That
it's taken me what, 10 days to find five minutes to post another entry should
tell you something; I now have NO spare time at all. Work is nine hours a day,
with an hour-long commute at either end. It takes me a very bare minimum of 40
minutes to get up, washed, breakfasted and out of the house every morning; and
the sous-chef loathes me.
Not really sure why; in some ways he can make my life hell, more from the snide remark side of things than any other. As I discovered before, I can only take so long being treated like a w*&^3r before I give up and take my ball home. He is, first, jealous that I've a successful career as a journalist behind me with a nice house and a posh car to show for it. He has a successful career, an ex-wife and a 20-year-old Renault 5. So, only the car to mark the difference then.
As I said on Monday last week, duck's back/water by and large; however, the S-C is working on his 'emmerdements' as we say here - he seems to be watching me doing whatever it is, then appearing 30 seconds before I finish to tutt that I haven't already done so.
And he expects stuff to be done because he says so, not because there's a good reason; chef, by contrast, is keen that I work faster - a lot faster - but is good at explaining why and how.
For example, I now understand the idea of 'refreshing' vegetables, especially green ones, after cooking them as well as any O-level (ooh, that dates you!) student. Organo-somethings are involved and it keeps the vitamins in and the colour green. So, worth doing.
I'm getting something of a handle on the system and the way things work; I start at 8 finding seven or eight salads for the 'self' next door to the kitchen where we do about 30-40 covers a day. This isn't as easy as it sounds sometimes as there aren't any lying around some days and the S-C, who is in charge of these things, jealously guards them. Today he told me six would be fine which attracted a bollocking from chef when he saw what I'd done, or rather not done; the S-C heroically saved the day by 'finding' a salad in the cold store, from the pile he'd told me I couldn't touch.
What am I learning? Well, now I know how to peal a melon, for example. Peel a melon? Oh yes, peel a melon. Lay it down longways, cut off the two ends; stand it up on one end and, as always, using the f*76%$g HUGEST knife you can find (chefs here always work with the HUGEST knives they can find, as opposed to Labahou where they worked with the smallest) cut down the side, following the contour. Repeat with all eight melons you're currently peeling.
I can make three gallons of mayonnaise at once, boil 48 eggs at a go (in the oven, no less) and have learned how to wash lettuce all over again. Oh yes. And how to stack lettuce leaves vertically. I am not making this up.
As Bubba wrote the other day, there's a book in "Chef's Foibles"; they're all different in weird, it-doesn't-matter-anywhere-else ways and you just have to learn them as you go along. I'm already thinking of some crackers for when I have my own kitchen.
Anyway. After the 7-8 salads I have to find three or four puddings - same S-C problems - and two or three fruits, and then three or four cheeses. I also have to make up orders to send out to satellite cafeterias - normally a 13 and a 39. Finding something different every day is a real pain in the bum, believe me.
Then I stack all this on a 'chariot' and leave it in cold room number 4, 'Chambre froid de départ' and do something else like peel 25 kilos of (cooked) potatoes, wash 18 lettuces (and stack them vertically, of course) or fail to use the Vacuum Packer.
The Vacuum Packing Machine is the second bane of my life; it's almost impossible to seal anything up and get it right and not wrinkle the bag - it took me an hour to do four bags of veal in Sauce Forestier the other day, much to the S-C's amusement. The problem is that you mustn't have any oil or grease along the seam so have to spend ages and ages wiping and wiping it with bits of paper towel.
Oh yes, paper towels. Tea towels are completely forbidden except for hauling hot things out of the oven - every spillage and hand-wiping has to be done with paper towels so the microbes go straight into the bin. Hygienic, I suppose, but it's much handier to have a tea towel tucked into your waist band.
Then I discovered why the sous-vide machine is so hard; it's because it's so hard to use - the commis chef went on a three DAY course to use it, I've had two minutes' worth of instruction. And then a one minute lesson to contradict it.
So yeah, there's lots of little things that annoy. The big picture is much better and happier; this is a four-month contract and, at the end of it, I can boast (OK, lie about) a year's worth of kitchen experience on my CV; I'm learning a lot about different ways of working, and working quickly; I'm learning how to cope with days and days of constant, on-your-feet-nine-hours-a-day kitchening; and I'm learning new techniques and recipes about the basics, which is what I need.
There are good and bad days, it's true, and last Thursday I was within half a second of giving it up, because it was a truly shitty day. I was walking through Nimes to buy more chef's coats - a clean, pressed, bleached, pure- white one every day, please - when I got a call from another restaurant where I'd sent a CV. I came close to at least going for an interview, but resisted in the end. And Thursday was the worst day so far, hopefully I have enough of a handle on things now and the learning curve is flattening a little.
We'll see.
Ultimately, there are an awful lot of vacancies in this trade around here and, worst comes to the worst, I can just walk out the door. I don't think I'm going to, though, I do prefer to stick it out.
But it's nice to have choices.
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