08 Cooking - A Crook with No Fingerprints is a Cook
And it's almost Christmas again!
Remember that scene in The Polar Express (2005) where the waiters come in with hot chocolate and sing the “hot, hot” song? A lot of people sing it in the kitchen, along with “sharps”, “knife”, and “behind you”.
The hottest place in the kitchen—and the most likely to do damage—is on “the line”—the sauté cook, griller, and griddler are all in a row, and all burners on the 25-foot line are on full-blast. It’s Death Valley sculpted in steel, coated with liberal amounts of clarified butter. The line cooks wait for an order to come in, and depending on what it is, can have several orders blazing away at once. It’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, and if you lose concentration, a lot of opportunities for 3rd degree burns. Most of us, if we’ve cooked before at all, have already managed to burn off our fingerprints by reaching for the pan/pot/utensil without thinking. Mystery writers could have a field day with this fact.
There’s also a sandwich station, which supplies the coffee shop; a garde manger station (pronounced “gard manJAY”—oh, you sound so French) for salads and cold appetizers; a prep team, who cut all the vegetables and do some of the other foundation preparation such as side dishes; the student meal team who come up with the eats, a student chef who finds out what the different stations need and makes a list each day, and yours truly—packing veges and herbs, “fabricating” meat, fish and poultry (yes, that’s what it’s called), making the occasional stock, and up to my elbows in soapy, greasy water at least three times a day. I brought in a little red devil rubber duck that sits on the sink dividers—patron saint of the pot sink. Next week, I’ll be student chef—I can’t tell whether I’m moving up or down in the world.