mskerr

Another example of something on which there's no consensus

Once again, I am going to reveal my extreme naivete... I have quite a varied resume, with work in some very very different areas and no immediately apparent logic, aside from me liking to do different things. In the food industry, I've worked fast food (first job), made coffees, washed dishes, line cooked, served, worked in a deli... but no single job for longer than six months. While apparently, it's extremely common for servers and cooks to only spend a few months at one food business before moving onto greener pastures (higher tips/pay/ better working conditions/ higher quality food etc), my question is: how is this viewed when applying for a job? (I'm not talking about high-end restaurants here, but sort of lower-mid to mid-range - in the U.S. specifically.) Will a hiring manager see a couple three month stints here and the odd six month stint there and think "Too flaky" or will they not bat an eye and just accept it as normal for the industry? (I'm sure this will be debated, but I'm thinking more of FOH here, as I would think it'd take a bit longer to train a cook in just the way the chef likes each item cooked, vs. explaining preferences for service to FOH.) I mean, I know that many servers (again, not talking very high end like French Laundry, or somewhere with a loyal staff like Lola, or anything) are doing it for quick money/while waiting for their big break/as a second job/while in school/etc etc, but is a hiring manager at, say, your average decent-but-not-great American casual restaurant looking for someone who is going to stay around for a while, or do they just expect high turnover? As a secondary question - at what point is a brief stint too brief to mention on a resume? Like, I will leave off the cafe job for one month that I decided wasn't worth the low pay and where I would prefer the boss not be contacted because he's crazy. But if I work somewhere for, say, three months to save up some money before a move or something, and the boss would attest that I was a solid worker, is that legit? (I suppose this bleeds into the other thing I was wondering about: what do people look for when hiring waitstaff? - but that probably deserves its own thread.) By the way - this is all a bit strange to me, as I consider myself more at home as BOH... as my other recent posts showing my cluelessness about FOH would attest to! Thanks in advance for any advice, as I am well and truly puzzled. Edited for clarity.

I just started a new server job. When I was a server before, I was blissfully ignorant and had no idea how many faux pas/ "cardinal sins" (as Ripert calls them) I committed. I put the cork back in wine bottles, until I was corrected by a customer one day. I didn't routinely serve women first. I probably "auctioned off food," and asked the cliched "how is everything?" frequently. I probably didn't refill drinks perfectly, as I've only just become aware that there is apparently a process to it only a few steps short of a Japanese tea ceremony. I occasionally had to ask customers how to make even basic cocktails they ordered (!) because I hadn't been trained at all and there was no one on staff to ask. I couldn't answer a lot of questions about the food or wine menus because I had to pay to try anything, at least when no one was looking. Luckily, I think a genuinely friendly attitude, a deep desire to do the job as well as possible, and a sincere concern for the quality of the diners' experiences compensated for my lack of training and naivete. Having started reading eGullet about a year ago, I now try to look to this "restaurant life" section of the forum to find out server etiquette to make up for the lack of training I've received on my three server jobs. (As I think someone commented on another thread here, it seems that since everyone's BEEN served many times in their life, it is often incorrectly assumed that everyone knows what service requires.) However - when I look on here or other restaurant-related pages for a simple answer of the proper way to do something, it seems I can find no consensus! For example: should I approach a diner from the right or left? Should I continually keep people's water glasses full, or would they find this overbearing and prefer to just have refills when their glass is actually getting low? Should I ask how everything is, or should I use some other similar iteration that is somehow not cliched? It seems most people agree that no one's plate should be cleared while other people at the table are still eating, yet my trainer at work clears them because she comes from a very popular chain restaurant where servers are never to let an empty plate sit in front of a customer. Should I refill their wine for them or let them refill it themselves? (I just saw a debate about this on a very old thread.) And it goes on and on... One simple answer, I'm sure is "do what your boss wants you to do!" BUT again, the bosses I've had don't seem to do much training aside from how to push specials or high-profit items. And in general, there seems to be an "it doesn't matter" vibe a lot of the time... but even if the boss isn't fussy about service, and tips are good because of general American tipping culture, I would hate for someone to go home after being served by me and post a rant on eG about some faux-pas I committed, especially since it would most likely be total unknowingly on my part, and I really do care about doing things properly and customers having a great time and a great meal. I don't mean for this to be a total rehash of previous eG debates on service. I am just wondering: IS there ANY consensus??

As a disclaimer, this easily falls under the "absurdly stupid questions" category... I would love to use local ingredients as much as possible from local farmers and artisans and such for a food business... what I have absolutely no idea about is HOW to go about doing this for a brand-new business, especially on a shoestring. Where do I start? Post ads on craiglist? Talk to people at the farmer's market and hope to dear god to negotiate a way cheaper bulk price? Are there hotspots for meeting local artisans/farmers/etc that I have no idea about? Meet them by chance by striking up a conversation in a bar in an agricultural area? (This almost worked for me before.) How do I go about getting local hogs or beef or the like - again, on a shoestring? Do a search online for local farms and just go talk to them? All of the above? I guess to amend my question a bit - is there a somewhat straightforward way to accomplish this or is it just a totally haphazard process involving lots of luck and chance? (Keeping in mind that I don't live in Portland or San Fran or somewhere that is an absolute mecca of local producers tripping into food truck-owner's laps or however it all goes down there.) While I would ideally love to serve lovely food that's good for the people eating it, and the environment, and local farmers, and the community, etc, I also want to serve it at a very reasonable price - like a price that someone wouldn't have to be an environmentally-conscious foodie to be willing to pay. I want to make food that is affordable for as many people as possible. So far, the local, sustainable meat I've encountered has been very pricy, though of course, I don't know how wholesale prices affect it. (I heard the term "brokavore" lately, referring to how many small-scale artisinal producers are basically making nothing as it is, because it costs so much more to do things sustainably, so I sort of doubt they can sell things for any less than they already are.) And while I would like to grow a lot of my own veggies, this sort of thing seems to be in danger of being legislated into extinction here in the US and probably some other countries as well in the not-too-distant future. (As a disclaimer, I know that it's time consuming and can be quite costly to grow your own ingredients for a food business, a la Melissa Kelly, but I think it'd be pretty manageable to grow a few choice things that grow easily and abundantly.) For reference, I would like to have a REALLY small food business - something I can mostly do on my own, or else with maybe one or two other people max. Food cart-style, with an omnivorous menu, with something for everyone but not specifically catering to any one crowd - not specifically serving "salads for the revolution!" or "pork-wrapped-pork-stuffed-pork" or whatever, though I'm certainly open to both of those things individually. I like to think a small business with a small overhead could be feasible for using sustainable ingredients because running costs are low to begin with and I don't need to pay prime big-city real estate or anything like that. Anyway - I'd appreciate any info that could help lessen my complete and utter confusion. Cheers!

OK I'm being optimistic here - I just found some great Shallot-Vermouth-Thyme pan sauce (CI recipe) from roasted chicken I made 2 weeks ago. Is it still ok to use or are there billions of little toxic buggers multiplying in the chicken juices? Cheers!

Smelly cheese! Blue cheese, feta, really sharp Italian cheeses, and probably anything beloved in France. I try to expand my horizons a lot and do hope that one day, I will suddenly 'get' smelly cheese, but for now I am more than happy to stay far, far away. The smell makes me gag involuntarily. (Also, having to crumble up whole buckets of feta at work didn't help me with this.) Nothing makes me sadder than to get something in a restaurant only to find smelly cheese on it when it arrives. Another thing that makes me gag involuntarily - ranch dressing. Almost everyone I know loves the stuff on just about everything, but I would just as soon never eat it again. Ditto the lima beans, though I probably never had them cooked properly and will give them another try. Watermelon. I've probably only had lame supermarket ones, but I think they have a funny flavor.

I reckon the third approach is exactly what I'll go for & I will look into the countertop convection oven. Cheers on both tips!

I'd assumed that when I moved to NZ "one day", I would just ship my whole sweet kitchen setup, but alas, it looks like the move is gonna come quite a bit sooner than expected, and I am BROKE. I don't own & can't afford Le Creuset or anything too flash, but everything I own is good quality, generally the "best buy" from the Cook's Illustrated equipment reviews... I will look more into groupage rate (I think it's called), where you're just filling out unused space in someone else's container, and it's also possible to have stuff shipped/ brought over later... but of course then there's headaches about where to store stuff in the meantime. Also, there's a good chance we'll be moving around a bit there before we settle into one place... and even so, we're not usually the types to settle down for long. And on and on... which is why I reckon I'll just embrace a minimalist set-up and move on from my cheap American dream of a kitchen with all sorts of useful appliances and tools and things to cooking wild boar in a cast iron skillet in the bush. Good fun.

I've checked out TradeMe and Sella, but not CL NZ. Will have a look right now. Edited to add: Well, that didn't take long! One of the sparsest CLs I've ever seen!

Probably New Zealand. I lived there before for about a year, and was surprised, though I'd been forewarned, how much more things cost in the US. (Not just food-wise. Like, even a basic t-shirt can cost 10-20 times more.) And when I got back to the States, I couldn't believe how cheap things were. NZ beer and wine is cheaper here in the US than in NZ (of course, their govt health-care factors into this, whereas in the US, you're on your own when your liver's shot). Of course there are many pluses about NZ - you can get a lot of fruit for just about nothing, all the wild boar and venison you could eat if you know hunters, you can go out and get quite a bit of your own seafood, and the meat and dairy is, generally speaking, way higher quality than in the US, Marmite's a lot cheaper ... Plus there's the famous laid-back Kiwi attitude, more prevalent some places than others of course - so at least in the circles I hang out in, no one feels the need to put on a big impressive dinner with fancy ingredients. Some lamb steaks and beer and a loaf of white bread and everyone's happy. Not to mention the awesome $2.50 meat pies, pavlova... many great things. BUT, decent kitchen equipment will cost a helluva lot more I imagine, aside from the odd yard-sale find/ hand-me-down/etc. Ex: my brief research online is showing NZ$410 for a Lodge 4.2L cast iron dutch oven. Which would probably cost under $50 in the States. A MINI food processor is NZ$150, and an 11-cup one is $NZ650. In the US, it's $40 and $150, respectively. I suppose another useful thing to mention is that I want to start my own food business eventually, so you can only imagine how much commercial equipment would cost. (Though I would probably check auctions/listings for equipment by a closing restaurant.)

Definitely. I spent the last year and a half living rurally. Not a single decent restaurant for a quite a distance - we were happy to drive an hour each way to go to the old-school taco truck, or even to In-n-Out (the famous, awesome burger chain). Aside from that, if I wanted Chinese or Italian or anything ethnic other than Mexican, or even a decent salad or sandwich or really anything, I was better off making it myself, even if it was a first attempt. Hence why I've been dabbling in a bit of everything. I reckon I won't be anywhere near as rural if I move (for better or worse - I quite enjoyed having that motivation to do things myself, as well as the whole rural life in general), and will probably have access to all sorts of tasty Asian and Middle Eastern food, as well as many other great kinds of food, but no access to Mexican. So, my priority will be improving my Mexican cooking, which has always been my #1 cooking goal anyway, whereas my Chinese/ Lebanese/ etc cooking attempts will probably go, uh, on the back burner to use a cliche. I will look more into shipping - I've heard that you can get cheap rates if you're just filling up unneeded space in someone else's container, so if I figure out what I definitely want to take, hopefully I can keep the most necessary/favored things. And by the way, while I am feeling a bit of anxiety at having to let go of a lot of my kitchen stuff, I do love a good move and a change and overall regard it as a welcome challenge. But, it is just shocking how cheap kitchen equipment and ingredients - even a lot of quality ones - are in the US compared to a lot of other places. It almost makes it too easy to get used to having all sorts of tools and appliances and a pimped-out pantry. I am looking forward to a good reason to keep things simple - especially if I can get my hands on better raw ingredients than in the States at a better price, and don't need to pay, say, three times as much to buy beef from a cow that actually ate grass.

I make heaps of braises, soups, and stews, so my 2 enameled cast iron dutch ovens are my babies. BUT I've been teaching myself to cook for the last few years, and will pretty much try just about anything at least once. One day I'll make pasta and sauce, with one or both from scratch. The next day might be tacos. After that, a stir-fry. The next day, a roast. Then pasties. Then another attempt at pizza from scratch. And so on. Interspersed with all sorts of spontaneous munchies creation and frequent attempts at DIY projects of all sorts - I am keen to try making/fermenting/infusing/pickling/(hopefully working up to one day butchering/ curing) pretty much anything at least once - though I can easily put off a lot of these projects for a while if I don't have the equipment I need. Many don't require much beyond a mason jar or really basic kitchen tools. And anyway, I'm not that keen on pasta-, pizza- or tortilla-making! So, this could be a good motivation to focus on the tasks I enjoy more, and the dishes I most want to make well, as opposed to dabbling in all sorts of different things. For example, I enjoy attempting stir-fries and various Asian dishes from time to time, but know that my efforts are pathetic compared to even a halfway-decent cheap restaurant. Can probably put my home attempts off for a while. (Of course, when I get my inevitable Chinese fixation one day and decide to tackle it head-on, then I can deal with what, if any, equipment I need then.) On the other hand, the cuisine I most want to be able to cook well is Mex - well, sort of Cali/Tex-Mex. (Hey, it's what I love.) And I want to make killer salads, which can be done with no equipment, if necessary. So, for cookware, I could probably limit myself to dutch ovens, a skillet, and a pot. Not trying to tackle every cuisine also means I can work with a highly-simplified pantry. So I could probably get by for the most part with my dutch ovens (worth taking with me. Can't bear being away from them!), a good cast iron skillet (should be easy enough to find one at a yard sale & reseason), one baking sheet, one or two baking dishes, some mason jars, a cutting board (definitely some potential for creative recycling here), some basic tools (peeler, a couple spatulas and wooden spoons, grater, whisk...) mandoliner for convenience, chef and paring knife, strainer/colander... The good thing is that a lot of these things are either compact enough to bring with me on a plane, or can be found relatively cheap... Anyway, I think it would be a good challenge to simplify my setup, as I tend to dirty every dish, spoon, spatula, and pot in the kitchen when I cook, especially first attempts. And then I'm crabby about having to spend an hour doing dishes. So, more reasons to be stoked on simplifying! I am wondering what life without a food processor would be like. I don't use mine heaps, but for some things, it is so useful. Hopefully, it's the sort of thing that can be found second-hand? I'm sure this isn't exactly thrilling stuff to read, but thank you for helping me work it out!

Short of a standing mixer, I had recently pretty much achieved my ideal kitchen set-up - certainly far from how most people would picture an ideal kitchen, but realistically speaking, for me, it was pretty sweet and didn't leave a lot to be desired for the time being... especially in light of my very limited budget, minimalist leanings (I always get rid of things I don't use frequently) and generally unfussy demeanor. I had my beloved dutch ovens, pots and pans that had won equipment reviews, an assortment of cast iron, including a wok and baking stone, all sorts of useful tools and appliances with none of the silly single-use ones (again, mostly equipment review-winners), a choice & extremely heavy mojalcete, a few dozen choice cookbooks, reference books and DIY books, boxes full of recipes and techniques and charts and copies of things from cookbooks that I had collected, not to mention a killer pantry, and many other minor but extremely convenient things (like dozens and dozens of mason jars for my many DIY projects) ... It may not sound particularly flash, but again I have very limited means, am not fussy though I'm particular about having good quality things when possible, and three short years ago I didn't even have a spatula to my name. Point is, it totally worked for me and what I do in the kitchen and my style. NOW I'm looking to move far, far away in the next year or two to a country where everything is way more expensive than here in the US, so I can't afford replicate my set-up, or anything remotely like it - and I probably won't have the money to ship my stuff. (It's pretty much all in storage already, probably to be distributed among friends and family. I do want to keep my enameled cast iron dutch ovens, McGee books, and chef's knife, if nothing else!) Luckily, I had always planned on eventually embracing a minimalist set-up, and I worship the cafes/ squatters' beach shacks on Bourdain where people cook on old hubcaps they've turned into stoves, mostly using good local produce, some good olive oil, wine, and fresh herbs to make some damn tasty-looking meals. I figured that while I was teaching myself to cook, I might as well make it a bit easier by having good tools and equipment, but that as my cooking skills increased, I'd be able to do more with less, and it'd be a fun challenge to boot. Also, I'm a bit of an old-school sort despite being rather young, so I relish in doing things in sort-of old-fashioned (and often time-consuming but soul-satisfying) ways. So I figure my low-fi set-up is just coming a bit sooner rather than later! I also reckon that working with a simple set-up and simple pantry will force me to be a better cook, as I've heard top chefs say many times that it's often hardest to do simple things right, because there's fewer ways to cover up bad technique/ingredients/mistakes. Also, I have usually had pretty crappy equipment in the houses I rent, esp. stoves, so I certainly haven't been spoiled, and generally view cantankerous equipment as a learning opportunity if I can't afford to do anything about it. There's certainly plenty of articles/book chapters on the things you actually need in a kitchen, vs the things that you don't (like "you do need a good knife, you don't need an avocado slicer"), and I am certainly interested to hear people's thoughts on Things You Can Do Without, but I'm also hoping to get a bit more in-depth input from folks here on being able to make top-notch food on very simple/humble/ DIY/ straight-up crazy set-ups - stories involving jerry-rigging, creative recycling, and MacGyver-esque ingenuity are especially appreciated, as I love finding non-traditional uses for things, and my husband is one clever bugger. At the moment, I'm picturing initially being limited to a secondhand 20-year-old electric skillet, maybe some cast iron and basic cookware scavenged from a yard sale, a knife, and a spatula, and it could definitely take a while to build up from there. Cheers! PS - One thing I've already realized is that I don't need my beloved cookbooks or boxes of recipes and useful bits of info. Would like to hang onto a couple of McGee books, my knife skills book, maybe one or two comprehensive books on technique, as well as my Fine Cooking Quick Tips and the like - books that tell you how to use things for all sorts of unusual purposes, or just clever little techniques. As for recipes, I can find pretty much everything I need free online just using Saveur, Fine Cooking, Serious Eats, choice blogs, not to mention, ahem, eG. Plus, cookbooks do get repetitive - can't tell you how many recipes for chicken stock or green chile sauce I have, and they're pretty much all the same. (On a somewhat related note - aren't kitchen set-ups funny things? Everyone has one, and yet it seems most home cooks, at least the ones I know here in the US, have a whole lot of things they don't need, use, or even understand, but lack extremely useful things. Like, most people I know - home cooks, not pros - seem to have heaps of mediocre/ dull/ not very useful knives, but don't have one really good sharp knife, or a sharpening steel.. or, the people who are least confident using their (usually dull) knives don't have a mandoliner to make life easy. Ditto kitchen thermometers, measuring spoons, or spatulas that won't melt in high heat. Or, in the case of my parents, all of the above PLUS salt, sugar, or flour! This is probably a whole different thread though.)

I have never had a proper bowl of knoephla, but read about it recently during a web search of "North Dakota cuisine." ND is often the butt of jokes, but when I finally went there (I had been looking forward to it for a long time), I had excellent food. Meat and potatoes comfort food - yum. I started making my first batch of knoephla yesterday, from a composite of recipes - just sweated a heap of mirepoix in butter, added diced potatoes and homemade easy chicken stock (a la Ruhlman - just simmer some chicken pieces, an onion, and carrot for a few hours). Meant to finish it with the cream and dumplings for lunch today, as we were already pretty full last night, but am glad to report that everyone dived into it last night as is, with some cream added. It was damn tasty! Does anyone have a specific knoephla recipe or tips/tricks? I can see this becoming a regular dish at our house, as my partner loves simple food with potatoes. And I read that you can throw in coleslaw mix as well - we like our cabbage. Cheers!

Hey all - time to revive this old topic! I'm probably gonna be moving near Fresno in a couple of months - any new food recomendations? Especially of the inexpensive/ ethnic sort? I hear there's some great Armenian/Turkish delis/bakeries for lahmajun, etc. I know there's gonna be great roach coaches & In-n-Out, so I'm pretty much set anyway. Cheers!

Disregarding my last post, those do sound delicious!

Yes, I saw that thread but it seemed to be more ideas for fillings. This is more what I'm looking for:

Keep the ideas coming, they all sound delicious! And I am happy to report that the puff pastry was in stock at Trader Joe's today - $4 for two sheets. I bought five boxes. Going to be eating a lot of puff pastry.

Yes, bacon fat with onions is often the seasoning before I cook with cast iron... So, in a business setting, fry up a bunch of bacon first thing, then cook onions in it, then burgers? And, how do you clean the grill without stripping it of the seasoning? Cheers!

Being both a burger-lover and a hopeful-future food business owner, I'm curious not only how to get a properly seasoned grill over time, but also how to mimic one in the meantime. Frying up a bunch of onions before making burgers maybe? Not sure, but looking forward to ideas!

I'm looking for Pierogi ideas. So far, I've only had them very basically, with sour cream, bacon, parsley etc, but what are other ways to serve them? I saw an America's Test Kitchen recipe for pierogis on a bed of mushrooms with (I think) a white wine-sour cream sauce, which sounded great. Are there any soups/stews with them? Any good meaty ideas? For the record - I haven't tried making them myself yet, and generally put off making things with homemade dough, but I'm open to ideas for fillings too! (Might give Michael Symon's beef cheek pierogis to start.) Cheers!

Puff pastry makes just about everything better, IMHO. Not being interested in sweets, I've been stockpiling savory ideas for when (fingers crossed) Trader Joe's restocks their artisan puff pastry.... or I finally tackle trying to make it myself in the depths of winter. My usual recipes are New Zealand- style minced beef, onion and cheese pie; Kiwi "bacon and egg" pie (with what we Americans call ham, with cheese and mixed veggies); Kiwi sausage roll (ground sausage with bread crumbs, thyme, onion, and tomato paste); or a tuna, cheese, onion, and egg roll that guests love for breakfast, with tapatio of course. I'm sure there's a million other things to do... recipes & brainstorms, please!

Talk to a boar hunter! Easier in small country towns... In our town, we could probably strike up a chat at the local dive bar and have a source by the time we've had a couple beers. Possibly craigslist? Or a hunting forum? (My partner, a boar hunter, is watching a wild boar hunting as I write this.) Edit: Also, here in CA, some butchers carry ground wild boar, and possibly other cuts - haven't checked it out firsthand yet.

We went to TnT's diner in West Fargo recently after seeing it on Roadfood as a local favorite. It was good! It's old Heartland comfort food - we had roast beef and Swedish meatballs. I've been craving good old meat and potatoes whenever I think about it. And the server was probably the friendliest one I've ever had! Also, Tom Hanks is a fan

Ps - And if anyone has a copy they're willing to let go of, let's make a deal!