tighting up the screws...

so, work has been good this week.  things are getting easier for me, and i'm feeling way less out of place.  see, el chefe and sous chefe and one of the other cooks have all worked together for years and they have the flow...they all know their stations and what needs to be done and they all work really well together.  kind of how i worked with everybody at the old place.  anyway, it's just a learning curve.  it's getting better.  what i noticed this week is that i pretty much take care of the cooking and everybody else does prep and makes sauces and gets other stuff done.  i can run the line by myself so they pretty much let me.  it's not crazy busy in the mornings or at lunch (yet...here's hoping) so i can do it no problem.  opening has been getting easier for me too, i'm getting a good routine down and the first couple days i opened i didn't have the kitchen nearly ready for service by the time we were open, but now i got it ready with twenty minutes to spare.  the girls have been referring to me as the "breakfast stud" which is kinda nice.  i'm fat and out of shape so i'll gladly take somebody calling me a stud, even if its for something as innocent and easy as cooking hashbrowns.  it's funny, the other guys are all night cooks (well, so was i, but i worked a lot of mid shifts that required me to cook breakfast for a while at the start of my shifts) and they mess with their hashbrowns too much.  just let them cook!  and don't dump oil on top of them!  i put oil down and spread it out with a grill spatula and spread my browns out, season them, and just let them cook.  i flip them about a minute before plating to heat the top (now bottom).  that's it.  el chefe keeps tossing them around and moving them and they take forever to cook and never get good and crispy.  anyway.  hashbrowns.

so i've had three different ex-coworkers come in to eat and check the new place out this week, and all were very complimentary and happy for me.  it's a good spot.  i'm enjoying the hell out of myself, learning a lot, and i get to wear shorts.  because i'm the opener and day cook i really only work with about three different servers but they all like me and they're all great at their jobs.  the other owners love me cause i'm reliable and i'm always smiling and positive and they can see what a kick ass cook i am.  it's nice to be noticed.  not that i wasn't noticed at the old place, but for what it was i never really got a chance to shine.  i can say this for sure...at the old place i never made a soup that sold out in one night and had many many compliments and people talking about it later.  i made the carrot and coriander soup again friday afternoon as a weekend soup and i came in yesterday morning and i couldn't find it anywhere and when sous chefe came in i asked him if any was left and he went "no no no...people love that soup!  it was gone early"  i feel like i got an even better do on it this time around, and it was nice that everybody else (customers included) agreed.

anyway.  i got today and tomorrow off, which is my first two days off in a row in around a month.  i think the last weekend i had was when i was still working at old place.  not that i'm complaining.  i'm not scared of work and i love money, so it's all good, but still...that second day off will come in extremely handy.  actually i'll probably just play mario and nap all day.  but to get to play mario and nap two days in a row?  priceless.

best chicken fried steak in town

so i'm sick of doing movie quotes.  it takes me forever to think of them and most of the time i get them slightly wrong.  i know song lyrics better.  anyway, i'm done with it unless one of you puts up a helluva stink.

so work has been good.  we're getting busier, and we're kind of the new downtown spot for business to have their functions and work parties.  we just did the missoula downtown association's anniversary (birthday?) party.  that was tuesday.  el chefe and i knocked out hours upon hours worth of chop and slice.  there was 60 on the books for five o clock, and even though most of them ordered off the menu, we had tons of appetizers laid out for everybody.  i made a batch of pico de gallo so big it i diced a whole case of tomatoes for it.  fresh fried tortilla chips and ten pounds of pico made for a happy bunch of folks.  there was also tons of mozz sticks with fresh marinara in bread bowls, and turkey & asparagus deli rolls for people to munch on.  it was nice.  i didn't stick around for the party cause i had worked almost nine hours but it went off without a hitch and we once again showed how we throw down.

wednesday was good, pretty busy in the afternoon, actually.  i was supposed to come in at 8 and el chefe wasn't going to come in until 9 to see if i opened the kitchen right but nobody was there to let me in at 8 and i don't have a key so i had to call el chefe and have him come down anyway.  he was only around for about an hour, he said he was going home to shower but we kind of made him stay home cause he's been at the restaurant day in day out for weeks straight...he needed a day on the couch.  so i held the fort down, got everything ready, made a soup (cream of asparagus...didn't like the texture but the flavor was great), and only cooked a couple of breakfast tickets but had more than a few for lunch and then a busy afternoon.  it was nice.  good ol day in the kitchen.

now i got today off, and i'm glad.  i too need a day on the couch.  i haven't had two days off in a row in like, a month.  i gotta work friday and saturday (long shift on saturday) but then i get sunday and monday off, so that's gonna be rad.  i'm gonna go get a haircut today, which i have been contemplating for weeks.  see, i wear a hat most of the time (90% of the time it's my ol blue mets had turned backwards) and i love the way my hair is sticking out of the back and bottom of my hat.  i have a pretty sweet mullet going on right now, actually, and i've gotten quite attached to it.  the thing is, i'm pretty sparse on top so without my hat i just look like freakshow from harold and kumar.  in the rare event i don't have my hat on i look absolutely ridiculous.  if i had hair on top to fluff up or spike then i'd totally keep the mullet, but as it stands, my hair is long and thick on the sides and in back, and up top it's all wispy and thin.  i look like gene wilder on a bad hair day.  so i'm gonna go cut it.  i've been growing my hair for like, four or five months now and every time i go to get a haircut something happens to stop me or i get sick of waiting at the haircut place or my wife runs her hands through my hair and says she likes it.

anyway, bye bye mullet.  it was pretty sweet having you.  we haven't really hung out since sixth grade when i had sweet step sides and a pimp rat tail/mullet combo.  thou shalt be missed.

haha, i just about posted that without actually mentioning the chicken fried steak.  it was all mullet, and i got sidetracked.  so yeah, our chicken fried steak is actually a six ounce sirloin pounded out (so we don't have to kill it, you can actually get it mid rare cause it's sirloin), and we have a secret breading, and we serve it with fried hashbrowns (fryer fried...super crispy and awesome) tossed with paprika and our bomb sausage gravy which has a very nice underlying sweetness.  and you also get two eggs.  for ten bucks.  it's gonna take over this town.  this town loves it's chicken fried steaks.  once the word gets out we should be going through a hundred a week.  anyway, yeah.  it's awesome.  crispy on the outside, tender juicy and delicious on the inside, a little heat, a little sweet....big pile of crunchy hashbrowns, a couple of runny egg yolks....absolute heaven.

let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!

so, hey...pretty good breakfast today!  i worked last saturday and it was ok, not busy at all, not really even steady, but ok.  last sunday was valentines day and nobody really goes out to breakfast and i was only at work for a couple hours getting my ravioli special ready.  so i was really hoping for a good day today, i want us to become THE downtown spot for breakfast.  there's some tough competition, so we gotta be on point, but we got our chicken fried steak dialed in today and it's gonna be the best in town, i promise. 

anyway, yeah, it was good and busy for a while today...it's kinda funny, when el chefe was there it was kinda mellow, then he went to get some six pans and stuff and while he was gone it got pretty banging, and it was just me and a new guy i hadn't worked with before.  he's awesome (a recent culinary school graduate), huge, and he helped me put it down today.  but since we haven't really been busy for breakfast yet i don't really feel like i have it all down and felt like i was in the weeds and holding up the show but the two servers kept telling me how awesome everything was and how fast it was coming out.  i'm just used to breakfast being a well oiled machine, with ticket times no longer than five minutes.  we had hashbrowns and meats ready to go so all you had to do was cook eggs and plate.  at the new joint i'm still getting used to everything (everything-where stuff is, how the equipment cooks, all that business), and i kept running out of sausage so the ticket times were more like ten or twelve minutes but everybody was really cool about it.  i also kept forgetting the toast cause i'm used to the servers doing the toast.  i keep getting kind of flustered about ticket times but the food is still coming out fast.  i just pride myself on being a kick ass line cook, and anything that takes longer than a couple minutes kind of bugs me.  el chefe is a perfectionist so ticket time isn't his primary concern.  but what could be a train wreck actually works really well, cause he gets on me about how stuff looks and i get on him about how long it's taking, and between the two of us, we bang out great food, and we do it quick.

anyway, i'm gonna go pick up my last check at the old joint tonight, and get my eat on while i'm there.  i kind of miss those cats, and i want a cheesesteak. 

i don't want a large farva, i want a goddamned liter of cola!

so yeah, that whole crawfish boil thing?  wow.  it was awesome.  crazy busy.  ran out of crawfish at 7.  had three hundred pounds of live crawfish ups'd straight from new orleans.  and sold every last one.  well, not really...some of them were dead (maybe ten pounds worth) and me, el chefe, and sous chefe all picked fighters and put them in jars next to eachother so they could see eachother and develop hatred and resentment towards one another, then we were gonna let them have a crawfish fight and see who's was the winner.  el chefe picked a huge black one and named it the colombian black mamba, sous chefe picked an even bigger one and named him mr. t and i picked a little red one that was fast and fiesty as hell and named him mr. whiskerbiscuts.  he's a sketchy little fucker.  anyway i left at four so and i just assumed they had their fight but they were all still there today, just staring at each other.  sous chefe fed his some bratwurst and i was temped to jack mr. whiskerbiscuts up on red bull and vodka but never got around to it.  and all day at work i swear to god the colombian black mamba was staring at me, and any time i got near his jar he reared back and started snapping his claws at me.  he didn't do it to our dishwasher, nor any of our servers.  just me.  my guess is that he just hates the irish.  which is wierd, cause i didn't think invertebrates were capable of bigotry but there ya go.  they hadn't fought by the time i left today and i bet they're all dead of boredom tomorrow.  i was hoping they'd be all fired up cause we murdered and ate all their friends and relations.

anyway...so, eh....oh yeah!  the crawfish boil was awesome, i cut up 150 lbs of bratwurst, and we had tons of corn and potatoes in there too.  fifteen bucks a bucket, with three dollars going to the missoula housing authority.  my pops came in and brought some of the chinese mafia (my extended stepfamily) in and said the bucket they bought had probably fifty or sixty crawfish in it.  we were also doing two dollar bud lights and friggin seven dollar pitchers of hurricanes.  i just went home after work, i thought it was a good idea for everyone involved for me to not get near 7 dollar mixed drink pitchers.  me and gator bobb used to get pitchers of bloody marys for breakfast back in the day, and we'd get super crunk by like, nine thirty.

so yeah, yesterday was a blast.  i'd never even eaten a crawfish before.  and i did it right, crack that sucker in half, suck the spicy bits out of the head and then eat the tail in one bite.  they were pretty good.  probably not something i'd order but if somebody else had some i'd eat a couple.  i'm like that with scallops, too.  anyway the buckets were huge and we were packed and the bar made a killing and it was a good time for all.  also it was for a good cause and it's always nice to be part of that.  today was pretty slow but i had a good time anyway.

i'd like to shoutout to both jamie and eric and say thanks for keeping up with the new joint on facebook....we  try to do updates from the kitchen but i keep forgetting there's a computer in there.  i keep forgetting about the tv, too, although last saturday we watched saved by the bell while we cooked breakfast which was just as awesome as it sounds.  we're gonna get a hd tv in the kitchen before this summer so me an el chefe can watch the world cup.

well, snakes don't have PARTS, but if i had to call it anything, i'd say it's his knee

so, work has been as both crazy and slow as a new restaurant usually is.  yesterday we were crazy slow cause it was president's day.  now, at all my old restaurants, presidents day is usually busy, cause we're open and not much else is, but since new joint is downtown across from the courthouse, it was absolutely dead yesterday.  now, the whole last week has been pretty good, steady lunches, breakfast is getting busier every day, and the bar just kills it at night.  yesterday i felt bad cause me and el chefe hadn't had a ticket all day and we were playing around with food and when we finally did get orders we weren't set up or ready in the slightest.  it didn't take all that long for food to hit the window but it was certainly longer than i'm used to for lunch tickets (which i try to keep under eight minutes).  and since we're downtown we really gotta get on that ticket time cause downtown people only got a certain chunk of time they can eat and we need to get them in, get them fed, and get them out.

anyway, today will be better, cause it's fat tuesday, and we're doing a huge ass crawfish boil.  fifteen bucks gets you a bucket of crawfish, sausage, corn, and potatoes, and pitchers of hurricanes are 7 bucks.  so hopefully we're busy.  also hopefully the crawfish gets here by noon, which is when the posters say we're starting.  we have to cook outside cause i guess the whole business stinks to high hell, but it's gonna be interesting to say the least.

anyway, the special i had in mind on valentines day didn't get served the way i had initially intended.  ok, it was a lobster, ricotta, and meyer lemon (a lemon/mandarin orange hybrid) ravioli with parsley and dill, and served with a roasted corn and chive cream sauce.  i came up with the dish from start to finish, i shopped for the ingredients, and i hand made all the ravis.  so, to my surprise, el chefe served it slightly differently than i wanted, and so yesterday we had a chef off to see who's dish was better.  we each made one ravi and served it the way we wanted.  mine looked like this.

 

el chefe made it like this

 

he fried the ravi and put a chocolate drizzle under it and served sauce on the side.  i thought his ravi had a better texture but i still like my dish...anyway, apples and oranges.  what do you guys think?

it's way too early for me to think of a movie quote

so...victory is mine!  i made my famous carrot and coriander soup yesterday at work, (the first soup i've made at the new place) and goddamn if we didn't sell out.  well, we sold the pot i made for lunch, and i had to make another one for dinner.  i left at five thirty so i dunno how busy it was last night or how well the soup sold at dinner but i was damn proud of how it sold during the day.  we weren't busy, more steady, but we were selling just as much soup as we were selling fries, which is pretty awesome for a burger joint.  anyway, i was all anal about how it looked when it was served and it looked like this

 

boom.

it was awesome.  today i'm gonna make a beer cheese soup with smoked paprika popcorn.  i'll let ya know how it goes.

i dunno, i just like smiling...smiling is my favorite!

so, today is the end of an era.  the end of my current time with bossman.  hopefully i won't ever have to go beg for my job back.  again.  hopefully this new thing will take off and become successful and busy and everything will be all good.  i don't really wanna think about what will happen if it doesn't.  i wanna be positive about the situation.  i'm really excited about this new restaurant still, and i know that with the crew we got, we have every chance in the world of being successful.  still though, it's an unknown.  but there's no reward without risk, right?

anyway, today is my last shift at the old place.  i bought boss a fifty dollar bottle of jameson 12 for being such a champ all these years.  i know he'll appreciate it, as he likes the whiskey like any good irishman.  it wouldn't surprise me if there was a card and maybe some cupcakes or something for me on my last day.  i bet jace made me cupcakes.  she's totally a grandma like that.  i bet if i showed up at her house she'd try to make me a sandwich and get me to put my coat on.  i'm gonna miss that crazy old bag.  i'm gonna miss everybody, actually, even the people that piss me off all the time.  they've got a great crew out there at the old place and even though it wasn't where i ultimately wanted to be, it's still a pretty good little restaurant that definitely has a place and purpose and loyal customers.  i wonder how noticeable my absence will be, aside from the noise level (i'm terribly loud and vulgar).  i'd like to think that with me being gone there will be a noticeable drop in the food quality but i think that's just my ego talking.  they'll be fine.  it's not complex food and they got good cooks so they'll be fine   still, i have been so loyal to boss over the years i can't help but feel just a little wierd about the whole thing.  i know it's gonna work out for me, and i'm super excited about the whole deal, but i've been working for boss for 11 years cause he's the best boss ever.

don't get me wrong, i've worked a couple shifts at the new place and i'm so goddamn excited about the possibilities there...also it's just...well, cooler.  it's downtown, and it's a bar, and it's in a gnarly old building that has all these hallways connecting all the bars and all these graffiti murals in the hallways.  the customers are a whole different chunk of the public that i haven't really had the chance to cook for yet, but know that they will be more receptive to the kind of food that i wanna cook.  for instance, tomorrow i'm cooking breakfast and lunch at the new place and i'm gonna make my carrot and coriander soup, which is really the greatest soup ever, and the one time i made it at old place nobody ordered it cause they all thought it was wierd.  the folks i'll be cooking for now will find the idea of a carrot soup intriguing and they'll most likely order it.  i hope!  it's a great soup, i first had it when i was in ireland after i scaled a giant rock in the middle of the sea, and it was an unforgettable food moment for me.  just absolute soup perfection. 

anyway, i'm rambling...i gotta stop by new place and talk to el chefe about valentine's specials before i head to old place to hammer out one last shift.  he wants all the cooks to come up with their own specials, he said he'd try or order anything we needed, but we also got a big box of fruit compotes and pastes and he wants each of us to incorporate one of the pastes in our dishes.  it's almost like a top chef competition!  i bet i lose...haha, i'm gonna have to pack my knives and go!

nah, i'll be fine...and i'm fucking excited to see what i can do when given absolute creative culinary freedom.  my first thought was just pinching a dish i had at a different restaurant a couple weeks ago, and even though i don't know exactly how they made it i'm sure i could at least duplicate it if not make it better.  but i should probably look for something else to do that's more my idea from start to finish.

i better get on that i think el chefe has to order stuff today so i gotta decide in the next hour.  hmm.  i'll let ya know.