Fraternity Kitchen

Not Just a Job

Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

One of my favorite posts from last year is Snowpocalypse, and it’s one that others remember not for the epic weather description but for the Bourbon Chocolate Cake, so longed for that I risked my life over it.  This time, though, I’m baking it on a warm June afternoon and taking it to Badley and Daniel to thank them.  The guys have been sinking into a crisis and I should say that it’s entirely their problem and yet somehow I was the one losing sleep and bursting into tears of frustration.  At one point, when one who had better reason than me to be ticked told me I “shouldn’t be so mean to those boys,” my incredulous response was that someone has to beat the crap out of them.  As leaders must, Badley and Daniel took the direct hits and turned things around, so they can eat the whole bourbon-drenched thing themselves as far as I’m concerned.  “This isn’t a normal job!” I cried to my husband who suggested that my last pay day of the year might perhaps have marked the end of my responsibilities and seemed not to share my conviction that without me in their lives, everything would just fall apart.

Seattle Summer

Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

“Are you going to keep up your blog over the summer?”  It was my mother who posed this question as we ate corn and crab soup and grilled gulf shrimp with grits and andouille at Dante’s Kitchen in New Orleans.  I flew out to Louisiana hours after my last day on the job.  And when I told her I thought not, she asked how she would keep up with my life.  “It’s not about me.  It’s about the guys,” I said, but then I was eating boiled crawfish with my brother and his wife and they asked me what I had planned for the summer back in Seattle.  “Mostly outdoorsy things,” I said, “concerts and picnics and hikes.”  Their expressions said it all…Summer.  Outside.  How very, very foreign.  And then there are the people who wonder what a fraternity chef does for 2 1/2 months.  So I thought, what the hell, I’ll write about shopping at our amazing neighborhood farmers’ markets and at cool ethnic shops like Uwajimaya, the source of the whole fish for tonight’s dinner.  “I’m looking for arctic char,” I told the fishmonger, but they didn’t have it and so after a little discussion about how I intended to prepare it he suggested the Rockfish pictured above.  Stay away from a fish with dull or sunken eyes they say, and this one’s were so much the opposite I swore he was watching me slathering him with lemon-dill butter before his trip to the oven.

Bums on the Ave

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

“This has the potential to turn out very badly,” Jeff said to me, which, come to think of it, could have been the subtitle to this blog.  I was in the kitchen smiling to myself about what was going on in the dining hall.  It’s finals week and so, while I keep cooking because that is what is required, guys keep leaving, so that we end up with mountains of uneaten food.  I let my disgust about this be known today…”all that flank steak, all those potatoes, just WASTED.”  Sometimes I feel like my bitching just floats out there ignored, but then at other times they try to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT WOMAN’S ANGER.  And so Shane had the brilliant idea to pack up all the leftover food and deliver it to the “bums on the Ave.”  They used the word a dozen times before Jesse suggested that “we don’t call them that anymore, the term is homeless” and they all just totally got into it.  “Philanthropy!” James cried.  They left the house expecting a perhaps less than happy experience, but they returned beaming.  And I was reminded why I love these guys so much.

Hot as Hell

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

“What did I say?!” Alex wondered aloud after I chased him out of the kitchen with a chef’s knife.  It was 89′ in Seattle today, so that in my air-condition-free, low-circulation workspace with ovens and a flat-top perpetually burning, it was oppressively, wiltingly Hellish.  And so, when Alex was the tenth person to saunter through and comment “sure is hot in here,”  well…you get the picture.  There’s been a heatwave here for a couple of days and a corresponding dearth of guys hanging out to chat with me, but Alex redeemed himself by plopping himself on my kitchen stool for 30 seconds to ask me if I signed the contract for the coming year, which I did.   Earlier, Daniel had stopped in to ask me a “professional question.”  But nothing to do with food.  “It’s hot, so do I still have to wear a suit to a job interview?”  “Yeah,” I said, “and a tie,” as I remembered Perry heading off to an interview with Rod unshaven, late, and wearing a polo shirt.  “You’ll be memorable.  For the right reasons.”

Like Nothing Else

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

The guys hate it when the cover photo is of food.  It’s a food blog I tell them, but they’re not buying it.  Today Scott bragged to Corey that he made the cover first and when Corey told him he was on here months ago, the two of them came into the kitchen to settle the matter.  Like kids wanting to know Who Mom Likes Best.  I’m not the sort to say they’re all my dear ones because they’re not.  But there’s a big enough group of freshmen like those two to make me lean towards signing a new contract.  Newman and Dan will be moving out, as will several other major “blog hogs” like Zach and Jesse and so it’s a great comfort to see new blood like Alex contributing the kind of thoroughly sarcastic comments that keep this thing alive.  

The picture is whole roasted fresh wild salmon, which, while simple and wonderful for 4 people, becomes a horror when done for a family of 60 bone-phobic young guys.  You can’t just bring it out and say “Ta Da!”  You have to skin it and fillet it and all the while wonder why you put insane things like this on your menus when you could just shove a bunch of frozen fish sticks in the oven and call it dinner.  Still, I will do it again because the taste was like nothing else.

Birthday Brownies

Monday, June 1st, 2009 | daily | 2 Comments

“Take a picture of us watching ladies soccer for the blog,” the guys emplored as I was locking up the kitchen for the night.  When the guys ask me to expose the intimate, embarassing details of their private lives to my fans, well, how can I not?  But it wasn’t the cover picture I had intended–that would be James.  He’s our houseboy this quarter and he was cleaning up when Eliab came in and told us James’ dad had called him three times on the weekend to request a cake for James’ birthday on Saturday.  “He should have been calling you!” Eliab exclaimed in my direction, to which I responded ”when exactly do you suppose I have time for baking a cake!”  Rather than sulk about this, James laughed and told me he didn’t care for cake anyway.  And then in a characteristic non-sequitor, he suddenly announced that his brother had accepted an offer from Texas A&M.  And turned down offers from UW and UT Austin.  “Whaaaat?” I howled.  “College Station over Seattle or Austin?”  But it was when I remembered meeting his brother last summer that I really lost it, “And he’s SMART.  Did he have some kind of brain injury accident?  Is there a woman?!”  Things took on a more civil tenor when I got back to the birthday cake thing and asked him what he’d really like.  “Well, I do like brownies,” he declared.  So there it is.  Special Brownies for James’ birthday.