hep-A, fractions, hot pots and a whole lot of brunoise
this past week i wasn't in the kitchen at all. it was my stocking & pot washing rotation. really, it wasn't that bad - mostly because i bonded with another classmate...without jenny, the entire week would have been much longer, and much less amusing.
the stocking of pots is kind of fun. you get to walk around the kitchen and put clean things away. it's kind of zen - doesn't take much skill to stack newly clean things on top of already clean ones. you also get to organize things to some extent, which is satisfying. those first 2 days a woman named jennifer was unloading the dishwasher. she's not a student, and she's somehow not all there, but her hands are made of asbestos - that woman can handle molten steel without a flinch. unfortunately, she also has a chronically runny nose, which disturbed everyone else in the room - clean dishes plus dirty nose...what would cynthia (sanitation instructor) say? the nose was bad enough, but at the end of day 2 i came into the dish ring to see not only the contents of her nose, but also a pickle, clutched firmly in her left hand. why that pickle put me over the edge i can't say, but it was really the final straw. luckily for us all, she was not in thursday or friday.
pot washing (yesterday and thursday) is the gross job. yesterday must have been very hectic because there were not only tons of pots, but also lots of burned on food. one pot was totally carbonized. cindy (duchess of the dishroom, supplies and food ordering) gave me some kind of toxic cleaner to get the stuff off. hard to know just how to feel about that. thursday there was no hot water in our 1st Quarter kitchen, so at the end of the day jenny and i were lugging our 30 QT stock pot (ringed with a fresh, thick layer of chicken fat) down to the ring to clean it. she came in yesterday with quite a memento...a constellation of fat across her shirt, happily baked on from the dryer. mark my words - it will be all the rage in 3rd quarter.
last week was all about knife skills. lots of small dice and brunoise. i think my cuts are good, but definitely not fast enough. next week i'll be in the 2nd quarter kitchen, assisting. hopefully i'll get a chance to improve my speed and maintain some precision. it was hard to be out of the kitchen for a whole week. jenny and i came back into the room after 4 hours of grossness to see our fellow students breaking down chickens. we felt bitterly cheated. i'm sure we'll get our chance too, but at the time, it was pretty hard not to indulge in a little self-pity.
i got a hepatitis-A shot on wednesday. seemed like a good idea. the oddest part was the release form. they ask you a bunch of questions designed - i guess - to make sure you haven't had any reactions in the past from vaccines. they asked things such as - after a shot have you ever experienced the following: dry mouth, extreme soreness, shortness of breath, convulsions (whoa, what?) seizures, (um...no - is this a concern?) and the best - high pitched crying. wtf?? spontaneous high pitched crying sounds comically terrifying. fortunately - my crying has remained at normal timbre.
personality-wise, my class is very interesting. there are several very young people, some much older than i am, and some i haven't spent much time with yet since we've all been on different shifts. there is definitely some fodder for drama - but since it seems likely that at some point people from class could read this, i won't go into any gossip. suffice it to say that there's no one i really dislike, there are a couple of total nut jobs, and it will be really interesting to see how all the psychology works out. i love not being super young...juanita and i were talking about how nice it is to be able to keep emotional distance. it's so striking for me because i've always struggled with it. not that i've been terrifically challenged yet, but so far - it's been fairly easy to keep from feeling overly dumb/attacked/lesser etc - the usual. i probably ask too many questions, and i probably participate too much...but whatever. i made my chef laugh yesterday. i brought in an article about heirloom turkeys and jenny, chef, juanita and i were all talking about factory farming. he was telling us that commercial turkeys have been so genetically modified that they can't even reproduce naturally. how gross is that? i made some comment about them all being bred to be stacked and he cracked up.
math rocks. my professor wrote "terrific" on my homework - i'm such a math dork! i can't believe i'm actually taking the class, but it's fun - my math ego hasn't been stroked since 3rd grade - which, actually, is about the level of math we're working at right now. i'll take it.
so that's the week in review. 6am comes very early ever day, but it's not nearly the struggle to get up that it used to be for work. it's wild to wake up every day and feel promise. i hope it stays that way.
the stocking of pots is kind of fun. you get to walk around the kitchen and put clean things away. it's kind of zen - doesn't take much skill to stack newly clean things on top of already clean ones. you also get to organize things to some extent, which is satisfying. those first 2 days a woman named jennifer was unloading the dishwasher. she's not a student, and she's somehow not all there, but her hands are made of asbestos - that woman can handle molten steel without a flinch. unfortunately, she also has a chronically runny nose, which disturbed everyone else in the room - clean dishes plus dirty nose...what would cynthia (sanitation instructor) say? the nose was bad enough, but at the end of day 2 i came into the dish ring to see not only the contents of her nose, but also a pickle, clutched firmly in her left hand. why that pickle put me over the edge i can't say, but it was really the final straw. luckily for us all, she was not in thursday or friday.
pot washing (yesterday and thursday) is the gross job. yesterday must have been very hectic because there were not only tons of pots, but also lots of burned on food. one pot was totally carbonized. cindy (duchess of the dishroom, supplies and food ordering) gave me some kind of toxic cleaner to get the stuff off. hard to know just how to feel about that. thursday there was no hot water in our 1st Quarter kitchen, so at the end of the day jenny and i were lugging our 30 QT stock pot (ringed with a fresh, thick layer of chicken fat) down to the ring to clean it. she came in yesterday with quite a memento...a constellation of fat across her shirt, happily baked on from the dryer. mark my words - it will be all the rage in 3rd quarter.
last week was all about knife skills. lots of small dice and brunoise. i think my cuts are good, but definitely not fast enough. next week i'll be in the 2nd quarter kitchen, assisting. hopefully i'll get a chance to improve my speed and maintain some precision. it was hard to be out of the kitchen for a whole week. jenny and i came back into the room after 4 hours of grossness to see our fellow students breaking down chickens. we felt bitterly cheated. i'm sure we'll get our chance too, but at the time, it was pretty hard not to indulge in a little self-pity.
i got a hepatitis-A shot on wednesday. seemed like a good idea. the oddest part was the release form. they ask you a bunch of questions designed - i guess - to make sure you haven't had any reactions in the past from vaccines. they asked things such as - after a shot have you ever experienced the following: dry mouth, extreme soreness, shortness of breath, convulsions (whoa, what?) seizures, (um...no - is this a concern?) and the best - high pitched crying. wtf?? spontaneous high pitched crying sounds comically terrifying. fortunately - my crying has remained at normal timbre.
personality-wise, my class is very interesting. there are several very young people, some much older than i am, and some i haven't spent much time with yet since we've all been on different shifts. there is definitely some fodder for drama - but since it seems likely that at some point people from class could read this, i won't go into any gossip. suffice it to say that there's no one i really dislike, there are a couple of total nut jobs, and it will be really interesting to see how all the psychology works out. i love not being super young...juanita and i were talking about how nice it is to be able to keep emotional distance. it's so striking for me because i've always struggled with it. not that i've been terrifically challenged yet, but so far - it's been fairly easy to keep from feeling overly dumb/attacked/lesser etc - the usual. i probably ask too many questions, and i probably participate too much...but whatever. i made my chef laugh yesterday. i brought in an article about heirloom turkeys and jenny, chef, juanita and i were all talking about factory farming. he was telling us that commercial turkeys have been so genetically modified that they can't even reproduce naturally. how gross is that? i made some comment about them all being bred to be stacked and he cracked up.
math rocks. my professor wrote "terrific" on my homework - i'm such a math dork! i can't believe i'm actually taking the class, but it's fun - my math ego hasn't been stroked since 3rd grade - which, actually, is about the level of math we're working at right now. i'll take it.
so that's the week in review. 6am comes very early ever day, but it's not nearly the struggle to get up that it used to be for work. it's wild to wake up every day and feel promise. i hope it stays that way.
posted by the pieces @ 12:21 PM
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