Well, it's been a while since I last posted on this site, and I thought I'd share with you what's been going on in the past few weeks. I've started working for a local catering company in the Washington, DC area, and I've been dying a slow death. Well, no, not really, but it has been wearing away at me to the point that I'm questioning whether or not this was a good idea to begin with. My day starts at 4:30 AM, when my alarm clock goes off, and I just try to ignore it in the vain hope that it will go away. I have to be at work at 6:00 AM, and I work an indetermininate number of hours (I work until the whole kitchen's work is done, whenever that may be) doing stupid mundane shit in large quantities.
I started out on the hotline where I would at least get to cook things, albeit in huge quantities. Among my records (personally, I'd never dream of cooking in this volume) are 89 pounds of asparagus (which is impressive when you consider that asparagus has a 67% yield, so to end up with 89 pounds, you have to start out with around 135 pounds). 135 pounds of pasta, 90 pounds of broccoli, and 800 pounds (yes, you read that correctly) of mashed potatoes. A lot of this is for local schools' lunch programmes.
These past couple weeks I've been on the cold line where I've been making salads. Not your pasta salads, or any other composed salads, but straight up Caesar salads, and other "house" salads. I chop lettuce by the hundreds of pounds. It's boring as hell, and further reinforces my theories that 1) cold food preparation is a pain in the arse, and 2) Germans love David Hasselhoff. At some point in the near future I'm supposed to rotate into the bakery, where supposedly I'll be working on various petit-fours and wedding cakes. I have a suspicion, however, that I'll just wind up making 200 pounds of cookies on any given day. I guess that remains to be seen.
So now that I've been working for a while, what thoughts do I have about this? Well, besides the one I mentioned before, that I'm not sure this was the right move for me, I really don't like having to get up every day at 4:30 AM. I haven't had a good night's sleep since 1987 (which, coincidentally, is also when most music started sucking big time), and this is the last thing I need. On those days when I get out at a decent hour, I just want to sleep all the time. I also think that most catering operations represent a gargantuan rip-off for the consumer (especially when you get into specialised catering, such as Kosher catering). If only you saw what goes into preparing the food for your wedding, it would be enough of a reason not to get married.
So now, I have to decide what to do for a job when this externship is over. Who knows where I'll wind up. It could be something culinary related, it could be back in the IT game, or it could be something completely new and different. There has to be something more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good looking. :-)
As I'm having these thoughts, this weblog should also evolve accordingly. I'm obviously not in school anymore, so I'm trying to think of a new direction for this site. Rest assured that there will be culinary postings, although it may just be my own gourmet tendencies, and not something restaurant or catering related. More to come on that soon!
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Comments (3)
You had to prepare school lunches? Haha.
Maybe you can do IT AND cooking. My sister is big into baking and was always bringing in samples of stuff into the computer software company she worked at. They liked her food so much, the started paying her once a month to bake something and bring it in.
Posted by Random Variable | March 25, 2006 6:16 AM
Posted on March 25, 2006 06:16
To be honest, that's really the direction I think I'm going to wind up heading in. I'll start some sort of culinary thing on the side (personal chefing, selling sauces, etc.) and if it gets big enough then I'll move into that full time...
Posted by The Good Rabbi | March 25, 2006 12:45 PM
Posted on March 25, 2006 12:45
Sounds like you've still got your head screwed on...even after mashing 800 lbs. of potatoes (was that by hand?). Good luck on your future endeavors...we're rooting for ya.
Posted by Yogi | March 25, 2006 7:03 PM
Posted on March 25, 2006 19:03