chromedome

When my late wife was in the hospital here, the meals all had the look of something prepared in a commissary 1000 miles away and shipped out frozen. The "turkey dinner," for example, consisted of watery mashed potatoes, pallid once-frozen mixed vegetables, some pale gravy substitute or other, and - I only wish I was kidding - two slices of inexpensive deli turkey roll, the kind you get in sandwiches from the gas station. Patients were, as Liuzhou says, patently there only to disrupt the smooth operation of the ward. One doctor would tell her, for example, that it was crucial she get enough rest to help her body recover and therefore he would order her a sedative for 10 PM. A nurse would then come around at 11, when she was just drifting off, to take a full set of vitals or a vial of blood. Then she'd be awakened at 6 AM for something else, and no sooner she'd manage to doze back off than breakfast (soggy toast, cold coffee, egg whites that had undoubtedly come from a carton) would arrive and wake her up again. She was there for 10 days in total, and it took her until the fourth day to cow the staff into submission (she was a woman with great force of will) and the food situation resolved itself when I pointed out that she did, in fact, have a personal chef who could bring things from home.

Oh, and the issue with hours cuts both ways. The regulatory environment is changing all the time, and if you can't demonstrate that you're in compliance with local labor standards there's potential for a malicious employee or former employee to create trouble by reporting you.

Yet, much of the reason for the turnover is that wages are too low. It's an ongoing problem for restaurateurs that wages squeeze already-thin margins, but cost of living in many cities makes it almost impossible to live on what a line cook makes. Even high-end restaurants, the kind any ambitious cook would want to work for, are frequently finding it difficult to keep staff because it's a losing proposition. Competition from non-restaurant players, and the effects of lower grocery prices, were also main points of the annual Baum + Whiteman restaurant trends report this year.

Motivation is a slippery thing. The last time I worked for someone else, the owners of the restaurant were brilliant, highly focused people with a clear vision, but they were amateurs. The restaurant was successful and the food was good, but turnover was a serious issue for them. I found out why very quickly when I went to work for them. There were two owners, a man who mostly handled the business side and a woman who was the hands-on manager. The female partner (they were not a couple) was the driver, the male partner was the investor and business brain. The female partner was in the kitchen at least once or twice every day, going "Full Ramsay" on one or another of the cooks for some minor infraction or other. The issue was that she expected every single employee - at $1.00 over minimum wage - to treat the place as if they were owners. At the slightest misstep, she'd be all over them in a fury. I was aghast to see her light into a poor kid who'd only been on the job three days, fuming afterwards (within his hearing) that he was "another bad hire who wouldn't last two weeks." Understandably, he didn't bother coming back after his shift. In a small city with a limited number of restaurants this kind of reputation gets around quickly, and has a real impact on your ability to keep a kitchen properly staffed. This is an extreme example, but many restaurateurs show similarly counterproductive attitudes and behaviors when seen through outside eyes. In that restaurant, I explained (very) carefully to the owner that buy-in has to be earned, not demanded, and that she was sapping all the spirit out of the kitchen through her interactions with the cooks. I "suggested" that she filter any feedback through me, rather than approaching line cooks directly, which helped greatly. As I got to know them I gave them opportunities to stretch their wings a bit, canvassing them for suggestions about improving the kitchen's organization and work flow, so we could get food out more efficiently. I also challenged them to create new dishes out of our existing ingredients and prep, putting them on as daily specials with that particular cook's name on them (ie, "Brad's Killer Vegan Panini"). Even the malcontent cook who'd been pointed out to me as "the next lazy b*stard I'm going to fire" when I came onboard was starting to come around and enjoy his shifts, laughing and joking with the others instead of scowling sullenly at the flattop and tuning everyone else out. Then she fired me for not driving an hour in to work through a raging blizzard on a day when the whole city was shut down anyway.

My mom's doing the same, as a recent widow. She's also revelling in the luxury of watching an entire show all the way through, as my father'd had the habit of flipping back and forth between shows. Seeing half of each show was more or less the norm.

My apologies to anyone who's already familiar with his work, but I tripped across blogger/author The Angry Chef earlier today, and thought many here would appreciate him as much as I now do. He's a longtime chef with a degree in microbiology, and spends his free time in a quixotic quest to debunk nutritional idiocy with solid scientific research and a degree of asperity. Or as he puts it, his blog is "the home of evidence-based profanity."

Lobsters were on at a relatively decent price for Father's Day ($7.88/ea for 1 to 1 1/4 pounds) so I bought a couple. More for my GF than for me...she's on day 6 of no tobacco, and I thought she deserved a bit of a treat. They were precooked at the store, so I just picked the meat and we had them with broad noodles and cream sauce and steamed veg.

That's very discouraging.

I guess that means the "greedy bastards" won. ETA: ...or at least, didn't do badly out of the transaction.

I'm partial to Terra Chips, though I don't splurge on 'em often. Their standard mix includes beetroot chips, but they also have a "Sweets & Beets" mix with just beets and sweet potatoes.

I dunno...unsolicited egg whites? Even on a "no good deed goes unpunished" basis, that's edging into Mother Teresa territory.

True enough. Though as far as that goes, I usually only go over 3 or 4 times a year. Having something to pick up pretty much determines when I'll go. I should clarify that it's not a true PO box but merely a disposable mailing address through ACE Hardware there, so it doesn't cost me anything.

I have a PO box in Calais, ME, for that very reason.

LOL Mine are just going in. Traditionally in these parts it's the May long weekend for planting from seed, and "full moon in June" (ie, this weekend) is the folkloric guideline to avoiding a late frost. To put that into perspective, I was at my mother's place last week and there were frost warnings on Monday and Tuesday. Admittedly it's been a cool spring even by local standards, but still...it shows the "old wives" had learned from bitter experience.

Usually the stricture against using a toaster oven is just because the heating element is too close, and scorches the top of the item being cooked. I think you're probably savvy enough to correct for that.

There's a fish called hoki? I would absolutely, positively, have to use it to make poke. Just 'cause.

The roots grow surprisingly large. When we moved my grandmother's plants up the hill from her old house (halfway from lake to road) to her new house (up closer to the road) some of the roots were larger than my leg. Mind you, that patch had been in its previous location for four decades or so, so you won't see that any time soon.

I found them at Pete Luckett's winery in Nova Scotia, where they were set out for sampling. I found them tasty, but a bit "seedy."

I love the cake. I knew someone who'd done a meatloaf cake with mashed potato "icing" for her meat-and-potatoes hubby one year, but this is definitely at a higher level.

I don't usually have par-cooked potatoes on hand. I start the potatoes when I decide on soup, then pull a container or two of the corresponding soup out of the freezer. Nuke it enough for the soup to come out of the container, then drop it in a pot on the stove to finish reheating. If you dice your potatoes to spoon size, they'll cook in about the length of time needed for the soup to reheat. If I'm on the ball I'll start a bit early so I can drain the potatoes and add them to the soup to finish cooking and absorb some of the flavor, but often I just don't bother.

Hmm. I did that when I bought my house in the 90s. By the end of the second summer it had extended to the neighbour's yard, and had colonized most of the lower part of mine. Admittedly, I'd been incautious enough to plant it in a place where the soil stayed damp because of the hillside's natural drainage. If you're in a dry climate (I don't remember your location) you might get away with it.

Ditto. I *do* make and freeze those soups, mind you, but w/o the potatoes. I cook those separately when I take the soup out of the freezer, and combine them at the end.

The place I used to work heated them in the salamander, then spread them with a paste made of sun-dried tomatoes and covered the paste with a slice of Swiss. We'd slide it back under the salamander to melt the cheese, then serve it on grilled sourdough. It was a good sandwich, I remember it very fondly and re-create it at home whenever I make meatloaf.

Son of a gun. I never knew that...looking forward to next spring, now. Plenty of hostas around the house, I could certainly sacrifice a few nice young shoots without making a dent in them.

Agreed. A palpable oxymoron.