DATE: 04/04/2008 15:02:52 / MOOD: happy
Me and Chicken
A life story and a Cookbook
Prologue
After one failed marriage in Miami Florida I moved to Atlanta Georgia, got married again, had a child and got divorced... again. That is when my cooking life started and where this book starts. First let me tell you something about this story. It is indeed a story. Some parts are all true. Some parts are what I remember to be true and may or may not be exactly accurate and other parts are just plain fantasy. It is up to you the reader to to figure out which is which. I will tell you this, all the recipes here are my own and have been served, for better or worse. Yes I will include the clinkers along with the good ones. The way I look at it it is just as important to learn from our mistakes as it is our successes.
Now here is my philosophy on cooking.
1: Flavor is not the enemy
2: Strange foods are OK as long as there is something on the plate that everyone can eat.
3: Mistakes are opportunities.
4: It is better to give than to receive.
5: Life is better with good food, Period.
My purpose in writing this is two fold. First I have always wanted to be a writer. I have started books several times and even finished one. It never got published because after I read it I hated it. Now I can't find the manuscript so it will never be published. Secondly I want to put down my recipes somewhere before I get too old to remember them and so others can get a hold of them. I figured this would be the best way.
Now on with the story.
It is early evening sometime in October, 1973 north of Atlanta, Georgia on Route 75 somewhere around Dalton. I am hungry and on my way back home dejected as a result of the above mentioned divorce....
Chapter 1
My First Job Cooking
A small sign in the window of the truck stop restaurant said 'Cook Wanted - Breakfast'. I figured I could do that. How hard could it be. I went inside, took the sign out of the window and casually strolled up to the counter and found a seat. The waitress waved to me and made the 'just a sec' motion as she waited on another customer at the other end. I looked at the menu and didn't see anything I thought would be difficult to make, especially for breakfast. Eggs, grits, it was Georgia after all, pancakes, waffles, bacon, sausage, gravy, all the normal stuff you would expect to find in a truck stop. After a couple of minutes the waitress came by with a pot of coffee and her pad. I accepted the coffee and ordered a club sandwich, the cheapes thing I could find. When the food came I asked her who I would talk to about the job.
"Me." she said. "I own the place. Can you cook?"
"I can cook breakfast pretty well." I said pointing to the menu. "It's not too complicated."
She just stood there looking at me for a minute. I felt like she was sizing up a side of beef.
"Where have you cooked before?" she asked as she poured a cup of coffee for herself and added some sugar, no milk just sugar.
I had to think fast. I had never cooked anywhere before really. I had done some prep work under the table in Atlanta while I was living in my car next to a stream with Joey the junk yard dog with hind legs that reminded me of a kangaroo. But besides that my restaurant experience had been limited to washing dishes and busing and a couple of weeks as waiter. So I lied.
"I worked at Denneys. Breakfast and early lunches in Atlanta."
That seemed to impress her. Denneys does quite a breakfast each morning.
"Well you are just in time." she said after a minute. "I don't have anyone for tomorrow morning and I was afraid I was going to have to do it myself. Can you be here by five?"
"Sure." I said just barely holding it together. At that moment I had just enough money to buy the sandwich and coffee in front of me and I had about one half a tank of gas in the car. I needed the job if I was ever going to get back home to Columbus, Ohio.
All she said was "Good" as she turned her attention to a new customer that had just plopped down in a booth at the far end of the restaurant.
Great, I had a job as a cook in a truck stop, doing breakfast. All I had to do now was learn how to cook before five am tomorrow. I went in search of the library.
I got to the restaurant easily by five. Actually I never left. I slept in my car in back of a shed behind the truck stop. Slept might be a little bit of an exaggeration. It was not that I wasn't used to sleeping in my car it was just that I was scared to death about the next day. My research at the library proved to me that I might be in way over my head. One of the books I read was all about real kitchen equipment and how much more powerful it was than home stuff and how easily you could either burn something or yourself. If that wasn't enough I found out that there must be twenty ways to cook eggs and none of them except a three minute egg had anything even resembling and exact recipe. Every book had its own interpretation for each stage of egg doneness. Over easy was somewhere between sloppy whites and just firm whites. Sunny side up went from runny to basted. Everything was left up to the cook and his way of doing it. Oh yeah, the book also said that the customer usually had no idea what they were talking about when it came to eggs cooked a particular way and to expect returns.
Then there were the grits. Hard grits, soft grits, creamy grits, cheesy grits, lumpy grits and just how many lumps is considered OK. Being as I was in the south and had been for a couple of years I had had many, many bowls of grits. No two had been the same even in the same restaurant on different days. I just figured that was the way it went. You can't make grits the same way twice. Not according to the books. I took a poll from all the books and decided that creamy, plain grits was the way to go.
Pancakes were another matter. I had no idea how many styles of pancakes there were. Plain, buttermilk, eggs, no eggs, fluffy, flat and chewy, soft but firm. I figured I would just serve what I came up with and leave it at that.
In all what I came away from the library with was this. I was going to be the cook. I was going to serve the stuff my way and if I got complaints I would do my best to make it right for the customer and leave it at that.
I was as ready as I was ever going to be so I put on my best 'Hell yeah, I know what I'm doing' posture and strode to the kitchen door. It was locked. There was nobody around. I ran to the front and in the front door. There was one waitress and an old codger of a cook behind the counter drinking what looked like coffee but I wouldn't have bet on it. The old codger looked up as I came in and said.
"Here comes the new guy. See ya later Jill." and left out the back.
Jill waved to me, blinked once, said "Hey" and went back to studying her coffee.
I went into the kitchen and looked around. The grills were on and heavily coated with hamburger grease. I couldn't see the bottom of the deep fryers through the caramel colored oil and there were all kinds of food bits all over the counters. In short the place was a mess and that was to my totally untrained eye. I figured it was some kind of test for the new guy to see what kind of fit I would throw. What were they thinking. I had a JOB. How much did it pay? I had no idea. That might have been an over site on my part but I didn't care at that point. I had a JOB and I wasn't about to mess it up for the sake of a little cleaning so I got started. Dishes I had no problem with. I knew the value of soaking. Scrubbing the rest only took a little while anyway but figuring out where to put them was another story. I figured that the night cook had screwed me so if I didn't put things back exactly where they belonged it was his fault for not staying and showing me around.
Cleaning done I decided to get a lay of the land. The first thing I noticed was all the little notes stuck on the front of just about every piece of stainless in the place. There were notes detailing the exact recipes for the home made stuff they served there. There were notes on what not to serve and even some on who not to serve. There was a really big note above the prep table with a list of things people wanted to see on the menu, none of which was on the menu. And there was a yellow eight and a half by eleven piece of paper that had the words “Clean the Kitchen After Every Shift The Management”. In my perusing I learned a couple of things. First, almost everything made here came out of a box or bag of some sort and second what didn't very well could have. At this point I was feeling pretty confident. I could follow package directions as well or better than the next guy and since I had recipes for the rest I would not have to come up with much on my own. Then things got a little bad. The recipe for the pancake batter went like this:
flour
sugar
baking powder
baking soda
salt (large stain from here)
milk
eggs
vegetable oil (to here)
stir till just mixed.
Period. That seemed a little shy on quantities to me. I had a good idea what pancakes were supposed to taste like so I experimented and extrapolated. This is what I came up with:
9 cups all-purpose flour
12 tablespoons sugar
12 teaspoons baking powder
6 teaspoon baking soda
3 teaspoon salt
6 milk
buttermilk as needed
6 eggs
12 tablespoons vegetable oil
Plus I added 3 teaspoon vanilla
Mix until combined but not totally smooth. Wait for fifteen minutes and add more buttermilk as needed to get the right consistency back.
I must admit this was purely a trial and error process. I took the better part of an hour to get it right. I am not saying this was the most perfect batch of pancakes ever made but at least they looked right and they were definitely fluffy. The place also served waffles. After some experimentation I came up the idea to decrease the amount of baking soda by half and add a couple of more tablespoons of sugar but this time all the sugar was powdered. I burnt a lot of waffles that morning.
Grits, as it turned out, were the easy part:
Grits
Water
Salt to taste
Five parts water to one part grits. Bring to a boil. Simmer for twenty minutes covered. Stir. If Cheesy grits are needed just add shredded cheddar and stir till they taste right.
I won't bother you with the rest of the first morning. It was hell, Hell I tell you. I never once stopped running. The dishwasher came in late, two hours late, drunk and in a bad mood. The owner showed up around eight. Took quick tour and left around eight fifteen. The best thing I can say for the morning was that the waitress was very understanding. She was well over fifty and had that look like she had been there for ever. Maybe she had. She understood that I had no idea what I was doing and told every customer not to expect too much. When I think back on it now I realize that the customers were being very tolerant. I, to this day, have no idea how many of them got what they ordered but none of them complained, much.
Around eleven the owner came back. The kitchen was a war zone. The dishes and pots were stacked to the ceiling. The service counter was covered with food particles and the waitress was slumped in the corner whimpering. After about a minute to look around the owner, Jill, asked me “Well how did it go?”
I just laughed. Or cried. I'm not sure which. Maybe a little of both. I stood there in front of her, covered from head to toe in flour, eggs, grease and fried potatoes bits. I bit my lip hard to stop whatever involuntary convulsions I was having and said “Ok, I guess.”
To her credit she just went over, poured a cup of coffee, black, strange that, sat at the corner of the counter and said softly. “You have never cooked a day in your life have you?”
To my credit I replied “No.”
She took a long pull on her brew and stared at the counter. After a while she used a butter knife to scrape something off the top. “Well,” she said still looking at the spot where the knife left a scratch, “No complaints so I guess, so you can stay.”
I will never forget the feeling I had at that moment. It fell somewhere between exaltation and dread. I honestly did not know if I could go through that again. My eyes stung, my legs were jello, my feet had felt better after a twenty mile forced march and there seemed to be something wrong with my back. That last would be just the first time of many. Still I stood up straight, brushed the biggest lumps off my apron and said in a strong, commanding tone. “Great. I'll see you tomorrow.”, long pause as she stared at me. “I'll clean up the kitchen now.” I said and slunk away.
That was the beginning of six months of breakfast in purgatory.
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DATE: 04/02/2008 10:11:07 / MOOD: disappointed
This is my first blog, ever. I have been building, repairing, programming and messing with computers since long before the Internet ever existed but I have never actually blogged. Here goes.
You know how you go up to someone and say;
"Boy I had a good dinner last night."
And they say something like "What did you have." pretending to actually care most of the time.
You respond with "I had some braised beef tounge and brussle sprouts witn rosemary garlic butter and mashed blue potatoes with horseradish." licking your lips as you remember the experience.
As you talk you can see the range of emotions sweep across the other persons face. It usually starts with surprise, cross fades to disbelief and finally morphs into disgust.
"Gawd, I wouldn't eat any of that. Thats disgusting." they say, or something close.
Now it is your turn to emote. You both have the same first reaction, surprise, but yours fades to something between resigned acceptance and irritation because you know what is coming next. You ask the inevitable question;
"Have you ever tried it?"
"No, of course not!" is the answer.
You follow with the litany;
"If you have never tried it how can you say you would not like it?"
"I just know it wouldn't." They say. "That stuff just isn't real food."
"But it is eaten all over the world except here." is the required response I believe and it is followed with something like;
"People in other countries eat some strange things but that doesn't make them good."
You know you should give up here but you don't. You plod on, vainly trying to part the muddy waters with force of will alone.
"If I made it for you I bet you would like it." you say, already knowing that there is no way you will convice them. They just look at you like you have a celery stalk hanging out of your ear and they get that 'Crazy food nut' condesending look on their faces.
"No that's OK." they say. " I will stick to the real food we eat here." and make some excuse to talk to someone else that isn't quite so strange.
It really is a shame. It is not that you were expounding on the virtues of deep fried sea horses on a stick or auful bits in blood soup or the dreaded monkey brains. You just want to get someone else to try and expand their horizons a little bit and at least try a new food.
The emotional pitfalls of a foodie can be deep and lined with the spikes of failure, even when you are just trying to help.
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