Final Friday

With this being my last week of work at Restaurant Eugene, it was a week of "lasts" but mainly just things like "last monday" or "last tuesday" and so on.  Today, however, was a day of "last time I'll see you" things.  But, I'll get to all that later.

First thing I did when I got into work today was to start draining the okra from the day before.  For the okra, I had to drain all the pickling liquid, then let the okra soak in ice water for three hours, and finally rinse them again before they were ready to be jarred.  Because this took so long and because we had not mised out everything else for the okra, we had to stop after we rinsed the okra and it will be my task to jar and process the okra tomorrow.

Once I got the okra drained and soaking in the ice water, I got the ketchup from yesterday and started to bring it to a boil with the rest of the ingredients so that we could finish the ketchup today.

Finished Ketchup 

Now that I had everything from yesterday going, I could get started on the list that Woody left for me.  Tomorrow, Woody will be working an event and he left lists of things that he needs prepped for the event.  On my list was to crisp 200 pieces of bacon, slice 10 pounds of tomatoes, and shred 10 heads of lettuce.  First thing I started on was the bacon because that would take the longest.

As I was slicing the bacon on the industrial slicer, one of the restaurant office girls approached me and asked if I had time to sit down for an interview for the Restaurant Eugene blog.  I told her that I would love to and that I would be finished in a few minutes.

When I got to a good stopping point with the bacon, I sat down to the interview.  From what I understand, they wanted to do a blog post about me and my internship since it was almost over.  Kinda just get an idea of how I'm liking the internship and what I'll take away from it and things like that.  There were some pretty easy questions like, "You're a rising senior at Clemson, right?" and "How did you end up at Restaurant Eugene?"  Then there were more difficult questions like, "What are your plans for after the internship and after graduation?" and "What will you take away from the internship?"  I say these are difficult questions not because they were hard to answer, but because there was so much involved with the answers.  All in all, I think the interview went well and I can't wait to read the blog post.  I visited Restaurant Eugene's blog earlier and didn't see a new post, but hopefully it'll be up soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

After the interview, I got back to makin' bacon.  Before long, though, I had sliced and baked more than the required 200 pieces of bacon and could officially cross that off my list.  On to the next one.

By now, the okra had soaked for the required three hours, so I drained them again, gave them a final rinse, and drained them one final time.  Now the okra is finally ready to be jarred, but that won't take place until tomorrow.

Next on my list was to shred the lettuce.  I had to wait a little bit because we didn't have the lettuce until it was delivered about half way through the day, but we had it now, so I could get to shredding it.  Shredding the lettuce was pretty easy since I used the industrial slicer, but it was really because the industrial slicer has an automatic setting.  While shredding the lettuce was easy, it was also messy.  There was shredded lettuce everywhere which meant a fairly extensive clean up.

Two items down, one item to go.  Before I could get started on my last list item, though, Ryan asked me to jar and process the bloody mary mix that he had been making that day because he had to leave a little bit early.  This didn't take too terribly long and since the jars have to process for 30 minutes, that gave me time to work on the my last list item, slicing tomatoes.

Once I finished with the bloody mary mix and the tomatoes, it was past time for me to leave and this meant saying goodbye to the people that would not be at work tomorrow (Ryan, Jorje, and Billy).  I haven't talked about Jorje (one of the dishwashers) or Billy (one of the pastry chefs) very much but they were both very helpful whenever I needed anything.  I've talked about Ryan a lot because we worked similar hours and worked on a lot of the same projects.  I'm going to miss joking around with Ryan to pass the time during the mornings when no one else is around.  As odd as it was to think that I won't be seeing these three people that I've been with almost every day for two and a half months, it's going to be even more odd tomorrow when I have to say goodbye to everyone else.

Till next time,

Ben

410 hours completed