TracyFood

Monkey Monday: battle scar edition 23 July 2007 6:33 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,monkeys,Morning Glory,restaurants,work , trackback

I cut myself at work today. Not badly, or so I decided after more than an hour in the waiting room at urgent care, when I went to the bathroom and washed my hands and replaced my wet bandage with a new one from the triage nurse and concluded that I didn’t need stitches after all. My machismo had kicked back in, for one thing, and for another I was really hungry and since changing the bandage didn’t restart the bleeding I decided my lightheadedness was probably due more to the fact that I hadn’t eaten for hours rather than the shock or pain of what is still a nasty enough cut that I’m glad I got to leave work early today.

The cut in question is on the index finger of my left hand, and it happened like this:

Some very special customer was too good for the side of glory fries and tantric mushroom gravy that usually comes with the Happy Morning sandwich (a split biscuit topped with tofu sour cream, spinach, tomato, a soysage patty on one side, and your choice of a tofu patty or scrambled egg and cheese on the other). No, this very special customer wanted an over-easy egg instead of scrambled, and a side salad instead of potatoes, and I had to go all the way to the fridge in the back room for their precious lettuce, and I was grumpy about it, and trying too hard to work too fast, and my knife slipped. Dammit.

Then, with three tickets hanging in my window and more on the way, I got to flail around the kitchen trying to tape myself up, turning off stove burners and opening waffle irons so they wouldn’t scorch their contents, going to the back room AGAIN because we were out of paper towels, and soaking not one but two bandages with water and blood before I finally got the wound cleaned and hidden away under a too-big glove that made it really hard to use my left hand. Yeah, that kind of sucked.

However, it sucked far less than other times I’ve hurt myself working in kitchens. For one thing, I was able to call my boss to say that I’d cut myself and explain that I probably wouldn’t get the day’s prep chores done, and this was absolutely the right thing to do. For another, I didn’t have to take petty cash out of the register and leave the restaurant to go restock the first aid kit because I’d used up all the med tape (this actually happened to me once, and that time I did need stitches but had to keep working for another four or five hours before I could leave to get them). Also, I did not have to finish my shift today — even though I’d told Gail I probably didn’t need stitches, she called Beth and got her to come in and help me out and send me off to urgent care, even if in the end my hunger and macho won out over my need or want for medical attention. Finally, I do not have to work tomorrow. Now that I am home and showered and having a nice cup of tea and a sit-down (with biscuits!) I feel pretty lucky despite my hurt hand, but I maintain more than ever that there is a special hell for people who cannot order food as it is described on a restaurant menu, without making fussy changes to prove just what beautiful and unique snowflakes they are.

Dear readers, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, restaurants have menus for a reason: so we don’t have to look at a list of ingredients and make stuff up at a time when we’re out to relax and have food brought to us instead of cooking it for ourselves. The food you order when you go out to eat can literally involve blood and tears as well as sweat (and there’s plenty of that last one here these days as Eugene seems to be trying to impersonate the hot and humid summers of my New Jersey childhood, only without the fricken thunderstorms to make all the mugginess worth it). So be kind, or at least don’t be a jackass. Whenever possible, order from the menu you have, not from the menu you wish you had. And tip your servers well or be destroyed.

This week on TracyFood I’ll be writing about restaurants, because after this weekend the above little rantlet is unfortunately not the only advice I feel inspired to give. Because I feel like this post is maybe a little mistitled, I may write some more about my various and sundry cooking scars, or maybe something about the comedy gold way cooks bond with kitchen horror stories of injuries and more. I’ll try to lighten things up with some happy restaurant-themed stories too, reviews and the like (I did just bike and eat my way around the IJsselmeer only last month, after all), and if I’m feeling very cunning, maybe I’ll manage to finish another general piece like last month’s kiddie meal rant, perhaps something on the differences between restaurant and home cooking. Since I actually have more than one day off in a row this week, I may actually have time for all this writing, as well as reading the new Harry Potter, gardening (cherry tomatoes! woo!) and maybe finally catching Ratatouille…

Linley

Have you read Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain? He tells very interesting stories about what goes on in restaurant kitchens, including some about injuries. It’s funny and terrifying.

And since I’m commenting, I have two questions that you may be able to help with:

1. Other than make banana bread, what would you suggest that people do with overripe bananas? Andy and I went through a period of buying more fruit than we could reasonably eat in a week, and we ended up with twelve mushy bananas in the freezer. We used eight of them in banana bread, and I’d love something else to do with the rest.

2. How do you make homemade refried beans that do not have hard bits of not-fully-cooked bean in them? I’ve cooked dried beans for hours on end and still failed to obtain the smooth consistency that I love in restaurant refried beans.
http://www.tracyfood.com Tracy

Hi Linley! I have not read Kitchen Confidential or anything else written by Anthony Bourdain, but I’ve read enough interviews with the man to have a pretty good feel for his schtick. In particular, see here and here on Salon for examples (you can use this site pass to cheat past the ads if you want). While I have no doubt that Bourdain can cook circles around me, and I respect many of his opinions, I admit this grudgingly, because he’s such an asshole. Or at least, that’s his public persona — like I said before, a schtick — and it seems to sell books. Bully for him; I don’t have to buy them. (I feel the same way about Michael Moore — I agree with some of what he has to say, but not with the way he has of saying it, and so I mostly just try to move on with my life without letting the cognitive dissonance get me too pissed off.) Now Marco Pierre White, his memoir I might check out one of these days, because if that interview I just linked there is any indicator, he has a lot of good things to say about the people who work in restaurants and the relationships between restaurant crew and the people they work for and with, including customers. This sentence is a placeholder, a reminder to me to write something about how these guys are all chefs and I’m just a cook, nowhere near a restaurant of my own or Michelin stars or any of that, but maybe some other time when my thoughts on that subject are well-formed enough to be well-written.

Bananas are a problem food for me, no doubt about it, but I seem to be craving them lately — or at least, I’ve noticed that whenever I put them on anything at work, I seem to save myself a few slices. I blame the heat, making me all desperate for electrolytes (mmm, potassium). I’m not coming up with any clever suggestions off the top of my head, but I’ll give it a think.

I like refried beans with a little bit of chunkiness to them, but not-fully-cooked beans are, indeed, unpleasantly crunchy. I’ll pay attention to my technique next time I make them, and write a report.

Thanks for commenting!
dushenka

if you cook the beans for 4+ hours and then put them in the blender/food processor, they are smooth