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.