It’s Better to Regret Something You Did, Than Something You Didn’t Do.
 Pure Heaven. |
A thought occurred to me today as I made breakfast for myself and the wife.
Every morning in heaven, you are served hot, sunny-side-up fried eggs cooked in fresh bacon fat. Runny yolks, buttered toast, perfectly seasoned.
Every morning in hell you get cold scrambled eggs cooked in butter.
This is one of those oddly true stories that makes no sense to me, but all the same results in an unique opportunity for you, my loyal readers.
So my wife and I were going through piles of old papers and so forth that had collected over the past few months when my wife said to me, “Honey, is this a paycheck you forgot to deposit?…” At first, I didn’t even think that was possible. I had set up direct deposit with Rustico as early as I could so as to avoid mistakes like that. By my reckoning, I had only ever received one actual paycheck from Rustico, the rest had gone straight to my bank.
With great skepticism I took the paper from my wife, and much to my chagrin, there in my hand was my first paycheck from Rustico. It was for the first half-pay-period I worked for, and amounted to almost exactly $500. I had lost it in the shuffle, and forgotten all about it.
For those of you who are keepeing score at home, I started working at Rustico back in May of 2007, so this is money I had long since not accounted for. Additionally, the “Void after 120 days” on the check was staring me in the face as if to say “Way to go fuck-nut.”
So with hat in hand, I called up the company’s paycheck manager and asked her if I could get a new check cut to replace this old one. She said she couldn’t get to it right away since I happened to call her on pay day for all the other people in the company, and I told her that was fine. Hell, if it took her another month to get me the check, that would be cool - it’s not like I deserved speedy service for a mistake that was so bone-headed.
 Yup, this is me. At least for now… |
But thanks to the kindness of our payroll manager, and perhaps a little influence of the holiday season, a week later I was handed my fresh new copy of my original paycheck from Rustico. Totalling exactly $499.44, this is money that at first I was glad to have back, but on the other hand I realized was money that was no different than a twenty I may have mysteriously discovered in my chef’s pants on laundry day. This is “found money”. I can really do with it whatever I please.
So to reward you, my loyal readers, for sticking with me through all this time (and through this article) I hereby present this poll to you of ideas that have come through my head of what to do with this money. Vote for your favorite, and I will do with this money what you all think is the best option.
Update:These were the results of the first round of voting. I have made a run-off vote for the top four options. Be sure to vote there!
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| Save it! This is money to help fund your future restaurant! |  24% |
27 | |
| Buy $500 worth of lottery tickets. | 5% |
6 | |
| Spend the money on your wife as a reward for sticking by you. | 16% |
18 | |
| Go out to an amazing meal at a fabulous restaurant you normally cannot afford. | 15% |
17 | |
| Get a $500 bottle of wine, and enjoy it with friends and a fabulous meal you prepare. | 4% |
5 | |
| Buy a plane ticket to visit some friends you have not seen in a long time. | 5% |
6 | |
| Give the money to charity. | 4% |
5 | |
| Buy yourself a new set of top-notch knives. | 26% |
29 | |
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| 113 votes total | |||
I’m not kidding here, I have every intention of doing what you all tell me to do with the money. That being said, there are several options here, and I am sure some of you will have other ideas for what I should do that you will tell me about. So I may have to have a run-off vote at a later time to really narrow it down if there is not a clear winner here this first time around.
Let me know what to do, and I’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes!
All of the sous chefs in a kitchen are in constant competition to prove themselves to the head chef. It’s like a bunch of children competing for their parents’ love, and in that way it is admittedly kinda dysfunctional. It almost seems that each one of us wants to appear to be the brightest, or have the best skills or ideas so we can be the main #2 guy in the kitchen. It’s not like such a position would really mean much of anything in the long run, but it is a way we can all compete I guess to make ourselves better at what we do.
 That’s what I’m talkin’ about baby! |
With the upcoming holiday party at our restaurant, chef had me bring in a whole pig so he could cook it for the crowd that’ll be on hand tomorrow night. He took the meat off the bones, holding the body of the pig all in one piece so he could stuff it with rice and olives and so forth. He then had Andrew (one of the other sous chefs) cook the stuffing, but Andrew over-cooked it. It was perfectly done rice, but with it being done all the way, it was useless as a stuffing. (The now fully-cooked rice would be over-cooked once the pig was done…)
So we needed ideas of what to do next. The conversation went as follows:
Me: Well, couldn’t you just cook the pig alone, and then when it is most of the way done you stuff…
Chef: No, I think I am just going to spit-roast it.
Andrew: Well, you could run that spit (narrow spit) through it and cook it on that over the wood fire.
Chef: but that spit would just spin inside the pig, it wouldn’t turn.
Me: You could use the rib basket spit we have upstairs. It is wide enough to spread the pig out, and it would roast evenly on all sides.
Chef: That’s a better idea, but how does it come though the mouth?
Me: There is a narrow end where the spit enters the rotisserie mechanism, just feed that through, and you’d be fine.
Chef: Yeah, but the final product would then collapse since it has no internal bones anymore…
Me: Well, I can’t help with that, but you could serve it “pig pickin’” style, where you cut the lower jaw in half after it roasts and then serve it butterflied.
Chef: Yeah, but I wanted to serve a “whole pig”, ya know? I think I’m just going to put the carcass back in and roast it like that so I can present it, and serve the rice on the side.
So at least I’d come up with a bunch of ideas, and I had enjoyed the back-and-forth of our idea exchange, even if he shot all of my ideas down. At least I had showed him that I could think of different ways to cook the pig, and provide him with possible solutions to his dilemma.
I then went over to expo the line for a little bit as business was picking up, and all of the sudden chef comes up behind me the exchange is as follows (I swear I’m not making this up):
Chef: Hey Matt, Wilkin (one of our servers) came up with the solution! We just cook the pig most of the way, and then we stuff it when it is almost done! Problem solved!
Me: (In disbelief) Umm chef.. that’s exactly what I sa…
Chef (turning to Wilkin): Great idea Wilkin! Thanks!
(Chef turns back to me noting I was about to say something.)
Me: (Shaking head) Fire pepperoni pizza and two burgers medium!
It’s a long, tough battle when you’re fighting to be taken seriously. Someday I’ll get there. Or maybe I just need my own place….
Sure, I cook a lot in my kitchen at work, but people are always wondering if I still cook at home. I have answered before, that indeed I do, and I feel like this might be an example of what I do on my “own time” in my kitchen.
It all began with some friends of mine watching a Duke basketball game (for those of you who forget, I am indeed a Blue Devil) when one of my friends, Michelle, mentioned she was going home over Thanksgiving, and would be getting some venison from her dad. She asked me if I had any ideas what she should do with it. My response was immediate:
 So majestic. So beautiful. So delicious. |
“Give it to me, and let me cook it for you!”
I love venison, but I get so few chances to work with it. It is so lean that it is actually quite hard to work with, but when it is done right, it is succulent, full of flavor and just downright heavenly. Michelle agreed, and soon she was back with some steaks and a piece of saddle meat.
So I put together a full late-fall menu for this venison, and allow me to share with you here:
Oh yeah, and did I mention I made Panna Cotta with Madagascar vanilla, black mission figs and raspberry-port sauce for dessert?
Yeah, it was a kick-ass meal, and helped to satiate my creative side for at least a little longer…
I had dinner reservations this past Saturday with some good friends from college, and I knew that since Saturday nights usually get started fast and furious, I would have to make the reservations for later in the evening. I booked us a table at Corduroy for 8:30 which I figured would be plenty of time to knock off work, come home, get changed and so forth.
 Ahhh paperwork… the sexiest part of any kitchen career. |
With the Saturday night prep work almost complete, I went into the office to finish off my paperwork. It went much more quickly than usual as there were no scheduling irregularities, and the check lists we use in the restaurant needed only the most minor of modifications. In short, it was 6:30, and I was looking like I could head on out the door.
I walked up to chef who was working the pizza ovens and asked him if there was anything he needed. He asked me to prep a few ingredients, which took no time at all. When I came back to him with the prep work done, he asked me about the latest batch of apple cider vinaigrette.
“Who made this batch?” he asked.
“I did,” I responded.
“Well, it’s terrible. Just terrible. No flavor, no bite, just awful. Did you follow the recipe?”
“To the letter chef.”
“Well, then I think I need to rework it.”
 Yes, there are more ingredients in the vinaigrette than this… |
The problem here was not that I felt bad about making a bad vinaigrette - I had indeed followed the recipe - but rather that we had about 3 gallons of it, which was kinda wasteful if it was unusable. However, I remembered that I had more base for the vinaigrette in the back, so I began to mix the base in with some more cider vinegar, and (at chef’s suggestion) more sugar as well.
While I was working on this, Andrew - another sous chef, who was working sauté - said he was urgently low on our porcini caps appetizer. I set aside the obvious question of why he had not made it over the course of the day, and helped Augustine, one of our prep chefs, work on putting it together. The first step of this dish is lots and lots of chopping, so I gave him what he needed to chop, and had him go to town on it. I figured I would come back and help him finish it off when I was done with the vinaigrette and the sherry butter (another part of the porcini caps dish).
So now I was repairing a vinaigrette, building a compound butter and overseeing the building of a mushroom dish. No problem, I figured this would all be done within a half hour. I was tasting how the vinaigrette was coming along when all of the sudden from the line I hear Andrew say, “Uh oh… that’s not good…”
 I could just make out some of the guys on the line through the smoke… |
I turn around and see, well, not much. There was too much smoke in between myself and the cooks on the line to see much of anything. The hood had stopped working. I could see there was electricity coming to the system as the lights were on, but I wanted to be sure, so I jumped to the breaker boxes just to see if we had popped a circuit. Nope, all the circuits were fine. As the kitchen continued to fill up with smoke - just as the Saturday night service was beginning to build - it was apparent that the belt on the fan had broken. We had to fix it ourselves, and fast. And that meant climbing up the ladder to the roof to fix it right away. Chef grabbed some spare belts and a flashlight, then asked me to grab some channel locks and a flathead screwdriver and meet him on the roof.
For those of you who don’t know me there are two things in this world I generally don’t like:
 What the ladder to the roof looks like to those of us who hate ladders… |
This task was not something I was looking forward to, but it was do or die at this moment, so I sucked it up and flew up the roof (which was mercifully flat) and helped chef change the belt. I ran back down, flipped the switch on the hood, and within seconds, the kitchen was clear of smoke. Those things are much more powerful than I thought.
Tools put away, I was now able to help Augustine finish up the mushroom appetizer as he rolled the compound butter I had made. I then took a sample of the repaired vinaigrette to chef who nodded his head in approval. (Vinaigrette saved!) I cleaned up my station, put away the extra vinaigrette and delivered the mushrooms to Andrew. With a quick sigh of relief as the adrenaline was now just wearing off, I took a look at my watch realizing that with everything that had just transpired, I was probably now woefully late for dinner.
It was 7:00. This entire mess of events had transpired in just half an hour.
Chef came up to me at that moment and said, “Thanks for your help, get on out of here.”
As with all orders from him, I did what I was told immediately.
Wow, so little writing as of late. I know my fans are disappointed - all 12 of you - so allow me to bring you up to speed on some of the things that have been going on, and perhaps this will lead me back into the world of regular posting once again.
 Disney World. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a place I would less like to be. |
So the week that I started to slack off was really a “hell week” for me. The reason? Chef and one of the sous chefs took off for a special event at Disney World. I have now forgotten what the event was, but it went well for them, so that was great. But for myself and the one other sous chef who were left at the restaurant, we ended up with some seriously long shifts. I ended up pulling 5 double shifts in a row over the course of the week, while the other sous chef ended up working eight straight days. It was an experiment in both endurance and competency. And I would like to say that the two of us passed with flying colors.
While on the one hand, it was a rough and grueling experience to run a kitchen of that size with so many fewer people than we were used to, on the other hand it was a great experience for the two of us to see what it would be like when we struck out on our own. That day is of course coming for the both of us someday, and it is good to see that we can make it work when we have to.
That being said, I am NOT ready for this yet. I still have so much to learn. Sure, the impatience grows in me if only because I am so much older than everyone else starting out in this profession, but I know my limitations, and being an executive chef is one of them. For now.
 The George Washington Memorial Masonic Temple in Alexandria. As undeniably phallic as the other Washington Monument. |
I also was given the opportunity to work a catering event for Rustico at the local Masonic Temple. The George Washington Memorial Masonic Temple is something I had always wanted to go inside, but alas, I am not, nor do I ever think I will be, a Mason. But this was a charity event for kids that they were holding, and so we were allowed to bring some of our beers and food and share them with the people there. Needless to say, we blew everyone away. It really was amazing how much better our food was than most of the other presenters (everyone who came up to us mentioned that), and it gave me a real sense of pride in the quality of the work we are doing at Rustico. If I’m ever going to be a great chef, I’d better be at a great restaurant to learn how to become one.
For the record, the inside of the temple… not so interesting.
The root beer is currently no longer for sale at Rustico. I wasn’t getting much support from chef on the product, and he didn’t like the 16 oz size - he wanted it to come down to 12 oz. I have had trouble finding 12 oz stopper bottles for this project, and I was upset at the short shelf-life of the root beer myself. So chef let me take home the stopper bottles myself, and now I am going to work on the recipe in my own spare time. Should be fun. I think one of the tricks will be to use brewer’s yeast as the slower reaction time will allow the root beer to live longer in the bottle. We shall see.
 Wow, I went almost a year and a half with this blog without having to post a photo of this nasty stuff. |
And speaking of inventions of mine that are coming off the menu, it appears that figs are now about to go out of season, so it is time to phase out the autumn pizza and think up a winter pizza. Though I do want to say that on some recent days, the autumn pizza has made it to the #2 slot in sales! Yes, I am very happy about that. But as for a winter pie?… I’m still kinda stuck, though I think it may have to involve broccoli. For those of you who don’t know me, that is one of my least favorite foods, but is a quintessential winter vegetable.
Any suggestions?
So with Christmas coming up at an unbelievably rapid rate, I’m now working hard to make sure all the schedules in the restaurant are working out as people need time off here and there for the festivities with their families. It’s a rough job, but again good experience. I myself get no extra time off for the holidays this year - I will be working like I always do. I think the only real unknown for me this Christmas will be: exactly how MANY copies of the Ratatouille DVD will I be receiving from friends and family? 
P.S. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’ll get none as everyone will think that everyone else is getting me a copy….
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