Category Archives: The Back End

Blessing or Curse?

  D**m you World Wide Web, d**m you Internet, d**m you too, all you excellent chefs who spend some of your precious free time blogging and sharing knowledge and information. If it was not for you and the other items on my list of things to curse right now I could have remained complacent in [...]

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The Wall

  Fairly regularly in the world of endurance sports you hear the term “hitting the wall”, in performance activities you get the term “in the zone”, and in the culinary field you have the term “in the weeds”. Well, I think I have finally hit the wall here, yesterday should have been the end of [...]

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Parting Ways, Part Two

  If I didn’t know better I would have to think that one of the co-workers read my last post on this subject on Sunday, immediately after I wrote it. As I walked in to work Monday morning the news of the day was that said co-worker was no more, he had just walked out [...]

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Never Trust a Skinny Chef

  There might be some truth in the old saying to “Never Trust a Skinny Chef”, at least from a patrons point of view. If the head of the kitchen is pleasantly plump at the very least you would know that he is probably eating his own cooking, or at least the food that is [...]

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The Toys of the Trade

  Give me a knife, and some room to work, a source of heat or two, and some food and I’ll cook, something anyways. Depending on the venue and the menu the actual tools vary considerably but this post is about the toys. The little, and not so little extras that make the job easier, [...]

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The Tools, and Toys, of the Trade

  Often, when reading the other blogs out there that I frequent, I come across posts, sometimes whole pages devoted to favorite, or essential tools, new toys or pieces of equipment of one description or another, people often are saying that they could not cook without “x”, or piece “y” is such a Godsend that [...]

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Hey! That’s Cheating

  As I related recently I have been reading Heat, an accounting of the earlier days of Mario Batali in his rise to celebrity chef status. At one point the author relates a passage wherein Mario is in Italy earning his chops the old school way, and the old woman who has learned all her [...]

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Shoemaker, NOT!

  When I first started this journey of blogging, and websites I had a bit of an idea of what I wanted to do with a website or two, I figured that I would certainly not be unique, in fact I knew of a couple of sites that were somewhat similar already, and my personal [...]

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Hell Week

  One of the things about being a chef, whenever people in general are having a holiday, that’s when it seems that we have to work harder. Christmas, yep, you bet, Christmas parties usually begin about the last week of November and last through until the first or second week of January. New Years Day, [...]

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Too many Cooks spoil the soup

  Or the menu, as would be the case right now in my place of employment. Recently we had the parent company we are working for implement a new menu on us. Now this in and of itself is not a bad thing, but after having the chef here create and implement the menu for [...]

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