Archive for May, 2010
Perfect Pitch
Saturday, May 29th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
I’ve tried hard to convince institutional cooks that Tyson is not our friend, but I really don’t need to mock the company because it does a great job of that without my help. “Do they know they’re funny?” I asked my husband as I read priceless nuggets from their website like the statement that their processed taco meat allows for a ”minimum culinary skill set.” Or their pitch to school lunch directors to “select beef for your commodity allocation,” and divert it to Tyson who will “turn it into products that excite kids.” I don’t know about you, but when I read that last line, I had a hard time picturing a healthy meal. Okay, a meal, period. Stephen Neel of Oregon Natural Meats made his own pitch to us yesterday with steaks and burgers from cattle he’s personally connected to. As someone who’s spent the past four years deriding Big Food and entertaining the guys with my side of phone conversations that leave no doubt I feel strongly about the source of my stuff, this perfect day just threw me off. It would have been enough for most people to taste the clearly superior meat, but learning that Neel used to work for ADM–and that with this former insider knowlege he found the movie Food, Inc. to be “technically accurate”–added a certain spice to that steak. Still, as long as there are food companies promoting a “minimum culinary skill set,” there will be blog material and anyway, while I’ve turned a corner on chicken and beef, there’s work to be done. “So now,” I said to my long-suffering USF reps, “lets talk about pigs.”
Tough Crowd
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 | daily | 4 Comments
When the juice machine guy arrived to remove our defunct equipment, he asked me why we were sending it away. I thought about telling him that the company he works for is part of the evil giant industrial food complex I seek to destroy. But he looked like he was already having a “I Hate My Job” day at 9 o’clock in the morning, so instead I just told him the boring truth. It’s amusing to toy with some people and then others are too hopelessly sad to make it any fun. I tried to explain this to one of the guys who’s been on the receiving end of some relentless teasing lately: they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t love you I assured him. But he was struggling and so I finally had to play mom and advise him to just say the magic phrase, “I know you are, but what am I!” He was skeptical about using this 4th grade rejoinder, but it’s amazingly effective coming out of the mouth of a 20-something. There’s been a feverish amount of teasing around here lately and I am not innocent as Blair discovered today when I interuppted his story about eating at Olive Garden to read a Seattle Weekly critic’s quote that “Olive Garden is widely considered the lamest restaurant in the world.” That Blair of all people–the person for whom I make Chipotle Mayonnaise for sandwich bar, the person who asks 10,000 questions while he watches me butcher a chicken–would let slip that he eats at that palace of fakery. Well, he was just asking for it.
Things Fall Apart
Monday, May 24th, 2010 | daily | 9 Comments
Every year in the last few weeks of school, it all just falls apart. When I told John our juice machine door was broken, he asked me if it was still functional. So I sent him a picture and the message, “what I meant was that the door fell on me this morning and I’m considering my legal options.” But truly I wasn’t mad about this. “It’s a sign,” Corey said gravely when he witnessed the damage. Corey shares my hatred of the juice machine, which should more properly be called the sugar machine. “Sugar, high fructose corn syrup…oh, and then in case you didn’t get enough highly-processed sweetness, regular ol’ corn syrup,” I read from the label when one of the guys expressed curiosity about the contents of the glass in his hand. I’m not the food police and consider the Center for Science in the Public Interest to be the Center for Joyless Food Phobics Who Need to Lighten Up. I think everyone should have a choice and if I want to spread straight lard on my toast, the CSPI can just zip it, but it should be an informed choice. I mean, how nutty is it to think that something called lemonade should contain–I’m just throwing this out there–lemon juice? Still, contrary to rumor and suspicion, I did not kill the machine. “Bashing the crap out of something is not my M.O.,” I told Blair. “I’m way more subtle than that.”
Red and Wild
Thursday, May 20th, 2010 | daily | 3 Comments
“I was bored in class, so I read all the comments on the blog,” Carlos told me. He’d read all the posts, so he was making good use of his tuition spending by ensuring a really thorough study of Fraternity Kitchen. Knowing that a number of parents read this blog, I hesitate to share this, but I do try to check my grammar and I think the guys learn some vital life lessons here. Like working hard to ensure they don’t end up as a fraternity cook. I’d say “get a degree so you don’t grow up to be a fraternity cook,” except that I have one of those, a BA in English, which makes me super qualified to work long hours in a hot kitchen AND write a kick-ass blog that earns me zero income. “You have all these chefs in Iowa reading you,” Carlos marvelled, as if this was news to me. Or maybe he was just expressing astonishment that it’s not just bored college students wasting their time on this trash. I have fantasies about living the life of those salt of the Earth, farm-centric Iowans. Until I open my boxes of first of the season Copper River Sockeye, red and wild and packed on ice just yesterday.
Friends in High Places
Monday, May 17th, 2010 | daily | 4 Comments
Badley had great news today, but I didn’t hear it from him. I heard from Patrick first and then Blair. And then learned that everybody but me knew Badley was offered a job in Senator Murray’s office in D.C. after graduation. Regardless of your politics (and I want to declare to all my readers that I have come to completely detest politics–particularly that of the ideological, partisan, you’re for me or against me kind, so I really take no side), this is BIG news. A 2010 college graduate with a JOB!. But as I said, I didn’t hear it from him, a person who routinely texts me at all hours to ask me and tell me all kinds of urgent things like “can you make me a batch of salsa for winter break?” I thought about how to retaliate against this, but I really don’t need to. It’s awesome that Badley will be in Washington. And I will be texting him relentlessly with requests to make major changes to the school lunch program and the Farm Bill, to subsidize vegetable farming instead of corn, soy and wheat farming, and to work on declaring High Fructose Corn Syrup a controlled substance.
Reminiscing
Sunday, May 16th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
This picture was taken at last night’s alumni event just after Alex had finished a monologue about the likelihood of my leaving. “Where else is she going to go?” he recalled telling current members of the house. “Where else can she have it her way and talk shit about her customers on the Internet?” I’m the first to admit that the job has it’s upside, but then again, the very fact that there is a never ending stream of shit to talk about on the internet is why most fraternity cooks seem more like they’re on court-ordered community service than there by choice. When guys ask me who hired me, I’m never sure if they’re asking WHO hired YOU??? or if they’re just interested in the history, but regardless I tell them it was Alex, who had suffered three years of food described to me variously as “cat meat” and “rat meat.” None of the current residents of the House have any memory of this and so sometimes I fantasize about having that former cook come back to substitute while I take a nice little holiday in Spain.
What Matters
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 | daily | 2 Comments
Festivities were in progress when I arrived for work at 7AM. The pig should have been going, too, but the coals weren’t even out of the bag. They’d forgotten to obtain the necessary permit to hold a party and so, when the Seattle PD pulled up in front of the house, there was that flashing lights in your rearview mirror moment. The cops waited a while, saw that no one was hurting or being hurt, and then left without a word. I smiled broadly when I got this news because, after a couple of weeks of bureaucratic bullshit in both my work and personal life, it was reassuring to see people in power who hadn’t lost their ability to make a judgment call. I was thinking that my job, too, calls for a certain amount of prioritizing what to care about, what’s a serious matter, what needs to be let go of. Plugs left out of the sink: annoying. Pig left unrefrigerated overnight: deadly. Well, really, he’d been kept in an ice chest, like a murdered body on its way to a landfill, on top of ice, but not encased in it. I temp’d it and it was still cold. “How long has it been here?” I asked them and watched each face go through a “what’s the right answer?” contortion. Reason enough for me to get the walk-in cooler I’m getting a quote on this Friday.
Scary
Monday, May 10th, 2010 | daily | 2 Comments
Just as I was rubbing down a 65lb pig with salt and spice, Johnny presented me with a gift of spot prawns his family had caught in the Hood Canal over the weekend. I think it was a sort of apology for not making Friday’s lunch and while it would have been great to have him, well, come on…first of the season spot prawns. “We use cat food for bait,” he told me, and I started imagining Johnny slitting Fifi’s throat in aid of this shrimping trip and I was thinking that I was really not okay with that. “No…like Fancy Feast,” he explained. ”Not cat as food.” It was a huge relief I can tell you because I didn’t have plans for dinner and so tonight my husband and I enjoyed little else but these garlic-roasted crustaceons. It was the first day of Greek Week, but it wasn’t the guys who provided the drama of the day. It was a cook from another house who arrived drunk and raging and “looking like a homeless person,” as pledge Brian put it. “I heard you quit!” she bellowed as I calmly assured her that you can’t believe all you hear. She was on fire furious about a rumor that my guys were going to her house for dinner Thursday, and I was thinking a lot of thoughts about that prospect that I didn’t share. “Holy Jesus,” I said to some of the freshmen later, “and you think I’m scary.”
Far From Done
Sunday, May 9th, 2010 | daily | 8 Comments
For most of the winter, local produce is limited to potatoes and turnips, so it’s a thrill to see the arrival of Washington asparagus, leeks and rhubarb. “I never ate vegetables,” one of the guys told me on Friday, trying to explain the impact I’d had on the life of this House. “I eat vegetables now.” I was so struck by this simple declaration because, as I told my husband while we hiked the Lime Kiln Trail yesterday, “I’m trying to bring them along with me, not preach to them.” “It’s in the very early stages,” the VP from US Foodservices told me on Thursday, referring to a partnership with Oregon and Washington ranchers to offer natural, local beef to select customers. “I’d love to offer this to you,” he went on, before the caveat that it wouldn’t be ready for roll-out until the Fall. It’s hard to overstate how major this is–the prospect of obtaining beef from a national food distributor that’s not shipped thousands of miles from massive feedlots, but instead from small, nearby farms; the kinds of places that, when you look up the company name on the web, you don’t get a hundred articles about how really very nasty they are. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t see how it was ever going to happen for large groups on a budget. So when a few of the leaders in the House took me to lunch on Friday to ask me to come back next year, I’d already had 24 hours of regret that I’d be leaving just as I’d been given the gift of having my years of relentless pleading pay off. I’m so far from done.
Tastes Like Chicken
Thursday, May 6th, 2010 | daily | 1 Comment
There’s nothing like show and tell to get your point across. I purchased both chicken breasts from US Foodservice, but the one on the left is one they sourced locally, from whole chickens that I break down myself (15 minutes for a case of twelve…I did time myself). The one on the right comes pre-cut from “Massive Chicken Factory Anywhere USA.” And you can’t really see it here, but the chicken that’s treated like one of God’s creatures is plumper and pinker than the one that looks like road kill. And what you also can’t see is that Exhibit Left tastes like chicken. ”Please make sure the dining area is presentable,” I had requested of Little Dick, who diligently remembered the request and made sure it was so. So that when I met with a VP of Sales from US Foodservice to tell him we need more of the left and less of the right (absolutely no political inuendo intended), he would take me seriously. And he didn’t just get the message, he dropped a bombshell. “US Foodservice sponsered that British guy’s American TV show… Jamie…” “Jamie Oliver?” I asked, incredulous. The guy who revolutionized the entire British school food system and believes as fervently as I do that processed food is poison. That Jamie.
Winners
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
Pledge Nick came into the kitchen today to tell me “Badley’s sick and he needs me to bring some chips up to his room.” Not just any chips, mind you, he was specific in his flavor choice of jalapeno. I told Nick we were fresh out of His Majesty’s request and shortly after I called Badley to tell him not to bother me and the freshmen on a day when I’m cooking for a VIP, poor pledge Nick returned with a prescription bottle. “He told me to show you this.” The Mayor of Mercer Island was our guest tonight, and I’m not sure why, but I’m guessing Mayor McGinn wasn’t available and, as one of the guys pointed out, Mercer Island is one of the top places to live in the country. They invite successful people to come speak to the guys with a promise of a dinner that’s not the dinner of their frat life memories. “They should invite a few unsucessful people,” my husband suggested. “For balance.” I thought this was a great idea, but wondered how that invitation would go down; “we’ve reached our quota of winners, so we were just wondering how your schedule is looking?” It’s been one of those weeks where you constantly feel that you will never get all of the food cooked, with this dinner in the middle and then tomorrow one of the VP’s of Sales from US Foodservice coming to hear my thoughts on improving the food system as we know it. It was one of their people who arranged the date, not me, and it occured to me today to ask Rod, “whose idea was it to schedule a business meeting at a frat house the day after Cinqo de Mayo?”
Charm Offensive
Monday, May 3rd, 2010 | daily | 2 Comments
Late Friday I received the most charming lunch invitaiton from the current President and “several members of the executive team.” (I admit that instead of just being totally delighted, I spent several seconds wondering which members of the executive team don’t want to take me to lunch). So when I came into work this morning, I naturally wondered if the roses were more of the charm offensive. But they were from the guys’ advisor, who appeared later for Chapter Dinner. I showed him the sanitizer test strips I’d bought over the weekend to prove that my sanitizer water is safe (which it ALWAYS is). And the internal refrigerator thermometer I’d bought to prove that the external thermometer is correct (which it is). All for the health inspector, who is due to return next week. “He’s coming back to re-inspect all the Houses,” I told the guys’ advisor. Next week, as in Greek Week. The one particular week when having a member of the King County government lurking around is probably not such a great thing. “And I’m quite sure those are totally against code,” I remarked, glancing at the roses contaminating my work tables in all their unsanitary loveliness.
Archive
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008