see now this is just annoying

so, TWICE now i have written a fantastic post about how this one table eats too much spaghetti sauce on tuesday nights, and twice this goddamn laptop has failed and froze up, so you're just going to have to take my word for it...it was a great post, probably one of my best, and it was full of witty comments and hilarious insights.  it could have changed the world. 

oh well.  stupid laptop.  look at my knives!  i call it the murder kit.

k left to right...12 inch forschner granton edge slicer

analon paring knife

worthless veggie cleaver (too light)

8 in analon chef knife (my tattoo knife)

henkel steel

offset serrated knife

microplane

8 in henkel granton edge santoku (my go-to knife)

the henkel is a fantastic knife but i highly recommend analon knives as well, the steel is awesome, they're easy to sharpen and keep sharp, they all come with hard sheaths, and they're affordable as all hell.  i have three of them (one's at home, a 5 inch kyotso, which my wife loves).

holy god my computer is f**ked up

sorry dear readers, i haven't posted in a while.  my computer has some sort of virus that i just can't get rid of, and it's not allowing me to access my blog.  i can blog from my blackberry, but the sort of posts i like to write are frigging annoying to type on my bb.  i could twitter from my bb (but twittering is stupid) but blogging from it is a pain in my ass.

anyway, i also have an old crappy laptop that i have to drag upstairs and actually plug in to my ethernet cable, which i guess isn't really a problem, i'm just lazy.

ANYway...i can't really remember what happened at work this week so i'm assuming that nothing important went down.  we got some new steaks...16 oz bone in new york strips, to replace our 12 oz ribeyes that weren't selling.  these new ones are ginormous.  i think they look awesome, but i also think that 16 oz of protein for one meal is disgusting and excessive.  unless you're doing a hot wing challenge or something, or eating that five pound steak in texas.  i guess then it's more about proving your awesomeness.  but if you're just looking for a little dinner and you decide to order a goddamn pound of steak then i think you got issues.

oh yeah, on thursday my mother in law had a little gettogether at the restaurant, and it was her, my father in law, my lovely wife, a couple folks from the bank my m-i-l used to work at, and for some reason, my boss's dad.  i went out to talk to them before they ordered and when i came back to the kitchen i said "umm....boss?  i think your dad is hitting on my wife" and he just goes "probably."  classic.  the boss was working for jenney on thursday cause she ran off to get married.  and we weren't exactly busy, but we had a good weekday dinner rush and i ran circles around him and that's always fun.

geez, i wish i could think of more stuff to talk about right now, considering i haven't blogged in a week, but i'm all out.

here's a picture of my kitchen!  it's hot in there!

this crap always happens

so, last night we had a party scheduled...supposed to be 20-25 people, and it's actually pretty rare when all of them show up, and it's even rarer for them to show up on time.  if we have a group scheduled for twenty people at six thirty, chances are that we'll get sixteen or seventeen of them around seven, seven fifteen.  and i love how nobody thinks its a big deal.  it's not like we set up half of our restaurant for them, and brought in extra help....oh.....wait....

anyway, the group last night turned out to be 31 people, which was awesome, and they all ate dinner and drank some beers or wine each, so the ticket was huge.  peggy took part of the table and jeana took the other part, and even though peggy's part was 19 people and jeana's was only 12, jeana ended up with more tips.  and peggy threw a hissy fit, and it became this whole big thing, and jeana was crying at one point, and it turned out that i finished before any of the servers.  ANY of them.  only one is supposed to close!  and peggy and jeana were still there, mostly cause peggy was whining and calling the boss and jeana was trying to not bash peggy's head in and get her sidework done, which had gone unattended due to the drama. 

so, from the kitchen perspective, the table went fine.  the boss was hanging around wanting to help but i've told him a million times, as long as i have one other person in the kitchen everything will be ok.  and i had tina and even though she's a little slower than i'd like, she did just fine.  boss is kinda cute, though, when he stands there asking if we want help...he looks like a kid asking for cookies.  we let this group order off the menu, and a lot of times with groups that big, we'll give them a limited menu just to make it easier on the girls and on the kitchen.  lemme see if i can remember what they had..

five matadors (one split)
four tuesday spag specials
one half rack ribs, mashies brown gravy
two chicken fried steaks, mashie chicken gravy
salmon and caper sauce, rice
almond salmon, rice
hamburger steak, mashie brown
meatloaf, mashie brown
two chicken strip baskets
cheeseburger, fries
single lumberjack cheeseburger, fries
country harvest salad
blt wheat toast
french dip, fries

that's all i remember off the top of my head but that's like 23 out of 31 meals.  and i have no reason whatsoever for remembering that.  i'm not gonna need to know that today when i go to work, but...there it is.  anyway. 

back to the salt mines...

haha! whee!

The world famous chef knife tattoo

the shrimp cocktails from the party i catered...they so cute!

here's my famous grilled cheeseburger.  yep.  you see it right.

this is my restaurant on a good day.  happy folks.

these are those caprese skewers that nobody ate at my party.

mmm...pulled pork tacos

classic. me and daniel rocking the phony moustaches

umm....working hard.  as usual.

"thanks for reading the blog, suckers!"

hey look what i can do

i can post pictures!  dat's me!

sorry grandma

jeez, i haven't posted in forever.  my computer has been having some major problems, and i'm too lazy to walk my laptop upstairs and plug it in.  i need a wireless router.  anyway.  what's going on, dear readers?  have ya missed me and my angry line cook rants?  not much happened this week...except that on thursday we had a big table (16 top) of regulars that came in and ate, and everything was fine except one there was confusion on one lady's fried chicken.  ok.  so we get this fried chicken pre breaded and pre portioned.  they come in bags of four pieces.  occasionally they only have three pieces, and sometimes they have two of the same pieces in there (supposed to have one each of breast, thigh, leg, and wing).  so this lady ended up only getting three pieces, and as soon as we found out, we dropped the other piece she was missing.  now, astute readers will realize that that means we opened up another bag of chicken and took a piece out.  ok, so we sent that out, and she thought it was overcooked, so we ended up making a whole new order of fried chicken.  then tara gave her a free piece of pie.  so, to recap, this lady got two whole chicken dinners (without being charged for either) and a free dessert, and when all was said and done, and everybody was done and leaving (this group comes in a lot and they're good customers and they tip well), this fucking lady comes back in like she forgot something, gets the credit card slip from tara, and TAKES THE FUCKING TIP OFF OF IT.

what the fuck is wrong with people?  first of all, that was kitchen error, which i don't think the server should be punished for.  second, we did EVERYTHING we could to make it right.  she got two dinners and a dessert for free.  and the other fifteen people at the table enjoyed their meal and tipped accordingly, and this skunky bitch takes the entire tip off the ticket.  and we were slow other than that, so the one table tara had all night that she could have made money off of, she got stiffed on, because of one stupid rich lady.  (oh yeah, all those folks are rich, and live on a golf course.  rich people tip like shit because they don't know what it's like to be broke and really need that four dollars.  fuck them).  also, it wasn't even tara's fault!  well, to be fair, it wasn't really our fault in the kitchen either, it was the fault of shitty product.  sorry folks...i don't do the ordering nor do i decide what products we'll use.  what i wish i did, however, is rush out and 86 this bitch, but i was long gone by the time all the drama went down.  *sigh*  sometimes i really hate people.

our last ticket was an hour and a half before we closed on saturday night, and we spent all night friday talking about nintendo games.  kind of a boring week.

not what i expected

so, halloween has come and gone, and lots of interesting things happened.  first of all, whoever wrote "Happy Halloween" on the board out front misspelled halloween (holloween) which is totally bush league.  then one of the breakfast cooks let an omelette go out with a slip of paper in it (most of our cheese comes pre-sliced with paper separating the slices).  it's careless, and it should not happen.  although we in the kitchen know that particular piece of paper never touched anything but cheese for all the customer knows we wiped our taints with it.  not cool. 

then there was the whole costume thing, which went about like i said it would.  most of the girls were in their griz gear like normal but with more facial accessories and fancier hairdos.  it was ok.  they looked like a gang, which, really, is kind of what we are anyway.  and tammy was in her prince get up, and she looked great, except she took her purple jacket off to wait tables, and then she just kind of looked like the soul glo guy from coming to america.  also i kept trying to get her to say "i'm rick james, bitch!"  she had a great wig and a pinstripe moustache.  i just told people i was dressed up as myself from the day before, and that my costume was more spot on than theirs. 

anyway, it was pretty slow, we didn't really get any after game rush like we should have.  jessie actually bet the boss (or he bet her, i'm not sure how it happened really) forty bucks that we wouldn't get 11 tables between 6:30 and 7:30, and she won.  just barely, though...at like 7:32 we started getting tables and we were actually pretty steady until almost nine.  of course, i had let jenney go by then (cause it was slow) so it was just me cooking, but i kind of like being by myself in the kitchen...it's almost easier for me to make sure everything comes up together by being responsible for both sides of the kitchen instead of assuming somebody else will do it.  anyway it was nice and steady for a while, and we made a few bucks and i got to talk to a couple of cool guys watching the world series game, one of whom grew up just a couple blocks from shea stadium.  for those of you who don't know (and judging by my counter, there isn't any of you) i'm a huge mets fan.  anyway, he was cool and i fed him and his buddy and we talked baseball for a while. 

it was a pretty good night.  now it's sunday, and i'm gonna be lazy and drink beer, and maybe play some mario.