Yall may remember that storm we had in Atlanta on Wednesday the 15th. Well, apparently there was a microburst of wind that exceeded 90 miles per hour right on top of our house and it knocked down a tree in our neighbors back yard.
Luckily, there was very minimal damage. Upon seeing the tree in our carport, I thought that it landed right on top of my car. I thought that my car was crushed. But, the only damage suffered was a broken taillight (and apparently there is a fuse or something in the taillight that can pretty much short out the entire car, so it’s proving to be a lot more trouble than we first anticipated). Also, the tree pretty much fell in the best place possible, right on our driveway. It did hit the edge of the carport (the edge where we have the power and cable lines), so we weren’t completely unharmed, but very lucky nonetheless.
Besides not having power (which means on A/C), the worst part was that all four of our family’s cars were trapped in the carport. I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to work the next day, which wouldn’t be good because I had already missed days for being sick, and did not and could not afford to miss any more days of work. However, a family friend lent us on of their cars for the next day and I got a ride to work.
So, long story short, I haven’t posted anything in 9 days because we didn’t have power from that Wednesday (the 15th) until the next Tuesday (the 21st). Then, once we did get power, we didn’t have internet until this past Saturday (the 25th).
Unfortunately, I don’t remember everything as well as I do right when I get home from work (which is usually when I write my posts), so most of these will be shorter posts and highlights of things that I can remember. But I’ve still got LOTS to talk about, so lets get to it!
WEDNESDAY
First thing I did when I got to work was to label and store the jars of pickled green tomatoes from the day before. And that’s all I have to say about that (see, can’t really remember much).
Next, I peeled roasted beets, which is surprisingly easy and very messy to do. All that is required to peel roasted beets is to cut the ends off, and then the skin will practically slide right off the beet. Beets, however, are very juicy and very closely resemble the color of blood. That’s why it didn’t surprise me when Woody walked past and said, “Did you kill someone in that corner?”
David asked me to help him with a dish that he was making for family meal, which was roasted eggplant. My job was to press the excess water from the eggplant, baste the eggplant with olive oil, and place them in the pan so they could be roasted.
Once I was finished, David pulled out a HUGE 5 pound sack of peanuts and told me to shell them. Being from a baseball family, I have shelled many a peanut in my day, so I got right to it. However, it was still a 5 pound bag of peanuts and pretty much kept me occupied until I was supposed to leave and Gavin asked me for some help.
Gavin came to me and asked if what I was doing (shelling peanuts) was really important at the moment. I figured that I had a fairly large amount of peanuts shelled, so I told him that I could probably stop for the day. That’s when Gavin took me too the walk-in and pulled down one of our largest containers which was filled with smaller sacks of peanuts. Then Gavin said, “and you wanna know something? These peanuts are already shelled.”
Now knowing that I had been shelling peanuts for hours while we had tens of pounds of already shelled peanuts, I went to help Gavin with whatever it was that he needed my help with.
302 hours left
THURSDAY
The day after the tree fell.
I got a ride to work from my mom who was using our friend’s car for the day. Right as my mom was dropping me off, David was coming back from taking the compost bin to his truck. So, naturally, I introduced my mom to David and David to my mom. This also gave me an opening to tell David about what happened the night before. I told David that the reason my mom dropped me off was because of the tree. This lead to some conversation and storytelling on my part while we worked on our project for the day.
The project for the day was making blueberry jam. We had almost 8 pounds of blueberries to used for this jam which was pretty simple consisting of the blueberries, apple cider vinegar, sugar, fresh vanilla, lemon zest, and pectin.
While I was peeling potatoes and checking the jam, Jason called my name and asked, “Would you be able to work an event tonight? Rob was supposed to work it, but he had a family emergency.” I told him, “Well, I haven’t told you this yet, but a tree kinda fell on our house last night, so I have someone coming to pick me up at 6 today.” “Oh, okay. Well, I’ll see if David can do it.”
After about three minutes of peeling potatoes and thinking about it, I went back to Jason and told him that I could work the event. Jason said that he didn’t want to keep me from home since we had a lot going on there, but I told him that there’s not much that I can really do because of the tree and that I would just have to arrange to get picked up later. After finding out that Jason lives about 10 minutes from my house, he offered to give me a ride home after the event, so we were all set.
The event that I was working was a wine tasting at the H & F Bottle Shop (which I didn’t know existed until I was asked to work the event). The whole thing would be pretty simple; all I had to do was plate food to the tasting. Everything was already prepared, so all that was left to do was plate the food and a few last minute touches. There would be two rounds, one at 7:30 and one at 9:30.
I was to leave for the bottle shop after family meal, so I jarred and processed the jam
Turns out that David wasn’t joking about the chicken heads. When I got to family meal, almost all that was left were chicken heads and chicken feet. Fortunately, I found some pieces of chicken that didn’t have eyes or talons, which I snatched up before they were gone.
A little while later, David took me, the food (fried chicken, corn bread, and lady pea salad), and utensils that I would need for the event (cutting board, towels, etc.) down to the bottle shop for the event.
For those that don’t know, Holeman and Finch Public House is not only famous for their 10:00 burgers but they’re also famous for their impressive cocktails. This is where the H & F Bottle Shop comes in. The intended purpose for the bottle shop is to sell everything that you would need to make their amazing cocktails at home. However, at the moment, they can only sell wine, so they have wine tastings and feature food from Restaurant Eugene and Holeman and Finch.
When we arrived at the bottle shop, David got me all set up in the back, showed me how everything should look in the basket, and left me to it.
All the people at the H & F Bottle Shop are extremely nice and even more knowledgeable about the wines that they sell. Not knowing much about wine, I was interested to observe and listen to everything they were telling customers. But before long, it was time for the first round for the wine tasting and for me to get to work on plating the food.
It wasn’t until one of the employees asked what the salad was that I realized that “Lady Pea Salad” could easily be misunderstood as something else. I’m sure it gave some people a good laugh though.
Both wine tastings went off without a hitch and we had about half of the food leftover which was perfect because now the bottle shop employees and I got to snack on the delicious food. In appreciation, the bottle shop employees asked if I would like a small glass of wine. Since about all I know about wine is that they can be red or white, but I am interested to learn, I told them that they could pick whatever they wanted. I was a little nervous about what they would choose for me, but I am glad to say that they did not disappoint.
After a while, Woody came to pick me up and take me back to Restaurant Eugene. He asked about the event and I told him that everything went great and that I had a lot of fun. Woody then informed me that they were going to let me have that Saturday off since I worked 12 hours straight. I thanked him, but added that I can still work on Saturday if they wanted me to (trying to make up for my lost sick days).
When we got back to Restaurant Eugene everyone (including the line cooks) was cleaning the kitchen, so I grabbed a squeegee (which I am very familiar with from working in the Clemson creamery) and did my best to help.
289 hours left
FRIDAY
When I got to work after getting dropped off again (this time because my car was in the shop because of the taillight fuse that essentially shut down my car), I got to work on labeling the blueberry jam from the day before. David was eager to hear about last night’s event and about the status of our house. I told him all about both topics throughout the course of the day.
Usually when I take pictures for this blog, I try to be discreet about it (which the flash is not very good about), but David caught me taking a picture of a tasty tomato sandwich that he gave me.
While looking for a place to put the jars of blueberry jam, we realized that we did not have much storage space. To remedy this, we decided to take some items that we don’t use very often to the storage unit. This included a lot of heavy lifting on my part and moving items to David’s truck. As we were in route to the storage unit, David told me that after all that, the people up in the office want me to move all their heavy stuff for them too and that “They want your body”. This made me laugh.
Upon our return from the storage unit, Woody told me that he wanted me to make pickled eggs for an event that the bottle shop was hosting on Saturday (a wine tasting with a musical guest). Woody showed me how to use the oven to make perfect hardboiled eggs.
This is probably a good time to describe the magic ovens that we have at Restaurant Eugene. These ovens are amazing. Like most ovens, you can choose the temperature that you want and it comes with a timer. But that and the fact that it has a door that opens and closes are where the similarities end. These ovens are touch screen, and with these ovens you can choose between dry heat and steam heat which is pretty cool, but that’s not all. I haven’t gotten to play with they dry heat as much as with the steam heat, but with the steam heat, you also have the choice of what percent of steam you want. So cool.
All that is pretty cool, but this is where it gets magical. Instead of choosing the dry heat or steam heat, you can press the “chef hat” button. Once pressed, you can choose from many different options on the screen ranging from lamb to chicken to fish. But for me, I wanted the egg button. I pressed the egg on the screen and was presented with more options. Small, medium, or large egg? Soft, medium, or hard-boiled? Then a timer told me when the oven was ready and once the eggs were in, a timer told me when the eggs were done.
Once the timer went off, I took the eggs out and put them right into cold water so that I could peel them easier. Every single egg was perfectly hard-boiled. Magical.
I slipped all the eggs into a jar, poured the brine over them and I was finished.
280 hours left
SATURDAY
Like I said earlier, my only job for the day was to make candied bacon. I got dropped off a little early because I figured that if I got there earlier, I would have more space and would be finished and out of the way earlier. Woody got me all set up and explained the procedure to me. I had to thinly slice bacon on the industrial slicer,
Of course, I had to taste a couple pieces of the candied bacon to make sure they tasted all right and boy did they taste good. You could smell these things from a mile away, which I guess is true of anything with bacon. They tasted smoky from the bacon, but sweet from the caramelized sugar, and slightly spicy from the Creole seasoning. Amazing.
I had to do 140 pieces of candied bacon and quickly got in a groove of preparing the next couple pans of bacon while a couple of pans were baking in the oven. It didn’t take too long, but doing 140 of anything, especially when that anything has multiple steps, is going to take a while.
After all the bacon was baked (bakin’ bacon), I had to put five pieces of the finished candied bacon into small bags and tie them closed with a piece of twine.
276 hours left
Till next time,
Ben
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