The nice little slice of ham

Today I feel like death. My cold keeps returning in waves and at inconvenient times. I’m hoping a nice frosty Hoegaarden will help assuage the pain. I keep thinking of this section of MFK Fisher’s A Cordiall Water, when she talks about how the French always say that a “little slice of ham” is a good remedy for almost anything, from hangovers to renal cancer. I’m assuming that one is supposed to eat it, and not lay flat on a bed with a big slice of pig stretched across the torso or something, but I could be wrong. I don’t have any ham in my half-fridge. I have two-day-old tofu, marinated in Kikkoman teriyaki, and a gross hunk of week-old turkey. This probably won’t suffice.

Work was draining, and boring, and frustrating as usual. Highlights included lunch, which was Mark Miller’s pork and dried chile posole, served with red chile sauce and radishes, and dessert, which was some kind of unimpressive, dry chocolate cake rolled with chocolate-orange ganache. It’s pretty sad when the best part of your day is wolfing down a piece of mediocre cake off a paper towel while filing in a back room.

One of my coworkers is driving me absolutely bonkers. She is really, really, REALLY not bright. REALLY. Yet she maintains this attitude of haughty disbelief towards anyone that asks her a question, including customers and superiors. I almost pity her because she must have had a difficult life unknowingly projecting this incredible rudeness to everyone that approaches her. It is interesting to watch, because every situation escalates to a confrontation when the other person assumes she is being deliberately spiteful to them. This haughtiness, combined with the laughable ineptitude, is pretty much intolerable, but I take every opportunity to kiss her ass because I’m stuck in a room the size of a small broom closet with her each day. I think that’s the attitude most people on the staff have adopted, because they are all at such close quarters with each other that there is no other option. There are few other things that she does that drive me batty. Here is a compendium:

1) She doesn’t say culinary. She says cue-linary. I fucking hate that.
2) She employs the phrases “For crying out soft!” and “By jiminy” approximately 15 times a day. The first one really gets me.
3) She makes little flourishes with her hands while writing and when handing a customer’s credit card back to them.
4) She stares at me blankly for about four seconds when I first arrive each morning, because her pea-brain is somehow unable to register my presence, remember my name or recognize my face with any immediacy, despite the fact that I have been working with her for over a month, and we just saw each other twelve hours ago.

I’m done. I promise I won’t drone on and on about my boring coworkers. I will try to focus on the fabulous cue-linary aspects of my job. Today I got to type up another set of Mark Miller’s recipes. He digresses at length about various anthropological topics (I think he has a Ph.D.), and has this difficult habit of veering off into esoteric topics for minutes at a stretch while his eyes dart all around, almost as if the eyeballs are physically reaching into the corners of his brain to extract the information that is stored there. Unlike my coworker, Mark Miller is very smart. He has a professorial way about him in that he assumes a level of familiarity in his audience that is probably extremely optimistic. But it doesn’t really matter, because he talks for long periods of time about obscure things and all you are expected to do is listen, I think. I don’t mind this.

Anyway, he scrawled off a batch of recipes for tomorrow’s class, and it was my job to decipher them and type them up. They were classic chef’s recipes in that they specified very vague quantities, assumed the existence of mise en place, and featured very minimal directions. His poor class. Tomorrow they are going to get a packet to take home that instructs them to “Combine all ingredients in a big pot. Cook until soft. Blend and sieve.” He was, however, very specific about certain aspects of these recipes; he requested with some urgency that a certain word in the middle of a sentence be both underlined! and followed by an exclamation point. I choked back the horror of the unappreciated English major and complied.

Tomorrow will feature wine tasting in Napa with Alison and Nathan. Thank god! This week has been so grim, I might have to do a Sideways maneuver (which you should see if you haven't yet) and pour the spit bucket over my head or run off into the hills while guzzling an entire bottle.