I
actually enjoy the washing up. No, really, I do. There is, to me, immense
satisfaction in making something clean. Really clean. As in, cleaner than the
last person who cleaned it left it. So today I have at some of the aluminium
oven pans which are, shall we say politely, a tad neglected. Five kilos of elbow
grease later and voila, clean. Cleaner anyway, some of them are a tad beyond
hope.
And
then Chef gets me to clean up the salmon he's just brought in. Cut out the
gills, scrape off the scales, give them a good wash.
Next,
the encornets – baby squids. These are even more fun: pull out the insides,
peel off the tissue-thin skin, separate out the body parts, cut off the
tentacles, remove the cartilage. All very satisfying.
And
finally the greatest challenge, 50 ecrevisses, fresh water
lobsters for want of a better word. 50 live ecrevisses, that is.
The secret here is to keep them in the fridge for an hour or two first, which
calms them right down. Then, you remove that vein that runs up their spines (or
where their spines would be if they weren't crustaceans) by gripping and gently
twisting the middle paddle in their tails and pulling the whole thing out in one
go – it looks rather blue in the middle, a navy blue compared to the very dark
blue of the ink of the squids.
About
20 ecrevisses into the pile, the heat of the kitchen starts waking them up and
they begin to fight each other. And then one of them decides to fight back
against me and pinches my finger, so I finish them off working in the walk-in
fridge – with a good few handfuls of ice cubes in their container to help calm
them down a bit more.
Yesterday
I got to do some vegetables too: endives – just pull off the dirty outer
leaves – and then some carrots and courgettes, cut en biseau –
basically, round off all the sharp edges of the pyramid-shaped cuts to make sure
the clients don't hurt their delicate mouths.
And
we eat well at lunchtime again: roti de veau stuffed with foie gras; roast
chicken; pate de campagne; and then a special huge brioche stuffed with sweeties
of some kind.
It's
not all hard work, you know.