1. After spending a part of Sunday and much of the day Monday preparing and cooking food for my contributions to Monday's family dinner, I was wiped out today. I didn't think my body was very tired. Nothing I did in the kitchen taxed me physically.
I was mentally fatigued. Preparing four different styles of chicken wings, baking one batch and frying the rest, and figuring out how to arrange the food I fixed and that Carol and Molly contributed into a convenient buffet and figuring out what dishware to use required concentration, a bit of imagination, and some calculation.
Back in the olden days when I taught writing classes, I organized some of my sections around the question of work and working and the course in American Working Class Literature & Composition that Margaret and I taught as a team focused all the time on work, working conditions, the demands of work, and the nature of many jobs themselves.
Many of the students in these courses either were currently working in the present or had worked in the past in bars, pubs, taprooms, cafes, and restaurants. So did Margaret. Without self-pity, but in plain truthful stories and with clear minded analysis, these students wrote about the mental demands of their jobs, the focus required, the remembering, the reading of customers, especially the grabbers and pinchers, and the fielding of requests, demands, and complaints.
These food service jobs required intelligence, savvy, suppressing feelings, and stamina.
It was draining.
So, here I was, drained and I didn't have that much to keep track of or a single difficult person to deal with who was eating the food I prepared.
I thought a lot, as I rested, about Billy McCallum, the owner and chef at Billy Mac's, one of my spiritual centers when I lived in Eugene. I thought about his dedication to preparing all his menu offerings, ranging from salads to soups to steaks to sandwiches to pasta dishes to fish to desserts, from scratch. I sat here and thought about all the work Billy did to prepare for customers, before his bar and grill opened, and marveled at all the great food he and his other cooks prepared in a tight, narrow kitchen.
Eventually, physical health problems led to Bill Mac closing his establishment in 2021 and retiring.
But today, knowing Billy McCallum not only ran and cooked for his restaurant, but ran a catering business, too, and knowing how efficiently he cooked and plated food for his very busy restaurant -- on any given Thursday, the people I dined with on Thursdays at Bill Mac's took up anywhere from eight to fifteen seats at a table --, I thought how exhausted he must have been night after night after night.
And here I was. Ha! Exhausted -- and all I did was spend parts of two days fixing food for a small family dinner.
2. Yeah. I never told anyone I was thinking this, but when I retired, but was teaching on a very limited and part time basis, I thought from time to time that I might enjoy applying for a job doing food preparation for someone -- mostly chopping. A friend of mine in Eugene has a top-notch catering business and from time to time he would post that he needed food prep help in his kitchen.
His postings emphasized the requirement that the person doing this work need to be able to work fast.
That requirement moved me to put any thoughts I had about doing part time food prep work to rest.
I'm slow in all parts of my life, but especially in the kitchen. I don't trust myself to chop, cut, dice, mince, season, or do anything with food quickly. I have a wandering mind. I need to slow down in order to concentrate. I need to work slowly to keep everything straight if I'm doing multiple tasks at once in the kitchen.
My lack of alacrity is, oddly enough, one of the reasons I took a long hiatus from watching the cooking competition show Chopped.
Watching the competing chefs forced by the clock to work fast, run around the pantry, sweat, and often stress out made me stress out and I don't really enjoy the competition angle of Chopped that much.
But, this evening, with cooking on my mind, I opened up the Food Network app on the Vizio and watched three episodes of Chopped.
I endured my anxiety as I watched the competitors cut fast, prance around the pantry, dash to the ice cream machine, frantically shove things in and pull them out of the oven, drag meat grinders, food processors, blenders, and other appliances to their food station, and sweat. I almost vicariously passed out.
But, for me, while I think Chopped is kind of a gimmicky show because of the absurd combinations of foods the chefs have to work with after they open their baskets, I very much enjoy listening to the judges talk about cooking, especially when they praise competitors for having elevated the products they had to work with.
Most of all, I try to learn and remember what these judges say about the relationship between flavors and textures in the meals they judge.
I'm not very good at it, but I'm always trying to figure out contrasts in the food I prepare for family dinner or when I give out assignments.
So, Monday night, to me, the central food item of our dinner was the hot wings. Because these wings would be at least moderately spicy and because it's hot outside, I wanted to have cool (or cold) items to go along with the hot wings. That's why I assigned Carol to make a cold Mediterranean soup and why I made a cold Mediterranean tomato salad.
I wanted to contrast the hot wings and these cold sides.
I also needed to have wings available that weren't hot (or spicy).
At first, I thought I'd make teriyaki wings, but my taste buds' imagination didn't think the sweet, brown sugar-y, and soy sauce saltiness of teriyaki would pair well with the Mediterranean sides. I liked the contrast between the hot wings and terriyaki wings, but I decided to make Mediterranean flavors a kind of flavor thread that would be present in the not hot wings and that would contrast with the hot wings.
So, I made lemon garlic wings and Mediterraneans wings (whose flavors may have been too much like the soup and salad).
I listened intently to the judges critique the flavors -- what complimented what and what complemented what -- where were their consistent flavor themes, where were there contrasts that balanced each other out.
And what did the judges have to say about similar and contrasting textures? Was there a pleasing variety of textures in Monday's family dinner? I'm not sure.
3. Well, for four days this week, our area has joined the many other places in the USA under the siege of a heat wave (are we in a heat dome?). I can't be out in the heat and I'm very grateful that Debbie and I had a heating/cooling system installed in our house in the spring of '22.
I rested, worked puzzles, munched on the ten to twelve chicken pieces left over from Monday night, thought a lot about cooking, and watched Chopped until after 1 a.m.
I tried to make the most of staying indoors. Whatever this day lacked in excitement, I made up for it in comfort and the pleasure of living in my head, enjoying teaching memories, focusing on gratitude, and daydreaming about future days in the kitchen.
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