more stories from the kitchen

(just when i thought i'd worked that one out, sheesh, after six months of writing about my so-called profession, which is one third of the time i've actually been a cook, damn, which makes this about as long as i've stuck with anything professionally, excepting writing of course, which never goes away).

The line cook started to tell me her tale this afternoon, while I swept counters and creamed butter. How she isn't like the others at Abeille, how she doesn't do drugs or drink way too much, how she's nervous and new and tough but not cocky. How she's friends with the patissier because they work days. How she will have sex with the Chef in the walk in while the Chef's brokenhearted, hand still maimed, barely working, how it will be a secret from Anna, how this will mean that she, Angie, the line cook, is cheating on her girlfriend whom she loves, LOVES. How devastation wrecks a career/a restaurant, how we try to dis-place our love when someone doesn't want it anymore, and how we step up to help others we admire even if it means that our actions are suddenly strange to us, that we are no longer who we thought we were. Angie, the newest line cook, watching Chef, the one that everybody wants too much from.

Two more days of work and then a day off. We're prepared for biblical cupcake floods tomorrow. Probably we overcompensated and mised way too much, but it was nice to go in this afternoon and not urgently need anything. The FB market was slammed today, too. Some customer jerked his roller skates into our table and took out three full sheet trays of pastries. Barely apologized. Thank god it was toward the end of the market, and not anything I'd toiled over all day. I'm getting the hang of preparing for Saturdays there. Last week was slow, so I had lots of free time but today I barely got Sunday's bread pudding into the oven and had to rely on Juan to take it out because I had to leave! All my baked goods were done or mised, so the physicaly labor of it today was just traying, restocking, baking off and decorating.