I wasn’t nervous at all about walking into the kitchen of a 5 Diamond restaurant without any professional training, until a last minute email exchange with the Chef a few days before I was to arrive at the Herbfarm. “Just bring two good sharp knives, work pants and non-skid shoes,” he wrote nonchalantly. It was then that it dawned on me that I might be allowed to actually DO something and I started to feel giddy.
I spent the next couple of days getting my knives sharpened at the butcher’s, second guessing what was meant by “work pants” and “non-skid shoes” as though these were some kind of foreign words that I needed to decipher. The night before, as I walked a good friend to the door after dinner, she asked me if I had a food handlers permit. A food handler’s permit? I had let mine expire years ago and it had not crossed my mind that I should renew it. Thankfully, I had just read that the county offered the test online and by morning I had the permit tucked in my wallet and felt that I had averted a crisis.
My inclination, when nervous, is to step back and observe my surroundings carefully, listening to instructions with the concentration of a game show contestant on the million dollar question. This is useful because I am able to remain calm and not look like an idiot, but the downside is that my furrowed brow and hawk-like focus look like I am trying to come in first-place in an evil eye competition. I practiced smiling on my drive out to the Herbfarm and gave myself a mantra - “I am friendly! I always do my best!” I arrived wearing a smile, black wrinkle-free pants of the kind that I remember donning to work as a retirement home waitress in high school, my non-skid clogs and carrying two newly-sharpened German-made knives. I was ready to do my best.
I had watched enough celebrity chef TV shows to think it entirely possible that I would be yelled at by the Chef at some point over the next couple of days. The main job of most TV celebrity chefs is to hate all food that is not their own creation and make aspiring cooks feel worthless. This possibility did not deter me though. Getting tossed out of the Herbfarm kitchen wouldn’t be so bad, like getting bashed on the red carpet by fashion critic Joan Rivers - being ON the red carpet is good enough.
I spent the next couple of days getting my knives sharpened at the butcher’s, second guessing what was meant by “work pants” and “non-skid shoes” as though these were some kind of foreign words that I needed to decipher. The night before, as I walked a good friend to the door after dinner, she asked me if I had a food handlers permit. A food handler’s permit? I had let mine expire years ago and it had not crossed my mind that I should renew it. Thankfully, I had just read that the county offered the test online and by morning I had the permit tucked in my wallet and felt that I had averted a crisis.
My inclination, when nervous, is to step back and observe my surroundings carefully, listening to instructions with the concentration of a game show contestant on the million dollar question. This is useful because I am able to remain calm and not look like an idiot, but the downside is that my furrowed brow and hawk-like focus look like I am trying to come in first-place in an evil eye competition. I practiced smiling on my drive out to the Herbfarm and gave myself a mantra - “I am friendly! I always do my best!” I arrived wearing a smile, black wrinkle-free pants of the kind that I remember donning to work as a retirement home waitress in high school, my non-skid clogs and carrying two newly-sharpened German-made knives. I was ready to do my best.
I had watched enough celebrity chef TV shows to think it entirely possible that I would be yelled at by the Chef at some point over the next couple of days. The main job of most TV celebrity chefs is to hate all food that is not their own creation and make aspiring cooks feel worthless. This possibility did not deter me though. Getting tossed out of the Herbfarm kitchen wouldn’t be so bad, like getting bashed on the red carpet by fashion critic Joan Rivers - being ON the red carpet is good enough.
more to come...
1 comments:
Sounds like fun!!! I look forward to updates!
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