what I have learned.....about kitchens and food

Part II in the series.

Finished up work yesterday, everyone was very nice to me and stayed for a few extra minutes in order for us to share a glass of prosecco and toast in my honor, which I appreciated a lot. However I was still perfectly happy to be walking out that door for good, and was greeted by the most amazing sight: it was snowing all yesterday evening, and while Florence isn't quite white, there has been a little bit of accumulation and this morning when I went out I was greeted by that perfect blue sky and crisp air that follows snow, and so someone must really love me. Snow is not common here; the city seems to be in a bit of a panic over it, and everyone is amazed at the wonder of this weather. Also the hills around the city are all dusted with snow now, which just creates this beautiful, powdered-sugar effect (photo not mine, but this is what I saw). Definitely leaving this city on a high note!

So what have I learned about kitchens and cooking? I have learned about the importance of cooking in a clean kitchen. "You don't know what you've got till it's gone..." Most people would not call the kitchen here dirty, but I've worked in very clean kitchens in the states, where you clean everything every day and clean the hard to reach spots, like under the shelves and the back corners of fridges, weekly. I worked for one month and we did those hard to reach spots once, and the daily clean we did was more focused on getting the stainless steel shined than on making sure that things were actually clean. I think it is just part of the whole quality control mentality. Making sure that your kitchen is of the best quality is just another part of making sure that the food is of the best quality. If you don't feel like you're standards of cleanliness are as  high as they can be, then it spills over into your food not needing to be the best it can be. Or maybe I'm going too much into the psychoanalysis on this one. Point being, I get why we clean the corners that can't be reached and why we keep things anally tidy in the states now.

I actually feel like I've learned quite a bit about medieval cookery, oddly enough. We did a lot of braises at the restaurant, and the way those dishes were structured was clearly traceable way back in time. Maybe Italian food just has good connections with its roots or something, but that is a cool bonus to the whole setup.

I think I've learned about sage as an herb and what it can do. I feel a lot more familiar with it, as it is suchc a crucial herb in the cooking here, and would be comfortable playing with it in the future. It also steeps nicely for a tea.

I've also gained a lot more respect and gratefulness for the stages I've done in the past. I was able to realize just how much I've learned from them, how they influenced me, and helped shape my perspective on kitchens in so many ways. I'm hoping that when I start searching for a job next month that this new vision will be able to help me find a place which fits well. I could handle a job I didn't love for a month, I would not be happy there for a year.

From the experience here more generally, I've learned how to make great breads, how to whip up a pasta sauce with anything in the fridge, a new appreciation for donuts, why the foam on a cappuccino matters, and the powers of gorgonzola.

As for this blog, it will be no longer about Italy as I'm about to leave, but if I have the chance I will be using it as I travel the middle east for the next few weeks. So to see pictures and hear news about the next adventure, continue to stay tuned!

what I have learned.....about myself

These next few posts are going to be a bit of a series. I'm trying to sum up my experiences here so I can leave with some recollection of what I've accomplished. Or at least something sentimental, emotional, and all that. So part I, below, is covering what I think I've learned about myself.  Deep, huh?

This is also a continuing part of my "think positive!" campaign, as work has not been a totally positive experience. There have been times when I wanted to just leave, and a large part of it wasn't anybody's fault. It was just that when there isn't enough business to keep one person busy, what do four people do? It was getting to the point where I started trying to work more slowly so that I would be bored less. And "slow" is never a compliment in the kitchen unless you're braising a piece of meat. There was also a passive-aggressive waitress who didn't like me. But I want to leave on a high note, and I don't think that I'm forcing myself to make a silver lining, but rather am just trying to remember the good times.

I've learned a little more about my problems with authority, and at the end of the day they're connected to my problems in dealing with incompetence. Because you see, most authority *is* incompetent. Clearly these problems are interconnected, and at work especially I have learned a lot about how incompetent authority can rub me the wrong way. While some things with Susanna got better, some didn't. A large part of the problem was just that I didn't have any standing instructions, which meant that at the end of almost every task I did for the restaurant I was left waiting. Once I was left alone in the kitchen for about twenty minutes with absolutely no clue where everyone else had gone, what I was supposed to be doing, and nothing to accomplish. So what could I do but stand there and wait? Not the best use of my time. But I was trying to be positive......oops. So I've learned more about my problems with authority, and how I bridle at it. It just aggravates me and I feel frustrated. I need to start accepting people in authority positions, listen better, and put my head down to work.

Additionally, slowing things down for me isn't good. I've begun to notice that even when I'm trying to work quickly, I'm not particularly fast. I would much rather get things done right, and my skills aren't up to the level they should be so that I can move quickly. I like to be precise, to get the cuts just square, to butcher the meats in such a way that I get the best possible cuts, but sometimes something just needs to get done, and I need to learn how to turn off the perfectionist switch so I can just do it.

The irony is that I actually enjoy tweaking and experimenting with things, and furthermore that I am horrible at doing anything with any sort of exactitude. I despise measuring. This makes me wonder in some ways what I'm a perfectionist at, and I think it might just be my knife cuts. Which, at the end of the day isn't too surprising to me. I've always known that I'm not the best baker because of how much I despise measuring, though I think I'm learning more about how to bake without measuring things, which is definitely making me think that I actually do like baking things. To the point where if I was producing interesting things I don't think I would mind working on pastry. I still prefer doing savory things, but I'm definitely becoming more interested in the other side. Speaking of which, if anyone has an idea on how to make something crunchy and very strongly olive oil flavored for a dessert, I tried the other day and failed miserably, and have yet to think of a new way to make this happen. I think it might require some heavy molecular gastronomy, but I'm not sure.....

Anyway I'm finding all this introspection to be quite tiring, and so I'm going to bed. Tomorrow is my last day of work, and then I'll be heading into the sunset! Yay!

Secret Ingredients

Some restaurants I've been to have secret ingredients which they put in almost everything to make it taste unified and delicious. One place in Boston keeps a container of pesto out on the counter, and every vegetable that gets sauteed on the hot line gets a dollop of pesto for some color and flavoring. It also adds a pretty flecked greenness and depth of flavor to everything.

I'll let you in on what our secret is at the restaurant here. We have these dried sweet peppers which we just call "pepperone" which is an ingredient from the south where Chef is from. They have a mild, kind of paprika-flavored sweetness to them, without the grassiness that you find in fresh peppers. When we do up all of our vegetables we always saute them up with a pepperone, our sauces as well get the pepper treatment. We deep-fry these things to use them as a garnish on dishes, and crumble up the deep fried ones to use as an ingredient in the egg portion of the veg platter. Pasta for staff meal is sometimes just made with a sauce of oil, garlic, and cooked pepperone. The only thing I'm surprised about is that we don't ever rehydrate them and make a paste to use as a sauce or rub on any of our meats. But if I were to look at the menu, I would guess that about 75% of it includes at least one dish with this random ingredient.

I can't believe I'm leaving in just one week! The time has been flying by, but I feel ready to head home, like I've gotten a lot out of my experience here. I'm going to be doing dinner with friends, celebrating my birthday somehow (maybe), packing up, going to a "graduation" ceremony at school, finishing my stage, and getting on a long flight to the states.....

What do I actually do from day to day?

So from the sounds of my complaining, whining, and moaning it probably sounds like I do nothing in the kitchen all day. However, I want to point out that this is anything but true. So for those of you who don't know much about what actually goes on in a real, live kitchen, I've put together a little list:


Broccoli rape (pronounced rah-pa, with a long 'a'): Every day the first thing I do when I get into the kitchen is prepare the broccoli rape for cooking. The way we do it is by peeling off all the outer leaves and stems, just leaving the tender core with a little floret of broccoli. I score the bottom of that stem with an x so it cooks all the way through, and then look through the leaves close to the core and also put the tender ones in the basket for cooking. The vegetable gets par-boiled and then sauteed with some oil, garlic, and pepperone (more on the pepperone in another post).

Garlic and parsley: Almost every single stage I have ever done involves garlic and parsley. Here, with the garlic, I usually peel about 2 or 3 heads of it daily. I learned a trick for this back at GZ, where you break off all the cloves and toss them in a tupperware. You then shake this tupperware for about three minutes like a maraca, and the garlic peels itself as it hits and rubs against the other garlic and the side of the tupperware. This works best when you have a lot of garlic that you need to peel, as with small amounts there isn't enough friction to make it work. But when done right, you open up the box and can just pluck out whole, peeled cloves of garlic for use. Chef gets a kick out of watching me shake the box, and I'm not sure if she likes it or thinks that I look like an idiot, but it is definitely a lot easier, not to mention the fact that this way you get less of that sticky garlic oil on your hands! As for the parsley, it is really straightforward. It reminds me of being in Trotter's kitchen, where the first thing I did, every day, for about an hour, was deal with parsley. You pick all the leaves off each stem, then you chop and chop and chop until the parsley is a soggy mess of finely chopped leaves. The other thing we do here is deep fry some parsley for a garnish. For that I need whole, perfect leaves, which pop like mad as the water evaporates from them in the fryer, and it leaves you with a nice, green, crunchy garnish that we use on several dishes. I actually like it a lot, though I dislike the way in which it gets the fryer a little dirty as you can never get all the parsley out that you put in.

Mussels: We get mussels in with the beards still attached, so I need to yank those off, cook the bivalves with some oil and garlic, and then, since we use them out of their shells, I pull each individual piece of meat out of the shell and check the inside of the muscle to make sure that the entire beard has been removed. There's something very disconcerting about dealing with the flesh of these things...

Blending things, whipping things: We do a lot of puree soups, and after staff meal I am often the one who blends them to a creamy smoothness in the food processor and seasons them. Also we do most of our small-batch whipped things by hand, which means I'm often recruited as a human kitchen-aid to make whipped cream or get egg whites to beautiful, soft peaks.

Cleaning: Cleaning is of course a central part to any kitchen, this one included. Furthermore I've discovered that I can start cleaning while they are putting out the last few plates, and this means we all get to go home earlier. Plus, usually by the end of service there isn't much for me to do, and so it's nice to have my hands busy.

That's day-to-day kitchen life for ya'....not the most exciting, but it can still be satisfying and I always have the opportunity to watch even when my hands are busy with something mundane.

By the way, it turns out we did not close the kitchen last night, and we actually had about a dozen guests! However we didn't do any prep during the day, and instead cleaned, which I was actually very happy to do....there was some nastiness that I found that made me appreciate how I used to clean like that every week at Green Zebra!