One of the interesting things about cooking at Inspiration Cafe is that you never know who you're going to meet. The cafe relies on volunteers, who tend to be a diverse bunch. One day the House of Blues Hotel sends over a crew, the next you're cooking with a pair of teenagers who may have barely picked up a knife before.
Either way, the Kitchen is a great equalizer. You walk into a room with a bunch of strangers and five minutes later the place is humming, everybody with a job: peeling potatoes, washing produce, cracking eggs. A sense of urgency cuts through the small talk, and people you might not otherwise trust with a large knife seem to handle the responsibility just fine.
People react differently to the kitchen. Some are like fish out of water, but others, in the space of a few hours, really start to get it. As they work through a series of seemingly trivial tasks, they discover that there's more behind each than they might have realized. Peeling two or three potatoes isn't much of an achievement, but if you have to peel twenty or thirty -- or more -- it matters how you hold the peeler, and whether you brace the potato against the cutting board. When using a knife, you show them how they can curl the fingers of their free hand to avoid cutting themselves, and use their knuckles as a guide against the side of the blade. To mix pancake batter to the proper consistency, they need to observe how it behaves when ladled onto the hot griddle. Will it spread too thinly, or sit in a pasty lump? They discover the answer. Everything in a kitchen is simple, but they learn how simple things make all the difference.
You've done this before, so you help keep things moving. When they need a bowl for the spinach they've just blanched, there's one ready in front of them. Where do they potatoes go? There's a sheet pan waiting, the oven is preheated. When finished they go in that hotel pan which is already warming over the stove. As the setup materializes around them, they begin to sense the importance of what cooks call mise en place, or putting everything in its place.
When service starts you show them how to work three plates at once. The cafe is hardly a five star venue, but we try to serve the freshest food we can, timing everything so it all comes together warm. The eggs go into the pans on the stove; the pancakes are on the griddle; toast is underway. When it all starts to hum, they start to grin, picking up on the energy. Each plate should look appetizing; don't serve anything you wouldn't eat yourself. Wipe the crumbs off the rim, and garnish with berries or fresh fruit if available. It doesn't matter whether you're serving one person or a hundred, if you're a cook you can't not do this.
The goal is teamwork, and no wasted effort. Hopefully we hit our stride quickly, but some days go better than others. One way or another, the food goes out. Then service ends, we go our separate ways, and often you never see the same people back again. But you hope they may look at kitchens, and their food, with a new level of interest in the future.
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