the drink of champions

the first step is to rock a badass shift on the line.  or don't, i guess, cause i drink these on my days off too.  anyway, they taste better after working 9 hours in a kitchen. 

step one.  get a pint glass and fill that sumbitch with ice.

then give yourself a good ol generous pour of Jameson.  or Bushmills.  or Powers.  use irish whiskey.

then fill er up with a quality ginger ale of your choice.  i like hansens cause it's spicy on my lips, like kissing an ancient mayan princess.

you could garnish it with a slice of lime or some candied ginger, but i like em straight up.  i actually can't ever taste the alcohol in these, so they can be a bit dangerous...but danger is my middle name.

actually it's not.  my middle name is way more badass than danger.

i'm jealous of other food blogs

other food blogs are so pretty.  they have all these pictures, and step by step recipes, and all i do is make dick jokes and talk about how hard i roll.  i used to post pictures of food but i haven't in quite a while.  so, with the help of my wife, i'm about to drop the hammer on a step by step tutorial on how to make my famous tomato parmesan bisque. 

step one---roast yourself some tomatoes, an onion, and some garlic.  drizzle that shit with olive oil, salt, and pepper.  i actually forgot to take a pic of this stage, but i took a pic of the same thing at work a while ago.

just scale it back for home cooking.  three or four nice tomatoes, one onion, two or three cloves of garlic.  this is what i had after an hour of roasting.  toss it all in your soup pot, like so

next, and this step is important...add one box of POMI strained tomatoes.  i discovered POMI a while ago and i refuse to use anything else now.  they're straight up italian san marzanos, and they're the best damn packaged tomato product on the planet.  they're kinda expensive compared to hunts or store brand, but they're seriously worth it.

now, make some chicken stock.  yeah, you could buy a carton, but the jars of chicken base are cheaper per gallon, and you can oomph it up or cut it back depending on your personal tastes.  also, drink some beers at this point, and crank the tunes.

next up...the secret weapon.  CALDO DE TOMATE.  find it in the mexi aisle of your local food mart.  it's powdered tomato stock, and it's amazing...a tablespoon of this will make nearly any recipe better, it adds a nice depth and is a great base veggie flavor to start soups or stocks or gravys.  one tablespoon to make my tomatoes more tomato-y.

ok, add all that to your pot and bring to a simmer.  while that's happening...

get your heavy cream on.  use the entire container.  i guess you could use regular milk, but i'd lose respect for you.  while your cream is coming to a boil...

chop your ass some basil.  don't worry about getting it chopped down that fine, we'll blend it up later.  now add that basil, son!!

yeah, yeah...that's good stuff.  your kitchen should smell friggin awesome right now.

mine sure did.  now get your salt and pepper on.  don't be shy.  le sal...

and le pep...

ok, now we're just waiting for the cream to come to a boil.  feel free to take this time to bust some sweet air guitar moves while listening to social distortion real loud.

ok, this is an important lesson...heavy cream will boil in two stages.  little bubbles...

to big bubbles.  i always call it "boiling up and boiling down".  when the bubbles get big and you're in danger or making a terrible mess...

cut back the heat and grate a shitload of fresh parm into the cream.  we melt the cheese into the cream because it incorperates a lot better than if we tried to add it to the stock.  romano or asiago will also do just fine here.  asiago smells like farts but it tastes pretty awesome.  take note of the motion blur caused by the fierceness with which i grate cheese.

now grab your trusty stick blender (you do have a trusty stick blender, right?  if you don't, you're dead to me.) and blitz your tomatoes and stock and stuff up real good like

then, while still blending, add your parmesan cream

by now your soup should have turned a kickass shade of orange, and the basil will be all chopped to bits and everything should be as smooth as sam jackson.  feel free to keep the blender in there for a while...the longer you blend, the smoother your soup.

boom.  done.  now keep that shit on a simmer and we move on to the next step.

wait...next step?  didn't i just say that we're done?   well, yeah, but you can't really have tomato soup without some kick ass grilled cheese sammies, right?  i had some hot dog buns i needed to use from earlier in the week when i made chicago dogs, so they became the vehicle of choice.  rocked some provolone, some leftover salami, and the rest of the basil.  if you used all the basil in the soup...well...whoops.

i know a lot of people butter the outside of the bread when making grilled cheeses, but...eff that.  i just butter up my pan real good.

add your sammies and give them two or three minutes on medium heat.  flip when they're crispy and delicious looking.

same deal for side two.  now pull them out, slice on the bias so they're easy to dip, and badda boom.

you're welcome.

movin on up

when i started working brunch shifts a few months ago (almost a year ago, i dunno exactly) i was on the egg station, and i rocked that hard for a few months.  then some personnel shakeups happened and i moved up a spot to the middle station, which is where all the scrambles, corned beef hashes, burritos, and all the breakfast meats come from, and today i'm being moved up again to expeditor.  there's actually no cooking involved on the expo station (well, not true...i have to make hollendaise) but it's the organization and pace for the entire kitchen.  i'm not worried about it, i'm actually kinda stoked, but it's wierd to be such a good cook that i don't even have to cook anymore...

the sticker game

ahh yes, the sticker game.  our prep guy is an absolute master of the sticker game.  he can get me five or six times in a shift and i can't ever seem to get him.  lemme explain...our feta and our goat cheese come with sheets of stickers (in case you break it down to smaller amounts and sell it) and all we ever do with them is try to stick them on eachother's back.  it's very similar to flour hands.  see, we all have to wear black tshirts at work, and flour hands is awesome.  working in a kitchen you get so used to somebody gently putting a hand on your back to let you know they're there, that you never think you just got flour handed.  the sticker game and flour hands are great, but my favorite kitchen game of all time (aside from the kitchen game) is red rings.  a place i used to work at served those ridiculous cinammon apples with everything, and they just sit in their own bright red syrup all day, and i used to palm them and slap other cooks backs so their nice white chef jacket had red rings all over the back.  red handprints work too, but the best was the time i came up behind my km with an apple ring in each hand, reached around him and slapped the rings over his nipples.  he wore his coat with two giant red rings on his titties all day.  you'd think that working an extended period of time with me would teach you to bring a change of clothes.

gotta do something to break the routine every once in a while.  and don't ask about the game...you really don't want to know...

i refuse to believe i'm the only one who's made this

so, i don't get to make soups at work...i think in the year i've been there i've only made two soups....one was like a week after i started working there and then a few months ago i just kind of fell into a spot where a soup was needed, but that one ended up scorched (allegedly...i thought it was fine).  and i'm pretty ok with it, we have four other guys who make soups, and they're all good at what they do, and they each have a style of their own, so it works out great for the restaurant.  we run a meat soup, a veg soup, and french onion everyday, so there's ample opportunities to make soups, but i always let the other guys handle it.  they just jump on it faster than i do.  but i also like making soups, and at my last job i was the soup guy.  so i've kinda been biding my time, waiting on the bench, so to speak, for my chance.  and i got it today.

i knew i had to make at least one soup today, so last night i was trying to come up with something different to make, something that's not too much like anything anybody else makes.  i initially thought of a thai peanut soup, but we don't have any peanuts or peanut butter.  but then i remembered we have tons of tahini on hand for making hummus, so i just changed it to a sesame chicken soup.  i had kind of mapped it out in my head last night, and then this morning i googled "sesame chicken soup" and got very few results, most of which were like "sesame oil, water, the end" and i knew i wanted to step it up a bit.  so, here ya go internet...a kick ass sesame chicken soup recipe.

all the measurements are estimates, cause i just kind of threw it together, but i'm way happy with the results.

MIKEY'S SESAME CHICKEN SOUP

saute 1 lb chicken breast in 1/4 cup good sesame oil, adding 4tbsp minced garlic and 2tbsp smashed ginger (i put mine thru my microplane) after the chicken cooks a bit, maybe three minutes.  cook for another couple minutes and add 2 cups of shredded carrot and 1 cup diced green onion (i did mine on the bias...fancy!).  season with salt and pepper and cook for another two minutes.  add 1 gal chicken stock, one 12oz (i think) jar of tahini, about 3/4 gal heavy cream, 3/4 c soy sauce, and a few good lashings of siracha.  then i toasted about a cup of sesame seeds until they smelled good and they started popping out of the pan, and blended that up with just enough stock to moisten, and added that back into the soup.  it tasted great but wasn't quite thick enough for me, so i made a roux with about a quarter pound butter and maybe an 1/8 of a cup of sesame oil to add some more sesame goodness, and after i added that and it came up to temp it was perfect.  makes...i dunno...maybe a couple of third pans?  didn't turn out to be as much as i wanted.  but i thought it was great.  i've never made it before, and according to google, nobody else has either.

i should probably dial it in and put it up somewhere.  but to you four people that still read my blog, you heard it here first!

the logistics of kicking ass

sometimes during brunch i get what i call "fryer fucked".  that is, i just get super backed up on fried items and hold up the whole show.  there's literally nothing i can do about it but power through, but still, i feel bad letting shit die in the window cause i can't get any fries out.  i work the broiler/fryer station at brunch, and do all the eggs (except the poachies for the bennys).  we only have two fryers, four baskets worth.  we don't have regular hashbrowns, we do a fried potato/sauteed onion combo we lovingly refer to as bubba browns, but in addition to having enough for the plates, i gotta fry potatoes for the next station over to use in scrambles and burritos and whatnot.  and we're usually busy enough where one fryer is dominated by those potatoes for six hours straight.  but then we also run our regular menu during brunch, so when people start ordering regular food, i can get wicked fryer fucked.  an order of wings takes up one basket for at least ten minutes.  four sides of fries can fit into one basket.  but all of a sudden it's lent so i've been frying fish like a motherfucker, and yesterday was the st. paddys parade for some reason (i guess cause it was saturday) and we got pounded after the parade was over, three hours straight just banging plates out, and people were ordering just as many fish and chips as they were over easy eggs, and i got fryer fucked.  we had simultaneous 15 tops (our dining room isn't all that big either) and was a total half and half mix of breakfast and lunch items.  anyway, we did 4800 on saturday and we normally do around 3000.  that's food and bev combined (we're a bar) but still...4800 brunch kicks ass.

the other time i get fryer fucked is during happy hour when wings are a quarter.  it's very common to have two or three hundred wings on the board (my all time high was 450 hanging) and at most we can put a hundred and twenty wings in the fryers at once.  that's assuming i have nothing else to cook (fries, tots, rings, chicken sammies, etc) and that the wings are kinda little.  sometimes they're big and i can only do about 80.  we fire off sheet pans of wings in the pizza oven to par bake them a little but i still gotta fry them until crispy.  and i'm getting to where i can toss 100 wings in sauce in a big ass bowl like a champ.

anyway.  just thought i'd share.  i don't blog enough anymore.

should i be worried?

so, i've read my fair share of anthony bourdain, and i'm sure most of my readers have as well (seriously...if not...go get kitchen confidential right now), and i'm seeing some things at work that are setting off alarm bells, or at least, would set off bourdain's alarm bells.  i dunno if i'm reading too much into this sort of stuff, but a few of the things i've noticed are:

we stopped giving water to everybody.  people can still get water, but they have to ask.  i think it's pretty redneck to have to ask for water at a restaurant.  apparently we are "saving money" by not having to wash tons of water glasses a day, but if you're trying to cut costs by not running loads of dishes...maybe there's bigger trouble.  ironically we are supposed to tell people that we're "saving the planet" with the water thing, but we still use tons and tons of styrafoam and don't recycle shit.  ha.

we have cut portion sizes on some things while keeping their prices the same.  i just found out yesterday that our half pound burgers now only weigh 6 oz.  that wasn't announced to the staff, by the way, it happened real quietly and i only found out cause i overheard a conversation about it last week.

we now require drink purchases in order to get the happy hour specials.  never had to do that before.

there's all sorts of notes up about making sure you charge for sodas and if anybody is caught not charging for sodas they will be terminated for theft.  also sodas went up in price a dollar to a whopping $2.50.  i have issues with this because in montana designated drivers are supposed to be able to drink soda for free (we are a bar, after all) and really...who pays two fifty for a coke?   ridiculous.

this hasn't happened to me yet, but lots of the kitchen fellas are getting hours missed on their paychecks.  like, they should have 63 hours on the check but only have 59.  and there's serious tip issues as well.

there's actually lots of other sketchy shit that i see and i'm not going to go into it here, but suffice to say, i have my worries about the state of my job right now.  part of me wants to stir the pot just to see what's really at the bottom, but my common sense tells me to just be happy i have a job right now.  i like my job, and i love my boys, but we all see these things, and we all worry.