Food Dreams and Nightmares

One of my dreams has always been to open a restaurant. The idea of being open for business, of creating wonderful experiences for people, of making a whole lot of people happy with food, this really excites me. Right now, I'm far, far too thin skinned to go into the business, but I hope to one day get the kind of training necessary to be able to stand on my own two feet and face the public with my food.

I don't have aspirations to be some kind of incredible chef, however. I just want to take care of people, feed them, give them a place where they can get out of the world for a while and enjoy an experience that lifts them up out of their noise, trouble and stress.

People who know the business tell me that I am describing a sure fire method for losing a lot of money: the best way to get more bucks in the food business is to move people through as fast as you can.

I have to believe that there is some happy medium between that model and the concept of people enjoying a meal, taking their time.

Anyway, I am hoping I will have time to realize this dream. In the meantime, I am always learning, as much as I can, about the restaurant business. I've even thought of taking a job as a busboy on the weekends so I can learn the business from that angle.

That brings me to talk about Hell's Kitchen. I don't usually watch Reality TV shows. Something about them really ticks me off, but that's a different rant for a different post.

However, Hell's Kitchen season 5 has caught and keeps my attention. On one hand, I am constantly astonished by the amount of emotional and mental abuse Ramsay levels on his participants. The entire show seems to be designed to put him in situations where he freaks out and screams. Like a bad, rage-a-holic father, Ramsay continues to berate people, push their buttons when he can find them, and does everything he can to increase the stress and pressure in the kitchen, in order to cause other people to freak out. Time and again, I heard the chefs saying that they didn't know why they were making dumb mistakes. A fellow who works in a steak house couldn't even grill steaks right!
This guy reminds me of a person I worked for once. By yelling and screaming and threatening people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he manages to put everybody off their A game. It's not surprising that people who cope best with his management style are people who were themselves abused as children; in an abusive relationship of any kind one learns the necessary skills to deal with irrational people.

So why do I keep watching? I think it is partly a therapeutic experience. Exposing myself to this kind of abusive situation lets me tell myself how I would respond in the situation. I can talk back to the feelings created. I can root for individuals who are competing and empathize with them. At the same time, some of it is truly informative.

It's possible that I will drop this pastime pretty soon, but for now I think it does provide both entertainment and an opportunity to recognize the craziness and flaws of management through rage and destruction. The show is about shredding 16 potential chefs, and in the end, there is only 1 who emerges victorious. That's a 6.25% success rate, which is a terrible statistic if you think of the show as a teaching experience. If we could replace Ramsay with a chef who cultivates, not eliminates people, how many awesome world-class chefs would be created? It would be more than just 1, but I think that the main problem is that building people up is not as interesting television as breaking them down.

A side note: I see that most, if not all, of the restaurants Chef Ramsay has helped in his other show, Kitchen Nightmares, have all but failed. The shows seem to represent him as being a godsend, but ultimately I feel as though his ideas and "help" are just as toxic as his personality.

French Press Coffee….yumm!

The other day I procured a very inexpensive Bodum French Press coffee maker. It says "3 cups" on the box, but it should say, "3 faerie pixie sized cups" which should translate as "1/2 Bear Coffee Bowl Mug." 

But who cares? I didn't need that much coffee in me, anyway. Here's the thing; regular readers of my blog will have known that I have a Coffee Bot in my house. The Coffee Bot stores, grinds, and then instantly brews wonderful hot coffee into a thermal carafe. Unfortunately, the years have not been too kind to the Coffee Bot and its front basket access door has become somewhat difficult to open. No matter how much work I do to clean it and make it better, it's still got this door problem. It's a real problem - one has to literally force the door open!

The other problem with the Coffee Bot is that it doesn't make small batches of coffee well. So here I was, making a whole pot of coffee every day which happened to be about 3 times as much coffee as I drank every day. I was pouring a lot of coffee down the drain and that did not make me happy from a "Carbon Footprint" saving the earth kind of perspective. I mean, think of the expense to just get the coffee beans to the Bot. Now think about how I'm only really using 1/3 of the output of said Bot. Very wasteful, to my mind.

Here is where the Bodum press comes in. I've been reading about French Press coffee for some time and have wondered about it. I'd never had any until I procured my little 3-cup wonder. I love it! Yes, I have to get geeky and use a thermometer to see if the water has been heated to 200 degrees in my spinny-teapot. Yes, I have to wait 4 minutes while it brews. Yes, it is a little messy to clean out, but not so messy as the basket in the Coffee Bot! Yes, it gives me just one lovely mug of coffee. But that coffee is so.....wow. It's smooth. It's free of bitterness. It's the kind of coffee I imagine that Ishmael Wang made in "<a href="http://solarclipper.com">Quarter Share</a>" by Nathan Lowell. It's really good. 

So now I get to have many, many more cups of coffee from a bag of beans, I get to have geeky water temperature science fun every day, and I get to have a really good cup of coffee. Not bad for me, my wallet, or the planet!

i think, though, that socializing will require me to get a bigger Press, cause this just makes one mug at a time. Luckily, Bodum makes 'em!