First thing I did was convert the recipe to figure out how much of each ingredient I needed to get. Next, I worked on preparing the ingredients that needed some work. This included peeling and slicing onions, peeling garlic, and coring and slicing bell peppers. All the other ingredients were spices and such and only needed to be measured out.
While working on getting my ingredients together, Chef Hopkins walked into the kitchen with some fresh basil from his garden. Chef Hopkins had been gone for an entire week. I'm not exactly sure why Chef Hopkins and his family were gone, but I think I overheard someone talking about Mrs. Hopkins' mom passing away earlier in the week, so I assume it had something to do with that, though I never asked about it. I didn't want to be insensitive.
A short while later, Ryan (one of the line cooks) showed up and mentioned that he threw out his back last night while helping his grandmother with something. Chef Hopkins told him that his father deals with that sort of thing and that when he's laying down, he should be in a position like he is sitting up straight in a high backed chair. It's best to have some pillows under your legs to help or to just retain that position as you lay on your side. This helps relax the back and is the best position for it. So there's a little bit of chiropractic advice for the day.
My first problem arose while coring the peppers. We didn't have enough red bell peppers for the recipe. The recipe calls for 3 pounds and I only had 1 pound 10 ounces of pepper. Luckily, we had just received some sweet peppers and David said, "Just use these. It'll be fine. Just cut the stem off and toss them in the bowl and we'll process them like that." This was great, less work for me, or so I thought. The next problem came as I was slicing all the peppers after removing the core and seeds from all of them except for the new peppers. I went to David and told him that the recipe called for the peppers to be sliced, so I asked if he wanted me to slice them and leave the seeds and everything. David told me that I'd better go ahead and remove the seeds and everything before slicing them. So, I went back to coring and seeding peppers.
This recipe was a fairly simple one compared to the other pickling recipes. For this recipe, we just had to combine everything in a pot and bring it to a boil. Once it had been brought to a boil, take it off, jar it, and process it. Simple. Other recipes call for adding different ingredients at different times or bringing something to a simmer, adding an ingredient, then bringing it to a boil. It gan get pretty confusing, but this recipe was refreshingly straightforward.
A little while later, a new guy walked into the kitchen. I recognized this guy because he was at Restaurant Eugene the day I was sick to interview, take his food test, and take his cooking test. His name is JM and he's eventually going to be one of the line cooks. Today was his first day, so he was shadowing everyone and doing lots of prep work like I usually do. That's about all I know about JM. That and the fact that he's a pretty outgoing guy and likes finding out what everyone is working on.
At this point, well after noon, Woody had still not shown up for work. I could only assume that it was his day off. This doesn't sound all that unusual except that today was the first day since I had begun working at Restaurant Eugene that Woody had not been there. He has become somewhat of a staple and a person that I can always go to if I need help or if I need a new task. So, it was kinda weird not having Woody around.
By now I had all my ingredients prepped, measured, and combined into a pot. All of my ingredients except for the tomatoes which David wanted me to save until the last minute. All I had to do for the tomatoes was cut them into 8ths and remove the stem. Nothing difficult, but there were 20 pounds of tomatoes.
When I finished, David was gone to buy jars for me to put the pickled green tomatoes in because we had run out of jars. Over the course of the day, we had received some produce and nobody had put it was just sitting in the walk-in, so I got to work on getting some of getting everything organized and into cambros. Then we got 3 more shipments of produce. It just kept piling up. I was way over my head. Luckily, David showed up and took over. He told me that he was just going to get everything into the walk-in and we'll deal with it in the morning. So, I got back to work on pickling the tomatoes.
While waiting for everything to boil, I went to get family meal.
Now that everything was boiling, it was time to jar the pickled green tomatoes.
Once everything was jarred, they had to be processed for 12 minutes. I had to do the processing in batches because I could only use one oven and the jars are too tall to fit in two racks at the same time. So, while waiting for my pickled tomatoes to finish processing, I saw that Jackson was putting some portions of fish and oil into individual cryovac bags. I asked if he wanted me to cryovac the bags for him. He said that would be great, so that's what I did.
Eventually, all the jars had been processed. However, seeing as how I had 5 minutes left in my shift, I wasn't going to be able to stay there to wait for them to cool, label them, and store them. So, I flipped them upside down and left them to cool on the back table. That's when Gavin saw that I wasn't currently doing anything and gave me a task.
I had to take some fish that we had received that day, cut it to fit in the large cryovac bags, seal it and put it on ice in the walk-in. then I had to change out the ice for the other fish that were already in the walk-in. I ended up staying an extra half hour, but it's all good cause I could use the extra hours.
And with that I gathered my things, told everyone goodbye, and headed home for the evening.
Till next time,
Ben
310 hours left
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