I actually wrote yesterday's comments last week, but forgot to post them.
I am much busier than I thought; doing two services a day leaves about two or three hours between 15 and 18 heures, and the rest of the time is sleeping or working. However, there's two and and a bit days a week off too, Saturday lunchtime to Monday evening. Normalement; we worked last Saturday night and will be working next Saturday night too.
But.
I am really enjoying the work. I get a distinct kick out of making things clean, and the Maitre de Restaurant made a special point of telling me this morning that he's very pleased with my work and that he thinks my plates are 'nickel' - pronounced knee-kell and meaning sparkling clean. Which is nice.
I'm working my way down the piles of pans and grills and so on, there's a definite tide line delineating the ones I've done and the ones that were here before me.
Most enjoyable is the prep work in the mornings. So far I've done carrots, mushrooms and courgettes in the veg line and quite a few fish now: salmon, cod, baby squid and dorades which may be sea bream or bass, I forget which.
The dorades were most interesting - remove the fins, gut them, cut out the gills, de-scale, wash and make pretty for serving. Most of the others are already gutted, but scaling is fun; I had a nice line in sparkly makeup until I came home at 3 this afternoon where the scales had stuck all over my face and hair.
Most fun were the ecrevisses, which may be fresh-water langoustines - these were still alive albeit rather sleepy after spending a couple of hours in the fridge. First up, pull out that vein that runs up their spines, or where their spines would be if they had one. You do this by taking the middle paddle of their tails and waggling it side to side gently until it breaks free, then pulling it and the veiny gunk with it.
This went fine for about the first 20, but then the other 30 started waking up as the room warmed them and then one decided to fight back. So I finished the job back in the walk-in fridge, having liberally dosed them with ice-cubes to calm them down some more.
Then Chef boiled them all alive, and I then got to remove the outer shell from their tails leaving something that looked remarkably like the monster from Alien. And their shells are really, really tough - much tougher than those on prawns/shrimps, I cut myself several times.
Talking of cuts, I cut the tip of the middle finger of my right hand really badly on Saturday and it's still not healed. Someone broke a glass in my sink without telling me, so it was on with the rubber glove. Unfortunately the blood was so copious it started spilling out of the wrist, so I re-packed the wound and put on another glove, sealing this one round my wrist with some tape to stop the blood getting out.
It's a man's life I tell you.
Click here to make comments, rude or otherwise, on this stuff
Previous | Next