Line Cooking Narative: Formative idea 2

Every day is the same old thing: I get up - probably too late to feel like I should even bother to accomplish anything, I'm tired - so i have five cups of coffee. Before I have managed to eat a proper breakfast it's already time to head out the door. Leave the dishes on the table I'll take care of them when I get back from work. At work it's still the same every day: cup of coffee, small talk with the waitresses until they realize they should leave me alone, try to focus on getting prep work done quickly and efficiently - fail, another cup of coffee, get slammed by the lunch rush at about two, another cup of coffee, clean up and restock the line, try to make the waitresses feel like I don't hate them, get slammed by the dinner rush between six and eight, start cleaning up, deal with stragglers, cup of coffee, get out of work an hour late because nobody else can afford to give a hand, eat dinner - like I'm hungry[(?) because I'm not - 'nother cup of coffee], go out into the parking lot and smoke a cigarette with X waitress and pretend to be friendly, go home and ignore the dishes. Now I'm at the point where I'm tired but can't fall asleep but rather than doing anything useful I just turn on the TV in hopes that it will help my mind to wind down. Invariably the TV doesn't help at all. What really happens is that at some point I will nod off - maybe even for an hour; that means that when I do come to I am quite alert and feeling rested - which means that I won't be getting to sleep for another five hours. It's at about this point that I decide it would be wise to get out a beer in hopes of making myself tired and within another two hours or so I'll be doing shots - by myself - in an effort just to get to sleep so that I can get up and repeat the same performance, again.

Line Cooking Narative: Formative idea 1

Have you ever really thought about what goes into the compilation of a completed and ordered plate which is only a part of a whole? Let's have a quick look at a basic plate, some piece of shit – a sandwich with a side of fries. You have the plate and god help us if you work in a small locally owned diner where the manager is some crazy old lady that thinks it makes the presentation of the food better if everything comes on a differently designed plate which she probably found lying about in thrift stores – if that's the case you can throw presentation right out the window – just do what she says if the job is really that important to you. So crazy old ladies aside what we have is a general cliché in which there is probably a mottled-tannish plate- you're going to cut the sandwich diagonally so that you can have a triangled wedge of sandwich leaning up against the chunk, and then you make as big a pile of fries as you can; and the reason for all of this is because it's 'classy' – yes, it's not classy, it's 'classy' with quotation. Ask me why. I'm glad you asked – the reason for this is that you want sharp angles to be a part of the focus, where the fries are not considered the focus as much as a necessary evil. Sharp angles make it interesting to view – not that it's really considered heavily by the customer since every time they order a sandwich it's the same goddamn thing over and over again. You say to me, “but it's sandwiches – you can't make sandwiches different,” and I say back to you, “not with that attitude – sweetheart.” If we're lucky that's all the diner in question will do. Usually we are not so lucky. Rather than sticking with a tried and true formula they decide that in order to make this plate look a little nicer than everyone else's it needs a pickle and a frilled toothpick and a sprig of parsley or if we are really unlucky a sprinkling of chopped wilted parsley and besides that who knows what else – a wedge of lemon – maybe it's a fish sandwich, and in that case we would obviously have to add a ramekin of coleslaw, and a ramekin of tarter sauce; the point is: in the cooperate world the way to make something look nice is to garnish the hell out of it – this is not classy. Do not be fooled. Let's make a decision about the sandwich – let's say that it's turkey. While still giving the idea (possibly more than an actual physical image of one) of a sandwich how can we actually genuinely create an interesting presentation that will – given the ingredients without doubt shock the customer or recipient of the plate? What we need to do in our minds is strip everything to the bare bones. Sandwich. Maybe we need bread, maybe we need lettuce or something to substitute for it, onions and possibly something to convey flavour to an otherwise completely bland sandwich: gravy – essentially the condensed flavour of turkey. Of course a turkey sandwich usually has a side of cranberry sauce, and in our case what we really get from that, besides a warm sense of familiarity is colour, actual and real, interesting colour; so we want that stuff. Finally the starches: bread and potatoes. Now you can take a thanksgiving turkey with stuffing and if you think about it, it's just like an elaborate sandwich only less convenient to eat – but people don't think that to them, the only relation to a sandwich that they will get from that is cold and tomorrow. To maintain the idea of a sandwich we decide that maybe hot would be the preferred style and to assert the idea of a hot sandwich we can convey say toasted bread with something crisp – but rather than giving them toasted bread we give them quite crisp hash browns. Put these in the center of your very plain white plate. To give an angle to our viewers eyes we place the turkey partially on the hash browns – at an angle. Now we choose to top either the turkey or the hash browns with some caramelized onion and lay some sautéd spinach directly along one side of the browns. If we feel that the image is still blurry we can intensify the effect by applying the gravy in a straight line at an additional opposing angle. This down we add a small quenelle of cranberry sauce to one side or even partially overlapping the turkey – it should be in the acute angle between the turkey and the browns. This all done the last step that is required is to remind the person eating the 'sandwich' that it is what it is – and that is with a very lightly buttered and grilled toast triangle which we should be able to stand straight up among everything else, and so long as it is not perfectly centered the plate is presentation ready – no garnish required, only the necessary flavours on the plate with nothing to distract you from them. It's a diner-to-pseudo-huete-cuisine conversion. The only real work left is ensuring that the flavours are intense enough to carry what we've already taken in visually.

Line Cooking Narrative

I'm watching the cooking channel on my day off – Thirty minute meals with an attractive smiling and well endowed young lady, Everyday Italian, Sarah's poorly kept secrets, Bobby Flay's big fucking barbecue, Molto Mario – just sitting there, wasting away, seeing food that I'm never going to eat, or probably even try to make. I flip through the menu – dumbly fumbling with the remote, I want to see what's next even though I don't care – the perils of Pauline, or whatever that old southern lady who has a tendency to smother everything in butter and/or cheese shows' name is.

The phone rings. Can I come into work? Would it be a problem? No, seriously, I'm not doing anything important. I can be there in twenty minutes? Good. I feel ripped off in spite of the fact that I had absolutely nothing going on – at all.
Work is the smell of a deep fryer and eggs cooked in too much grease. I would rather live on the streets I told people, but I still find myself here, doing the same thing over and over and over again. We've got the universal ingredients: breaded shrimp to make college kids feel high-class, French fries by the box, crispy chicken fingers frozen in cases, little bags of rice and vegetables, packages of freeze dried vegetables, packaged premixed mashed potatoes, sealed portioned steaks, whatever you need - its got its own little plastic package. Remove the food and mix with whatever other packages you need to create an entrée. Here's your dinner, please let us know if we forgot to take an item out of its appropriate little plastic package, because if we did we will take it back to the kitchen and do it for you, then pretend to re-plate it so it looks like an entirely new dish – even though it's not and we both know it. I've been here for two years; they gave me a little star to put on my name tag – which apparently infers that I am really good at taking heated things out of packages without pissing off the manager or the customers. The waitresses are a different story, though. My god.

We're twenty-first century kids – pissing around, doing odd-jobs with no real direction. We do what people tell us. We do what we think we want. We do what society tells us. We do what our mom tells us, and what our boss tells us. That thirst that we had for life, the exuberance of living, the desire to do well, the excitement that we could find in a job well done, that – that's dead, or sedated, maybe waiting to come out and bring the fire of life back into us, but we've been conditioned to repress it. We've been conditioned like rats in a box – hit the lever, get the treat; rinse, repeat.

Mary is in the window. A customer tried to grab her ass, complained that the food wasn't hot enough even though she could see the steam coming off of it, someone spilled water all over her shirt, the dishwasher accidentally dropped a stack of plates into her arms – all that stuff that the waitresses go on about. She's talking in my direction even though she knows that I am just nodding and pretending to pay attention. That sucks. It's the arrangement that we have – she bitches and I don't tell her to shut up. The manager stops by to tell her that she can't cuss out the customers – even if they do try to grab her ass. The indignant look she shoots him as he turns to leave should have killed him. Then she's asking me what she wants to eat. How the hell do I know? I look like a goddamn chef? I'll think of something.

It's lemon pepper on a grilled chicken breast. I set it on grilled toast with garlic butter and a slice of swiss cheese. The side is sautéed tomatoes, red onions and scallions over not-too-greasy hash browns. It's enough of a change from the usual to get a response. The kind of thing that gives rise to responses of the “oh-my-god-you're-such-a-chef” nature. I do what I can. It's child's play, really. She's all tattoos, piercings and dyed hair, wicked glares and satiric laughter; she doesn't know a thing about food – what she knows is how to put someone on the defensive in a hurry.

Lamb

Braise a lamb chop for approximately two hours at about 275. It smelled a bit strong - so I used a relatively copious amount of white wine mixed with red wine vinegar. The flavors of the lamb and the wine and vinegar were taken in nicely by the potatoes and onions - also there was thyme and laurel. Possibly next time I could throw some tomatoes and a clove, a dash of nutmeg, some black pepper, a couple of carrots and garlic and reduce the sauce at the end to something resembling a demi-glace. It probably would need some additional spices though - I'll have to keep that in mind.
Parsley.