Getting Started

I'm sorry about point 3 in my last post.  Waving words like "loser" around is simply cruelty, unquestionably.  I strove to overcome the lack of wherewithal in those readers who find themselves wanting to work at a game world, only to find themselves repeatedly failing to do so.  If it comes as any comfort, it's but an echo of the sentiments that used to swirl around in my head for decades, which I truly think was incremental in leading me to a place where I could work every day without excuse.  For any creator, no matter what's being created, this is the #1 problem.  I want to work.  I can't make myself work.

Getting Started is a Canadian National Filmboard animated short from 1979 ... so it's dated.  The struggle is not.  The struggle is very up to date.  Every person who's ever done anything has had to overcome a natural resistance against working — perhaps it has something to do with biological organisms surviving through the conservation of energy.  Perhaps it's the constant comparison between ourselves and someone else who's obviously better at this thing than we are.  For myself, I find the will to write emerges from a constant struggle to remain confident about myself, my message and my ability.  Days when I lose that struggle, I don't write, and I feel awful when it comes time to turn in.  Days when I win that struggle, when I've written something meaningful, or finished tasks that really needed doing, I snuggle into bed happily.  This is the only real measure that counts for me: how do I feel when it's time to sleep.

Most days in the big picture, it takes no more than writing a post, or putting together a few pages on the wiki; it's getting past a deadline with work, or managing a day of spring cleaning, or taking all that stuff to the dump that's been waiting for weeks.  It's day to day stuff.  But if I take on something, um, bigger, the measure is skewed.  Suddenly, it's not enough to write a blog post.  Suddenly, I don't give a damn if the laundry gets done.  The only measure is the book.  Did I write enough book today?  No?  Then I hate myself.

It's been a touch and go week.  There've been interruptions and a page of work that wasn't saved that had to be done again, and a day lost to my real job and so on.  Despite that, I had a real victory this week, something to be really proud of, something that's made Tamara inordinately happy.  I feel good about that, but tonight I'm going to bed without any book done and, well ... fuck.

Anyway.  My partner Tamara is on a salt-free diet on account of kidney problems she's having.  She isn't in dialysis but the diet thing does spoil her mood most times ... though as I worked as a chef for many years I've been able to solve a lot using trickery and spices.  There's a great deal that can be done with a salt free diet, if you can maintain and control the amount of sugar — which she also has to keep low, as she's a type-2 diabetic.

Anyway, for several years, she hasn't been able to have pizza, which she likes.  She began talking about it a few weeks ago and I did some research and talked to the Italian market down the road from us.  The problem isn't that the pizza dough is flat, it's that the flatness has to be overcome by the richness of the sauce, which I can't produce with salt or anything but a stock I've made myself.  The market rightly suggested San Marzano tomatoes, which I haven't cooked with in many years, but which I realised were right to be strengthened by baking the tomatoes first before making the sauce.  The oven draws out more of the sugar, while it has to be left right to the point where the tomatoes are just starting to burn.  I par-boiled the tomatoes first, drained them, reduced the drain to thicken it and baked the tomatoes.  Earlier I'd boiled the left overs from a cheap pork roast that had a big bone in it, which made great stock after about 12 hours of simmering.  The pork stock went in the sauce, the tomatoes went in the sauce and then with garlic, onion, basil, oregano and dill, the sauce was gently stewed for about an hour.  I could have gone longer, but with the other set up, it was enough.

I made the pizza dough just as I've made it in half a dozen restaurants, where I used to make fifty pizzas every day.  I didn't have a hobart mixer or a hook, but I just made three pizza doughs.  I have a true pizza pan that I obtained from a place I worked at many years ago (the kitchen manager asked if there was anything she could do for me and I asked for the pan), which is a gawdsend.  I cooked the final result, a chicken-mushroom-feta pizza at 500 degrees and it came out perfect.  Exact restaurant quality, as I've made it for many years.  Tamara was thrilled.  Fully healthy, no salt, minimal sugar, tasted fantastic.  I ate one quarter and she ate the rest.  Then three days later, I took out one of the frozen doughs, let it defrost on top of the warm oven and made a pork loin-Hawaiian.  That came out perfect too.  Tamara is beside herself.  She gets to have pizza any time she wants, as much as she wants.

I should feel great about that, and I do ... but the fact is, I didn't get anything written yesterday or today.  A blog post is light, easy, fun, no pressure, no need to get anything accurate or right, or enduring.  Not like a book.  Writing a book is a bitch.

I better get something written tomorrow or I may fucking kill myself.

Dexterity of 7

Fell down a flight of stairs today. Was carrying a hotel pan of sizzling hot tomato bisque in two hands, when another cook decided to fly up the stairs, his head down, because he was in a hurry. I stopped him, avoided the collision, then took a step to the right to let him pass. And then, when I took my next step, there was no stair there.

I stumbled down, nailed myself several times on the left hand side with the metal railing as I struggled not to deadfall down the stairs. I kept the pan in my hands, half juggling it, until I was at the bottom, when I finally had to let go of it to grab the railing. The pan hit the floor, losing only one third of its contents - with bisque, you oven cook the tomatoes until they're on the edge of burning, to bring out the flavor - but that meant tomatoes all over the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling.

Cleaned it up, made the remaining five liters of bisque and slowly cooled down while cutting a dozen heads of lettuce.

Life in a kitchen.

Benefits

So I worked yesterday and, as I expected, I came home broken.

I thought I would write a bit on what things a cooking job offers that an office job does not - things that we can appreciate about it.

First and foremost, it tends to be a very free-minded environment.  I mean that you can fucking swear.  And talk about whatever you want, without anyone taking offense.  This is more true in a restaurant-bar environment, where I work, than it is in a family restaurant, but not much.  Most servers, I find, will change faces back and forth; speak very politely to the patrons and the swear and bitch as much as they like about whatever they want once they're in the back.

This is because kitchens are not conducive to restraint.  There's plenty of hot, boiling oil, fire, knives, potential disease and potential food contamination, mixed with exhaustion, speed, complaints and plenty of opportunity for misunderstandings.  To compensate for this, and the frustration it produces, kitchen staff will be the sort who can scream bloody murder at each other and five minutes later forget that it was ever said.  People who take a word said the wrong way personally and chafe on it for more than five minutes rarely last in the environment.

So if you're the sort that finds censorship and political correctness tiresome and a bit ludicrous, a kitchen is usually a refuge from it.  If you're expressive and passionate, if you have opinions you like to share, if you're tough-skinned and generally friendly in the face of people who are just being fucking honest, then kitchens are a refuge.

I have been called on the mat in an office environment for letting a slight edge of impatience enter my voice - and then had that incident mentioned again and again for three or four years whenever I've had to work with that person again.  The other person may forget it, I may forget it, but office management will never forget it.  Kitchens are a freedom from that sort of bullshit.

To work in a kitchen, it's good to be clean, but you don't have to be maintained.  People will drag you into the mop closet and hose you down if you don't control your stink, but beyond a bit of deodorant, it doesn't matter if you haven't shaved today or if your hair hasn't been cut in three or four months.  No one is measuring your character by where you buy your clothes or basing their opinion of you on how fit or trim you are.  Can he do the work?  Then no one gives a crap how many pounds overweight he is, or if he has joined a gym, seen his doctor or dentist, seen a chiropractor or how healthy he eats.  These are all standard, fairly constant conversations in an office - conversations I am careful to side-step.

Overall, no one has any interest at all in how anyone lives their life.  Specifics about life don't matter outside the restaurant; it is the individual who is judged and the judgement is upon ability and diligence, nothing else.  We don't get extra bonus points for who we know, what we do in our spare time, the charity work we commit to or fuck all anything else.  None of that will help me or the cook next to me when the rush is on.  It buys no respect.

Oh, and while I'm at it, the importance of recycling doesn't come up.  This is standard, constant, continuous chat in an office - "Do you recycle, how committed are you, you've thrown your coffee cup into the wrong receptacle again, you shouldn't buy that product because it isn't biodegradable" and on until eternity.  Kitchens throw so much stuff away, so much food away, because it can't be sold, it won't be eaten, it's sat out too long or it's too low a grade, it is hard to have any perception of recycling except to mock people who think they're accomplishing something.  I work in one kitchen and in the space of a day we fill a dumpster with crap.  Most of it going straight into a land-based methane-creation facility.  There's nothing we can do about it; it is the way business has to be done to make the food look glorious when it appears upon the pedantically critical and impatient patron's table.

We eat the food, too, but we know what food is and what goes into it.  We're just as picky but since we make the food, we have no preconceived notions about what we're getting.

Money is saved all over the place.  Only a fool works in a kitchen so far away that they can't walk there, so there's savings in commuting and parking.  Without needing to be dressed up, with uniforms that are waiting on a rack to be worn (if the kitchen is right, they have a cleaning service), without having to spend money on lunch or on coffee through the day, the actual going to work is cost-free. I'm able to work everyday without having to invest.

Some restaurants will charge for uniforms and knives and even hair-nets - but there's always another restaurant next door that doesn't.  This is good to keep in mind.  There is always another restaurant next door.

Lastly, while I point out the benefits, I'll note that while there's a recession going on, it took four days and 9 resumes for me to find a cooking job.  I've put out something like 2,000 online resumes to office work jobs over five months, I've been to 40 interviews and I've gotten exactly nowhere with that; despite the fact that everyone tells me I have a remarkable resume.  Only . . . apparently there's no work right now that doesn't involve talking to complaining customers, and I haven't any experience with that.

Except with several hundred bitchy front staff people.


The above is an example of the sort of post I'm going to write going forward on my previously attempted cooking blog, Setting the Fare. 

Update

So, last couple of days, been working again.  I've started shifts in a restaurant, gone back to cooking, something I haven't done in 13 years.  At nearly 51 years of age (much closer to 51 than 50), I am really feeling it; but it is nice to know that I actually can stand on my feet for eight hours without having a coronary.

Once my body begins to adapt, I'll be grateful.  Just at the moment, I'm thinking about trashing the cooking blog I started in the spring and starting it again, with a title like "An Old Man Starts Cooking Again."  If I'm serious about that, I'll have to do it soon, however, before the thoughts I'm having at the moment go out of my head.  

My feet hurt.

Getting ready for another shift tonight, don't want to burn too much energy writing.  For a while, each day will get work, until I turn that corner.

Time Saved!

Earlier today, Doug of Doug's Workshop made a comment that I'd like to run with a bit, specifically this part:

"Many people 'learn to cook' not by understanding the principles of the art, but by using the gadgets sold. Garlic press? Sure, you need one because garlic is awesome. Bread machine? Yes, because fresh bread is terrific."

This got me thinking about gadgets in general . . . but before I go off on a tear about the way playing modules kills the imagination, I just won't.  Instead, I'll talk about cooking.

Garlic, for instance.  What you need is a good knife, one where the blade is about an inch deep.  Like the one shown.  Clean off the garlic clove you want.  Place the clove on the cutting board.  Then place the side of the knife over the garlic clove.  Point the knife blade towards you so you won't cut yourself.  Press down on the side of the knife with the heel of your hand, steady but hard, until you feel the garlic crushed between the knife and the board.  Pick up the knife.  The garlic should be very flat, split into several pieces and wet.  If the garlic is still one piece, you haven't pressed hard enough.  Now chop the garlic with the knife blade three or four times.  Your garlic has now been crushed.  Scoop the crushed garlic up with the knife and drop it into your pan.

Up to three cloves can be done at a time, if they're warm.  The total time this takes is about two or three seconds.  If you're in a hurry, you can do it in one second - but I wouldn't recommend hurrying that fast until you've done this about seven or eight hundred times.  Since the chances are you already have a knife in your hand when you need the garlic, this will save you a great deal of time in putting down the knife and picking up the garlic press, then putting down the press and picking up your knife again.  The knife does a better job, too.

Why do garlic crushers exist?  Because, a) people are afraid of big knives; b) refridgerators can be sold to eskimos; c) it sounds like a good idea; and d) it never occurred to your mother or father that a knife can be used to crush things.

In short, ignorance.  If cooking shops did not carry garlic presses, they'd be harassed by would-be cooks until they did, because the presence of garlic presses has become so expected that shops can no longer ignore them.  This is a sign of the supreme victory a marketing department can ultimately have over a population - eventually, even cooks will buy them.  I worked in a number of restaurants where garlic presses could be found among the various tools.  Ignored, of course.  Such things are purchased by kitchen managers and restaurant owners - people who 'cook' for a few minutes between office hours.  Real cooks do not have the time that garlic presses demand.

But there is something to be learned here, where it comes to the time we take to prepare things. We suppose, if there are two hundred garlic heads and the garlic press can crush one head every minute, then the total time it will take to crush all the heads will be 3+ hours.  Whereupon the cook comes along and does the pile in 40 minutes.

It is easy to think you have the right tool and the right method; but it may be that you've simply missed a lesson or two along the way.  I get that people watch that idiot Ramsey scream at people and waffle on about food with bucketfuls of meaningless adjectives, but actual restaurant cooking is about ordering actions in the least amount of time - those that survive are those who can keep their heads about them in a dangerous environment.  Cooking isn't about gadgets, it isn't even about skill.  I could teach any one of you a reasonable amount of proficiency with a knife if you did it every day for a year.  Cooking is about paying attention.  Noticing details.  Recognizing slight color changes, an odor in the air, a certain alteration in sound.  If you're told what to expect, it's actually very, very easy to manage these things.

If you've never been told - or you have been told and you refuse to listen - then you will always be a lousy cook.  But then, conveniently, we can identify the lousy cooks very easily.

Hm.  Now that I think about it, DMing works the same way, doesn't it?

The Science of Omelette

Just mucking about: