to fire last and instead of burning myself repeatedly in the middle of a clumsy nervous breakdown, it's second nature to rotate or flip things on the grill while cutting bread for sandwiches or taking stuff out of the fryer/oven/broiler/low-boy coolers. I believe that, today, I began to put a little English on the plates.

~you can come stay at my house