I’ve been growing my own sprouts at home.

seeds soaking

You just soak the seeds for a few hours and then drain them and put the jar on your window sill. Rinse them at least once a day. I use the really mature sprouts as micro greens when I cook at home. It makes me feel like I’m gardening in the winter.

I always feel hesitant to write directly about restaurants that I’ve worked at. I would never want to offend or upset someone unintentionally. Feenie’s is closed, so writing stories about my time there has become my guilty pleasure.

After garde-manger I moved to the pasta station. It was a very interesting station, but it was also pretty easy so I began to get antsy and insist that I should move stations. I remember the sous chef looking at me with what I now understand to be an evil grin, “Next week Kyle will train you on Grill”.

“Okay,” I said. Happy that I had gotten my way. We both looked over at Kyle who was in the middle of the Saturday afternoon burger rush. His head wasn’t visable through the smoke coming off the grill, a string of the worst profanity you could imagine coming out of his mouth, “I hate this station!!! I came here to cook! not burger, fries, fucking, fuck, COCKSUCKER!!!” I had to duck as he whipped a raw burger across the kitchen onto the wall behind pasta station. “I could be getting paid $16 dollars an hour at Cactus to do this same fucking thing!!!”

As soon as he had a break in bills he mumbled to me, “I’m going out for a smoke.” Then he yelled loudley to the rest of the kitchen, “OFF LINE TO HANG MYSELF WITH A ROPE MADE OF BURGERS!!!”

I walked over to my friend Minjae who had already worked grill and told him about my new station and how scared I was. Just then Claudia the beautiful Guatamalan garde-manger girl was cooking staff meal on the grill. “Minjae! is so hot over here!” she yells across the kitchen. “Oh, zee smoke! Is so hot! Owe! my arms is burrrniiing!!”
Minjae quickly looks over at me, my mouth is open my eyebrows furrowed in dispair. “Claudia!” He starts making the cut it out gesture towards her. “Don’t listen to her Crust!”

I remember the first few times I tried to lift the fryer baskets full of fries I had to use two hands to lift it and tip it into the bowl. But by the end of my training I was using one hand for frys and the other to flip burgers. My first lesson was “L-TOP”, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle prep.
Kyle held up a slice of tomato out of the insert that was done by the morning guy, it was a centimeter thin on one side and and inch thick on the other, and the thick side still had the produce sticker on it. “This is what not to do”, he said. He showed me how to slice the pickles and the cheese and make the spicy mayo. It didn’t take me long to realize that this station sucks. Kyle explained to me how this station takes people who were previously good cooks and then turns them into POS’s (pieces of shit). It is also the station where you stick the hopeless skidballs and cocky pricks until they either quit or prove themselves. Ouch, I just realized why I was there and it wasn’t because I was a skidball!

I tried so hard not to snap, but I could see everyone watching and waiting. Finally one night four months in, I begged the sous chef to move me. “Please, please get me off that station! I don’t even know why I’m a cook anymore! OFF LINE FOR CRYING!!!” I yelled. Kyle Brian and Minjae all followed me out to the back loading dock. “I’m moving back to Saskatoon!” I cried. “I can’t stay here any more!” I had said this on the back loading dock a couple times before. Bryan said what he always does, “Oh suck it up princess, Saskatoon’s a shit hole, if you go back their you’ll be pregnant and living in a trailer in 6 months!”
“Hey! I love Saskatoon! Someday I’m going to go back there and open a restaurnat! My dad did try to get me to buy a trailer once though.” I said
Then Kyle said, “you know what? I think you’re right and you should go back to Saskatoon.”
“What? No I’ll stay.” I whimpered.
“Ha ha, works everytime,” he smirks. “Reverse psychology Crust.”

After that I was getting moved to entremat and I only had a week left. It went smooth except for one thing. The buger bus. It was Sunday brunch and It was 3 in the afternoon. Luckily, the night guy had taken over the station and I was doing prep for tonight. There were still lots of brunch bills coming in and suddenly one of the servers ran up to the pass and histarically said, “A bus of Japanese tourists just pulled up to the restaurnat and they all want the Feenie Burger!!”
We all laughed, we had heard that one before. Bryan comes around the corner from the dining room, “Um, their not kidding”. Sure enough the printer starts going and it doesn’t stop, “Ordering, 50 Burgers! Five no cheese, one just the patty, 3 no mayo, one no pickle, one no bun…” I ran over to tag team the station with the night guy. “Oh wait, Ordering 51 burgers, they want one to go for the bus driver!”
It was not smooth of coarse, with all the people involved trying to help the special order burgers got all mixed up. The Burger Bus!

I saw this recipe in a magazine that was doing a story on Michel Bras, and it looked so simple and rustic. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to choose a dessert to finish a meal when catering. When you are serving 6 courses it’s tricky to chose a dessert that will compliment your menu and please everyone. My first amateur instinct was chocolate, because I love it so much surely everyone else does too. But my catering guru Ang pointed out that this is not always the case and that she usually chooses something more neutral. Regardless, I was intrigued by the choice of the great chef Michel Bras to serve a rustic banana studded with small pieces of cinnamon stick, vanilla bean, candied orange zest, and coffee bean. Then roasted.

The plating in the mag was just a banana on the plate with some candied nuts and some spiced syrup. It looked quite stunning with the studded black banana, but I thought, “would this be awkward to eat? Would I have to get in there with my hands and fork to get to the sweet innards? Would the stuff stuck into the banana have to be pulled out individually?” So I did a test.

I had to use my hands a little bit but it wasn’t too messy and the studs all stuck to the peel so I didn’t have to pick them out. I like a sous-vide banana better. But it was still very good.

Bryan, Ben and I, grilled sausages, eggs and toast. The smokey flavor made it. I’m still trying to learn how to edit on imovie.

Training people is crazy. Based on my limited experience I have observed that if the kitchen you are working in has good people at the top who give good training then it is a positive cycle that perpetuates itself.

When I started at Feenie’s a guy had to train me on garde manger, he thoroughly explained each dish and each day answered my questions about the mise en place that was involved. He wasn’t happy about training a girl who didn’t know what brunoise or simple syrup was, but he did it because that is just what you do. You train the new guy. Why? Because somebody trained you. He told me why things were the way they were and it made sense to me. There were also other people around me on other stations who had done GM before who offered info about the way they do things, so I got to see different ways of doing the same job.

When it came time for me to train someone on GM I was proud to show what I had learned, I gave details, answered questions and set standards. It made me even better at GM to show someone else and explain my ways and why I do them. I also want to add that I was lucky because everyone I trained was super cool. The only time I got a little selfish and neurotic was when I trained Scott Dicks and was feeling inadequate because I could tell he was more experienced than me. I didn’t hold back information, instead my insecurity was manifested in me being extra nazi like in my training, “FIRST the spinach! THEN the goat cheese! THEN the prosciutto! Never any other order!! Always the SAME!!!” Scotty was really sweet about it and it didn’t take long for me to get over it.

Near the end of my year at Feenie’s we got a chef who didn’t like me, there were rumors that he was old school and didn’t like women in the kitchen, whatever it was that made him so happy towards the guys and so unhappy with me I’ll never know. I started to feel jaded, the guys that I was training were moving up stations ahead of me. It made me not feel like training people and it made me leave Feenie’s.

The next restaurant I worked at, I wasn’t really trained and it took me a while to figure everything out on my own. It was a bit of a hostile environment and they did not want to answer my questions. When I eventually had to train someone I was thinking, “it took me so much work to figure my way around here, I don’t want to tell this person all the shit I learned. I’m going to tell them in one hour what took me one week to figure out? It’s not fair. Also if the chef sees them instantly doing what took me a week to figure out on my own they will seem better than me”. So I have to admit that I just told them the bare minimum that they would need to do the station. I didn’t offer advice or set standards. It didn’t make me better and it made me feel shitty. I think the food suffered too. I wasn’t ready for an environment like this.

The next restaurant there were a bunch of really experienced guys, some of them took me under their wing, named me Crusty and taught me what they know. I felt so grateful to them for openly sharing what they had learned over the years. Because they did that for me, I will have their backs whenever they need me. Need 1500 canapes for tomorrow? Call Crusty. Dishwasher called in sick at 5:00 on a Friday night? Call Crusty. I can’t say no to these guys I owe them.

So maybe that is why you train people. When you do something to the best of your ability it makes you feel good and it makes the people you train loyal to you. As for all that mind game shit when you don’t want to teach people because you want to be better than them, it’s not worth it. Whenever I asked Kyle and Bryan about this stuff they always said, “if chef tells you to train someone and after a couple of days they are dog shit. Then you are dog shit.”

So get amped about training the new guy! You could make a new friend, or at least add another soldier to your army.

This is what the guy who is training me on the meat station is shouting to all the other cooks he is smoking with on the patio after work. My friend Kyle is coming up the stairs to the patio and he hears this, he immediately knows they are talking about me. “He he he haw haw haw!” they all laugh and continue talking in Quebecois. “Her meat had no sear! no sear at all! OPP-O-SIT of the sear!”
Kyle comes walking in, looks at me and says,”lets go, I’m fucking pissed off, we’re out of here.” 

“But why? wha hoppened?” I say. “They’re talking shit about you outside, you’re a joke to them, they don’t care about you,” Kyle says. 

“No, it’s cool,” I say slowly. 

“No. They’re joking about how you suck, they’re not telling you what you did wrong so that you can do better. You’re like Champ to them.” (Champ is a kid that worked at Feenie’s, we nicknamed him Champ because he is a champion, if you know what I mean).

“No.” I say, it’s slowly sinking in. I think Kyle might be right, I was just to caught up to see it. We leave, and I never feel quite right again there, even though deep down I thought maybe they’re just bustin’ my balls because they like me and how I try.

One of Kyle’s strengths is his brutal fucking honesty, “You are the ugliest kid I have ever seen!” “Hey buddy, having a bad day? not feeling well?….no you’re fine? Because you look like shit!” or my favorite “You have a mustache!” Which he would say to any girl that had a mustache. Some girls have them, but you’re not supposed to point it out! So I think he was right on this one and he seemed genuinely protective of me because he knows I’m doing my best and he doesn’t like to hear shit like that. Leaving that day, whether it was true or not, one thing was for sure, that my confidence which was already shaky was now gone.

Looking back now I know they didn’t mean anything by it. I think we both may have over reacted. It sucks training someone and I can understand joking about it. After that day I always took extra care in searing meat. The thing that bothered me though was, what if Kyle hadn’t told me what they were saying. Maybe still to this day I would not be searing meat properly. They watched me do it and they never said anything. This is where my brain took another turn for the worse. They never say anything to me, is there more stuff like this that I’ll never know about? I started paying extra careful attention to everything, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bitter. If they don’t say anything to me does that mean I’m not worth telling?

Holy Shit! Holy Shit! I’m on Butter on the Endive!!!! I think everyone in the Vancouver food scene already knows about www.butterontheendive.ca. For those who don’t, it is one of the reasons I started my blog. It is my favorite food blog (sorry Michael Ruhlman). It is written by Owen Lightly a young, but seasoned cook, and it provides tons of good info. I am super stoked to be mentioned on it.

I have been following the blog for a while but I had never actually met Owen until I saw him at a party. I tried to play it cool, but ended up like, “OMG! OMG! I’m a superfan!” Sometime after that we decided to take out our cameras and shoot drunk pictures of each other for our blogs (maybe it was just me that was drunk). I have to admit I was worried that he was going to post a redwine stained-eyes half shut-sweaty picture of me. I’m glad that he didn’t, but I think the pic I got of him is good so here it is.

Owen at a party

1:30AM Back from market. Our friend the sous chef Christian Eligh cooked for us. The food was simple. I like and understand simple. We paired wines, hence the blackout. The wines were great. THe deserts were really good.