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!