A Peek at the Professional Chef

As I've written before, Mr. Fresh Hell is a professional chef with over 20 years of experience - most of which he's had in New York.

Over the years, I've come face to face numerous times with people who have bought into several "myths" about what a chef is like in his personal time, and how he spends his off hours. So now let's play debunk the myth!

Myth: I hear all the time "Ooh you're so lucky to be married to a professional, he must cook wonderful gourmet food all the time." W-R-O-N-G! We can put paid to that myth with this reality: the last thing a chef wants to do when he gets home is keep on working by whipping up a lusciously romantic gourmet dinner for his wife. Take a look other professions - does the car mechanic routinely come home every night with a yen to tune up his family car? Don't those in medical professions dread cocktail parties at which they are constantly asked to perform spot diagnoses?

Mr. FH is great with restaurant leftovers, which more than makes up for the lack of daily gourmet fixings.

Myth: "I can't believe you have access to all this great food and you're not 300 pounds!", which subtly incorporates the first myth while providing snide commentary on my weight. Very often I'm left to my own devices for dinner, and it's not a 24/7 feast-a-thon. I blame chunky famous chefs everywhere (Paul Prudhomme, I'm so looking at you) for reinforcing the stereotype. Mr. FH is quite slim; he works in a hellishly hot kitchen, drinks a ton of water during his shifts, and rarely if ever eats or tastes his food while he works; he believes it unneccesary and condescending to his craft.

Myth: "Lucky you! You never have to cook." This bothers me a lot - I do have some skills and I actually like to cook. To be honest, I have learned more from Mr. FH than I could write - he's taught me how to cook lots of dishes, taught me to rely on my instincts in cooking, clued me into many shortcuts and professional methods, and cured me of my fear of knives (we do have a lot of sharp knives around, so that's one myth that I cannot debunk).

Even though Mr. FH has taught me a number of dishes he also enjoys making, our versions are not the same and reflect our personalities rather than a rigid adherence to recipes. On a tangential note: Mr. FH never writes any recipes down - he rarely follows written recipes, and prefers to have them deconstructed, if you will, before he cooks. Written recipes are static to him and without shape, if you will - to his credit, when he reads through a recipe and cooks it once, he'll never refer to the written version again. I fervently maintain that this quality is a combination of skill, experience, and pure talent.

Yet the day-to-day reality of a chef's life can be categorized by a recent unscientific inventory of the pockets of a pair of Mr. FH's chef pants before I sent them to the laundry: 3 kitchen towels, 8 produce rubber bands, 1 corkscrew, 2 pens and a coughdrop.

I dare anyone to find a romantic myth in that.

Blogiversary, The First

One year ago today, this blog came into existence. I was inspired not only by the sizeable number of blogs I was then reading on a daily basis, but by an extremely gifted and respected friend who had confessed to the creation of her own blog.

After a few fits and starts, the end result has become this place - an eclectic spot, as I see for myself while rooting around the archives.

I've written about aliens, both illegal and extraterrestrial. I've written about the places to which I've traveled, and the hopes and dreams that have followed me throughout those journeys - the occasions which have profoundly changed my ways of thinking, and the naieve romanticism I've had to leave behind.

I've written about confrontations with distant lands and unfamiliar cultures, precious and rare opportunities for me to embrace and thus explore my interest of the exotic and unknown.

I've written about books, food, current events, friendship, depression, anger, family, and cosmic indifference.

I've wept, exulted, and rolled my eyes heavenward countless times.

There are posts about gods, tolerance, perceived sexism, racism, feminism, cross-cultural marriage, and unrealistic expectations.

I've bastardized the elegant delineations of haiku to suit my purposes, with most of the verses composed while walking the streets of New York.

As one has categories of thought, so I've had categories of writing, such as File Under; In Which Our Heroine; Fresh Hell Family Stories, and This Week In Its Briefs.

To write that I never thought I'd stick with this creative endeavor for a year would be disingenous, I fear - as writers perhaps we all appear astonished that time has passed so quickly and that time itself can be encapsulated so neatly by our prose.

I believe in what I write and I continue to believe it has some small worth. To approach the blank space of the computer armed with this paltry weaponry should strike one, does strike one as hubris; not the monumentally life-changing essential component of human tragedy kind, but the garden variety recognizable as quaintly quotidian kind.

Which leaves me inordinately proud.

Tis The Season

I, like a good many people, am paying the lion's share of my attention to politics and reading a lot about it, both through books and blogs. Which is probably why I'm not writing so much.

I've discovered my creativity is rather flighty-one minute there, the next gone far away, and the amount of blog posts I devote to my inability to write is frustrating to me, not to mention my wee group of reader(s).

There are some tremendously talented writers in the blogosphere, and while I have been reading more than writing I can't help but think exposure to differing clear and lively prose styles will hopefully improve my efforts.

In hindsight, my education was rather slapdash, heavy on literature and history, light on formal logic. But I have a "never too late" optimism, and have, through the exposure to some keenly analytic intellects blogging on a wide variety of topics, been enjoying the lessons of applying formal logic and reasoning patterns to what are often my incoherent emotions and random thoughts. I think I'm getting better at critical thinking, as well; so hey, thanks bloggers!

I'm working now on a self-salutary post commemorating my first blogiversary, which will arrive soon, in which I shall toot my own horn pretty loudly.

Let's just hope that's not a day my creativity takes a vacation.

The Accidental Drive By Theory and Its Conception

My perception of society is that it's not particularly pleasant; strangers will not automatically love you, you will not constantly get your way, and at times it may appear that society is conspiring against you. Friends and family can act as buffers against the "slings and arrows" of society, but more often you have no choice but to marshal your personal strengths and dare to perform using your very own safety net.

That's a realistic yet not unkind notion of the callousness of human society which mirrors my view of the universe - it is an enormously complex and completely autonomous entity that considers you the random human, if it considers you at all, as a very small speck at best and while not intending to run roughshod over you at any given occasion, just might. Likely by accident. It won't mean to demolish you, of course, but shit happens.

During a small party at a friend's apartment a few weeks ago, the conversation turned to alien intelligence. All of the guests took a turn speculating on how an alien intelligence might view our planet and if it did show up, what its plans might be.

Many ideas were proffered amid much laughter - perhaps the aliens would just pass us by as backward and beneath their notice, with a wave of their many-fingered hands and a dismissive tsk toward our pathetic technology, which can best be expressed as the "Look! How Cool Are We - But We Have Ipods!" theory.

Then there was the less popular but no less plausible theory that alien conquerors would be interested in us from a biological standpoint and good only for dissection or anal probing, which finds expression in the "Humans As Scientific Experiments" theory.

The most bleak and no more or less credible than the others (and I admit this was my contribution) was the "Accidental Drive By Theory", where our entire universe would be inadvertently blown to smithereens by an alien with a big gun who simply couldn't aim straight. (Milky Way Galaxy completely destroyed? Oops. My bad. Quite sorry old chap.)

Since we seem to be on the verge yet again of annihilating ourselves, taking refuge in tipsy party imaginings may be frivolous.

Then again, we may only be left with a sense of humor in the end, and that's a pretty big safety net.

File Under: The Job and Its Nonsense

Most of what I do for the various Executive Cupcakes I've worked for during my career has been the unraveling of various bits of administrative red tape. I happen to be rather good at it. The prevailing wisdom is that success at administration involves being overly consumed with details - I'm not. What I can do rather well is translate jargon and convert it into language a Cupcake can then easily understand. It should come as no surprise that the average Executive Cupcake isn't patient enough to sort out jargon for itself; after all, It is busy saving the world, attending important meetings, putting out client fires, plowing the company into the ground, wheelbarrowing their money around or whatever it is Cupcakes do with their valuable time.

But another piece of prevailing wisdom that I wish I didn't have to constantly debunk is that just because I have a talent for administrative work that I necessarily like it. I don't, not at all; it just comes very easily for me. However, true challenges don't show up on my desk very often. With the explosion of the Internet, my role has changed in response. I couldn't function without it, quite frankly. How else would I be able to find a company in England which reproduces antique billiard table lights, map a route from Paris to Calais, or obtain the hours of the Modern Art Museum in Istanbul without ever leaving my desk?

Wise aged veterans may remember that once upon a time the New York Public Library had a reference desk one could call for answers to obscure or arcane questions. Having not used them in at least 16 years, I have no idea whether this desk still exists. Perhaps I'll Google them and check.

I've also gotten very skilled in putting together complicated travel itineraries - after six years of working for the Cupcake Emeritus, who is inordinately fond of frequent flyer miles and who takes several European trips per year, my knowledge increases with little effort. I certainly don't wish to know the fine print of the major airlines' award travel programs and that of all of their partner airlines, but I could probably pass that test with flying colors. I wish I could wipe my mental slate clean after every tortured jargon-translating session with an airline representative. Better yet, if I had dandy gold ingots in my pocket for every minute I've spent during those conversations I would find more to smile about.

The secret to the excellent service I receive is quite simple - I've learned to speak their jargon, and it marks me with an indelible brand of the insider. Also, I always remain reasonable and I win them to my side by talking to them like regular people, not faceless entities. If I can share a joke or make them laugh, it's almost a given that they'll take the time to work a little harder for me.

Never bullshit a bullshitter, so don't tell me I'm doing a fabulous job; I'll automatically doubt your sincerity and promptly speculate on why you believe flattery may influence me - I do a good job because I'm a professional with high personal standards and not for praise.

I butter up folks for a living simply to get what I want out of them, so if you're a reluctant or awkward courtier I will notice immediately and discount your words accordingly. A sincere expression of thanks does the trick - but then again, there's nothing like gold ingots...

Haiku - The Last Few Weeks

As I can't for the life of me think of anything witty or interesting to write, I decided to render the last few dramatic weeks in a series of haiku. A few of my wee group of readers will get the small jokes found within and be able to follow along easily. Other readers will perhaps struggle to find either levity of any kind or will not be able to build a storyline. However, trust me when I write that this is the only way I can think of to purge the events out of my brain without resorting to more drinking than I already have.

Drinking beer at JFK,
Strange man smells of black pepper,
Enroute to L.A.

JetBlue has nice seats;
Personal tv is grand.
But no food - I starve.

No one smokes out there.
It's not like I kill puppies.
Oy, the dirty looks!

I will get no sleep,
Talk all night to crazy girl-
He doesn't want you.

Sunrise brings no change.
Marriage is kaput, okay?
Face reality.

I predicted such,
But no one listens to me,
Clear voice of Reason.

Best part of L.A.
Sadly, were all the cheap cigs.
The rest was pure crap.

On the way back home,
Thank God for JetBlue headphones!
Tune out Crazy Girl.

Big shout out to home;
Good friend brings beer, hears my tale.
Helps me deal with her.

Computer and phone-
Not mine at all, oh my no!
At all hours - damn chat.

"I want second chance."
Marriage is kaput, again!
The facts are quite stark.

More phone messages
Than a sane person would leave,
But that's Crazy Girl!

She sneaks out early,
Flies to L.A. on a whim-
Surprise! Second chance?

No second chance, there-
Time to face reality.
Sad story, but true.

Homeward bound at last.
Crazy Girl - learned anything?
I don't believe so.

We tried hard to help-
With logic and self-respect.
Our toolbox is full.