Mike, the Prep Cook
As Gina wrote, yesterday was “Meals for a Month” time again, when she and I make 15 different meals to feed us for a month. This month went better than last time, but then we only make them for us not for Gina’s sister and her husband. Half as many meals makes a difference.
When we do this, I’m the prep cook — I chop all the onions, garlic, green pepper, etc. for all the recipes before we get started. It can be a lot of work, but it’s well-worth having all the veggies done before the assembly starts (Gina is the assembler, in case you didn’t figure that out). As I’m chopping up five cups of onions, I was thinking about the book Heat: An Amateur\’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany[1] where they have 2-4 people work all day doing this, preparing the meat, etc for all the night’s work. It grueling, usually you aren’t paid (especially if you just graduated from cooking school!) This is where the term “kitchen slave” from the title comes in. Of course, I only did five cups of onion — they might do twenty to thirty. And each piece has to be the same size. I wasn’t that careful.
I love to cook, but I wouldn’t enjoy being a kitchen slave in a restaurant. And neither do the cooking school graduates. However, they come out of cooking school like I came out with a computer science degree — both now have enough knowledge to start learning how to work in the field. In other words, we’ve learned how to learn — but we haven’t learned much yet. And I’m not a master chef in either field.
[1] Real review coming later. The short, three-word review: It’s very good.