How Do You Know When It's Done?

Every time I put a tray of muffins or crackers or sliced bacon into the convection oven, I turn to the person I'm helping and ask "How long should I leave it in for?" Inevitably the response, whether it's coming from Annie with a beleagured grin or from Wally with a mischevious simplicity, is "Until it's done." I roll my eyes. "Okay, that's helpful..." If you grow up on recipes, which are essentially formulas, you almost always anticipate a clear sign of completion to a dish. The bread puffs up, the pot of cream erupts with small bubbles, the butter's milk solids and fats separate. And recipes promise times to go with those indicators--10 minutes, 15 minutes, 2 hours. Those times enable you to walk away, do something else, forget about it for a bit.

But in this kitchen, you have to be present. You know that the crackers will be done when they're crisp and just turning golden on the edges, but how exactly long that will take, you can't say. If you don't wear a watch in the kitchen (and many people don't), you clock the duration of time by how much you manage to get done while waiting for something else to finish. It takes me exactly the time of fetching the oysters, Littleneck clams, ice and bucket of tools for the crackers to finish.

The scheduling of flights back to New York have structured the ending of this project, but what really tips me off to my departure is the light bulb going out. In the track lighting above our station, one of the lights has gone dark--a bulb Wally replaced the week I arrived. "It's a sign!" I moan with sadness as we look up at it tonight.

"Maybe it's just not meant for that socket," Annie says, as she pulls together her garnishes.

"Is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?" I ask her, half-teasing, half-truly wondering what she means.

"Hah...no, not a metaphor. But hey, if that's how you want to read it..." she laughs.

How something's done may have everything to do with how much you enjoy it--and how ready you are to move on when it stops becoming enjoyable. The challenge is useful in continuing to see what you do as "important," so when it stops becoming a learning experience, it stops becoming fun or valuable. I've got so much more I could be learning, and ultimately what I've gained by being here has a lot more to do with soaking up community and atmosphere than actual skills. The attitude of a kitchen, the values of a community where everyone has a connection to what they eat, this is what I'll take away and think about most. But the timing is everything--as I get ready to pack up, the season is finally arriving. For tonight, in essence our July 4th dinner, everything is coming to a head--packed tables, extra supplies. I'm preshucking oysters to lay out on ice, to minimize the waiting time (a good thing too, since the first order in is for 18 of them.) It will be a crowded night, one that necessitates a lot of focus and patience. (I will most likely be standing back as Annie and Wally tackle the rush.)

"Yeah, you kinda picked the wrong time to come," Geddes says, as he slices into a massive piece of just-caught salmon for tonight's service. "I mean, every night in July will be like this, just packed."

"Well, I'm far from done learning," I say. "And it was good to come in a slower month, if only to have more time to take it in."

"Oh sure. And you never really stop learning. I've taken time over the years to do lots of 'remedial things.' You know, chopping garlic and onions, nothing else. Just working on my skills."

Knowing that even someone as Zen-ly creative and efficient as Geddes would take time off just to whip himself back into shape is a huge consolation. And it's a consolation, in general, to know that my learning wasn't at the expense of the kitchen's running smoothly. I can't do everything, but the little things I can do felt important and necessary.

"Yeah, Tuesday's gonna be...hectic," says Wally, raising himself up on the cold station so he keeps his newly twisted ankle off the ground. "I mean, you think of all the little things I forget. The garnishes, the oysters..."

"Well, all the stuff I know how to do," I retort.

"Yeah, but I'll have to remember them all again."

"Hah, that'll be a rude awakening."

And yet, as I'm watching them go through service, a night with busy patches despite long periods for talking and laughing it up, I realize that this kitchen will absolutely go on functioning after my departure. Angela will watch each ticket and methodically assemble her dishes, moving smoothly and deliberately between each stage of plating. Chris will zoom from steak to chicken to pork in the same of a nanosecond, and sear each dish to perfection. Wally will plate up elegant salads that look more like works of art than edible dishes, and though he won't have met to race against, he'll do just fine. And Annie will look at a long ticket with multiple modifications and tackle it with the grace of a figure skater, moving from freezer to plate to window without a single stumble.  I'm barely making anything tonight, minus a few orders of blue greens and ice creams, but it's a chance to take in what Osa asserted last night: "I've never worked anywhere else where people are so excited about what they're making." I've been an asset, but I'm also barely a blip--the kitchen will definitely keep functioning without me. All they need are customers to keep serving.

And all of this comes from, and maybe in spite of, a continued assessment and pursuit of "what works." After a Friday night filled with meat orders--nothing but chicken and steak all night, despite the newly opened salmon fishing season--Angela and Geddes agree to tweak the side dishes for the salmon to maximize its popularity. Instead of offering it with lentils and chopped olives as we had yesterday, tonight we swap it out for tiny roasted new potatoes, a shaved fennel salad with hints of basil, and an orange aioli. It's still a sophisticated dish, but more traditional than before, and it sells like gangbusters. "Sometimes you just hit the sweet spot with the customers," Angela says as she wipes down her station after family meal. "I used to work at this restaurant in Seattle--little neighborhood place. And we had this chicken dish--roast chicken, potatoes, garlic jus, nothing too complicated. But we would always sell tons and tons of chicken. And eventually the chef was like 'Sorry, guys, we're keeping it on the menu.' I mean, it's predictable, but people would come in every night just to have the kitchen. So if that's what people wanted, and liked, then that's what we'd give them."

Giving someone what they want--satisfying an unnameable hunger or craving--is maybe the best way to know that you've done your job. If a steak comes back underdone, or a runner comes back with a request for more sauce, more dressing, a second helping of strawberry shortcake, you start to get the sense that you and you alone can meet that need and fix that oversight. And when a server comes back with good news--a customer rhapsodizing, saying "The black cod was extraordinary"--it's enormously gratifying. "It puts the wind back in my sails," says Angela, "when I know that they like what I'm doing." The preparation is much more than just another task to complete--it becomes a real gesture of generosity towards another hungry person. They walk out full, drunk, and happy--this may well be the highlight of their week, the thing that made everything better in retrospect.

And feeling that sense of purpose on the prep end makes all the difference. As we wrap up the night, and as Chris pours me a glass of Tempranillo, he tells me that he's always felt a pull to this profession. "In 10th grade, they brought a career counselor to our school and asked, "who knows what they want to do for a living?' I was the only one that raised my hand...because I knew I wanted to be a chef. And that sent me on my way, into vocational training. And I've worked lots of other jobs, man...I've been a mechanic, a carpenter, a store clerk, a chimney sweep, a stone mason..."

"...And you just keep coming back to this."

"Well, yeah. It's what I'm good at. It's my passion. And all through school, we were getting this emphasis on learning computers, knowing computers so that we could get good jobs. But I know that this is something a computer can never really do."

"It's a much more organic process." I sip on my wine, which carries just enough bitterness for me to wonder if it's coming from the wine or from my sadness in departing. I envy Chris for having so much certainty in his day-to-day work. I'm jealous of Angela's sense of validation from how customers respond. I wish I could soak up this proximity to useful work, this immersion in a life of service, and bring it back with me to mix into my office job. Would my emails then carry the same feeling of necessity, of urgency, as my completion of a order ticket?

I snatch up a paper copy of tonight's menu and pass it around to the servers, collecting little tokens of their farewells like signatures in a yearbook. Their notes are teasing and sweet--Darlene calls me her "Greek Goddess," for my newly sun-soaked nut-brown skin. Our host Christopher teases me for sneaking into the back of the first week's wedding. Wally reminds me not to drop the nuts. Chris gives me a bear hug so big and warm I almost tear up with appreciation. If this were a comedy about a misfit sports' team, there'd be a lot of winks and begrudging smiles and probably a nuggie or two. But this may be what I miss the most--the people, the jokes, the chatting in between moments of frenzied preparation. I will miss the people that make it happen every night, with focus and humor and joy. Those are the ingredients I most wish I could take back with me...

Wednesdays are for Self-Mutilation, or How Overconfidence Made Me Lose My Fingertip

I should've figured that coming off Tuesday's catered dinner on such a high note would leave me vulnerable in the kitchen. I was coasting on a sense of hard-won confidence and invincibility, and my first few hours of prep today were smooth-sailing. Annie puts me to work rolling out biscuits for cobbler, and I'm doing everything right--using the right measuring cups, folding the dough properly, cutting out rounds without any weird residue or flakiness.

 I know to get right in line when Geddes passes out slivers of his almost-ready house-made coppa, more original meat made from the Mangalitsas.

And I know to fill up my plate fast when family meal goes out and includes more of those delicious duck skin chicharones. 

(And for those of you debating the composition of our family meals, it isn't nearly as starch-heavy as you might expect...dinner's a little more so, since we go through the leftover potatoes and risotto from the night's service, but lunch is fairly light on the carbs and fats. Chris tells me Geddes almost never includes heavy-duty cheese use in the restaurant's menu, since it's high cost and often low-flavor. I'm grateful for this, since it cuts down on the unhealthiness of the staff meals, and because it leaves me to flavor my lunchtime taco with fresh salsa and avocado instead of sour cream and grated cheese.)

I know plenty of things by now—to know that we need to run off a new batch of rhubarb for cobbler, that we need fresh tarragon and borage and mint for dessert garnish, So given all the things I think I know, you’d think I’d know to pay attention when Wally asks me to run off a few golden beets on the mandoline for our special salad.

For those of you haven’t worked with a mandoline before, it’s an incredibly useful tool: it lets you shave ingredients into very thin slices, which often makes for a very thin wide cooking surface and for a beautiful appearance. With beets and raw vegetables like fennel and onion, they’re especially ideal, because it gives you a thin slice of flavor rather than a huge chunk of it. However, their blades—steel, porcelain, or otherwise—can be extremely sharp, and as you’re running your vegetable against the blade, it’s easy to slip and cut yourself. And before I know it, that’s exactly what I’ve done—sliced off a good one-square centimeter of my right index finger and fingernail.

I’m gushing blood and run to the first-aid station to wrap my hand in paper towels. It feel like a deep cut, my finger stinging and throbbing as I hold it tight to staunch the bleeding. I take one look at the cut and immediately have to look away—it’s like I’ve revealed a cross-section of a tree, as I can see the rings of meat under the tip of my finger. Wally follows behind me, and tells me to sit down and rest my hands on top of my head (to minimize blood flow through my body, and to keep the injury above heart level.) Angela and Chris soon wander over, as I’m sitting on a bucket of flour holding my hand in the air. “You know, if you want to stop the bleeding right away, put your finger in some lemon juice. Or bleach. Or vinegar.”

I give Chris a look. In his 42 years of cooking, he’s cut himself numerous times, and never once needed stitches. But that doesn’t mean I’ll take his word on first aid.

“I mean, it’ll hurt like hell, but it’ll stop the bleeding.”

I decide to continue holding my hand in the air. One of our servers for the night, Nate, stops by and takes a look. “Oh, that’s a good one!” he said. “Nice clean cut. You won’t need stitches, that’ll heal pretty nicely on its own. The dull cuts are the worst.” He turns to go back inside, then looks back. “Did you find the fingertip?”

It’s be funny if it wasn’t so embarrassing. It doesn’t hurt enough for me to cry, but it’s more than a little embarrassing to be holding my hand like a mortal wound when I’m surrounded by people who’ve done this to themselves countless times over their careers. Geddes tells me about the time he cut himself as he was preparing to plate a dinner for 300 people. “A diner drove me to the clinic, where I told them to stitch me up fast so I could go back to work. And I went back and did the dinner.” Another time he simply strapped on some Band-Aids and tied a rubber glove up at the wrist—only once he had a free moment could he open it up and pour out the accumulating blood. Such is life in a kitchen—you can’t take much time to recover when the tickets keep coming in. I sit down in the kitchen garden to rest, cursing not out of pain, but out of remorse that I’ve put myself out of commission.

As a sweet gesture to distract me, Luke has me walk out with him to the edge of the dining room lawn, where the land drops off to a cliff overlooking the ocean. He’s carrying a big plastic bucket of fish scraps—long strips of sturgeon skin, hunks of unusable halibut and salmon, full handfuls of bone and scales. He scoops some up in his hands, and flings it over the edge of the cliff. Before I can see where it’s disembarking from, an enormous bald eagle swoops down and snatches up the meat, carrying it back to its nest.

Turkey vultures and hawks start to circle in the air, watching as Luke throws each hunk of fish out to them. It’s an amazing sight, and a great show for the early-evening diners out on the patio. I almost forget about the throbbing of my finger.

Eventually the bleeding slows, and I come back inside where Wally helps me bandage it up properly (lots of Neosporin, two Band-Aids, and a bit of masking tape to hold it all together.) It makes sense that Wally would be the one to help me out—not only did he cut himself last week, but he’s also the one constantly showing me how to properly wrap up our station for clean-up. Good with plastic wrap, good with kitchen first-aid. And he shows me something Nate has written up in my absence.

And yes, that note at the bottom is for what to do with the “special” leftovers: “rolling into little piggy toe mousse; char-cut-erie plate.” For the first time in the night, I tear up. It’s such a hilarious, sweet gesture from my coworkers, who’ve all been here before, and I get weepy knowing at this sort-of rite of passage. Luke takes a look at the write-up. “$75.00? That’s far too cheap. I mean, you’ve got a limited supply.” “Yeah,” I say. “But who knows who else might be able to contribute ingredients?”

 I slip a rubber glove over my hand and go right back to the cold station, helping Wally assemble salads and desserts and keep up with the fairly busy night. Later in the night Geddes helps me swap out the bandage, and cuts the fingertips off a glove so I can have more use of my non-injured fingers. (When he first suggests it, I think he’s recommending I cut off the rest of my fingertips to make things easier. I blame this on the blood loss.)

As the night wraps up, I start to feel that big drop-off of energy, and one sip of Chris’s special wine for the night, an excellent 2006 Sauvignon Blanc, starts to leave me woozy. Thankfully I can load up on iron and carbohydrates at family dinner—a big pot of rice and beans, and a salad heavy with nuts and leftover crab. Wally wraps up my finger once more, and I stumble home, holding my hand aloft like a trophy. I down a few ibuprofen and collapse into bed.

Friday: The Mad Rush

Morning hike into town, and I get just lost enough to work up a sweat. On the way, with no warning in sight, an enormous bald eagle swooped low over a nearby fence, carrying a whole fox in its talons. The animal snags on a fence, and the eagle loosens its grip. It's barely five feet away from me, but I'm frozen to the spot. The eagle doesn't go back to reclaim its breakfast, but instead circles back up into the air and flies off. I wait until it's out of sight (in case it decides to divebomb me), then peer in at the fox. It's clearly dead, but also cleanly dead--its belly fur remains snow white, its muzzle still wet with dew from the early-morning grass. I make far more mess with my breakfast than this eagle does, and I almost feel jealous at its efficiency. A few paces farther down the road, a few deer cross the street. A bicyclist crosses between each of them, but they don't go scampering back into the woods. Instead, they each pick their way steadily across the road, disappearing into a nearby meadow. They watch me as I pass them by, but there's nothing so threatening about me that would make them bolt.

I'm suddenly feeling very small and insignificant to the life going on around me. The animals are far more adjusted to Orcas than I am, and they've carved out routines that make sense to them. I am the intruder in this environment, not the eagles or the hawks or the deer on the highway.

And for the first time since I've been here, I feel like one when I get in the kitchen. Annie's back from her two days off, and already I can feel myself aiming for perfection in her presence. Maybe Wally expected very little of me--except, maybe, to keep up with him--but when Annie sets me to work on chopping rhubarb and strawberries, I'm a little disappointed. Shouldn't I be learning something new, showing her what I can do? I'm eager to demonstrate my skills, and probably a little overconfident, so when the dinner rush hits, I'm suddenly flustered and more than a little overwhelmed. The tickets start coming in at a rapid pace, and they're all long, complicated orders--3 plates of different combinations of ice cream, 6 different salads with different modifications, and a handful of oyster-shucking projects that leave my hands aching, even as I try to sweettalk the oysters, begging them to open. And I commit the following mistakes, in order:

1) In plating a slice of the chocolate cashew tart, I neglect to think about why the dish is positioned the way it is: instead of laying down sesame seeds as the bed for the ice cream scoop (so it doesn't wander all over the plate), I scatter them across the center. The ice cream slides everywhere, and I have to replate the whole thing.

2) I'm having a helluva time scooping ice cream--every spoonful seems to either mush into pure liquid or stick to the smooth and come off in big icy globs. Annie tells me to dip my scoop in water to make the scooping easier, but getting that perfect smooth ball is still a problem. When she scoops and plates ice cream, it could be a glamour shot in Gourmet. I toss the first plate and try again. Ice cream and sorbet, I decide, are my nemesis. They are impossible to scoop, and required on almost every dessert. Damn you, customers, who we must appease with frozen treats.

3) I'm hurrying to run a cobbler out of the convection oven, and accidentally smash the top of it with my oven mitt. I'm also putting the candied ginger into the crevices of the dish, rather than scattering it across the top, creating more problems for myself. We cover it up with ice cream and send it off. I spend the rest of the night handling the cobbler dishes with my bare hands, just to be sure nothing else gets crushed.

None of this is technically catastrophic--we still send the food out on time, and no customers send complaints back to the kitchen--but I'm hyper-aware of how many things Annie is correcting in what I do. The logic of the kitchen hasn't become intuitive to me yet: I don't immediately connect certain plates with certain dishes, or certain orders of preparation to final tasting experience. And because it isn't second nature to met yet, I start to wonder and question if all these steps are necessary. Why does it matter that I use a chilled plate for the blue greens and organic greens salads, but not the spinach salad? Why should it matter that I scoop a round ball of ice cream versus an oval one? But then a second wave of self-flagellation comes over me--why is it so hard for me to remember and repeat these steps? Do I assume that, because I've eaten in fancy big-city restaurants, each element on the plate should be second-nature to me? And what kind of a jerk would I be if I treated the deliberate choices of these chefs as ephemera to my own appreciation of the dish?

Disgust and defeat wash over me as I stand at the prep station, staying by the wall as Annie and Wally clean up the remaining big orders during the rush period. I feel like an intern again, and when I'm called upon to whip up a spinach salad (greens + roasted cipollini onions + mustard dressing/herbs/S&P, garnished with hardboiled egg and bacon), I'm floundering and swearing like a longshoreman. I try to pile my greens as Wally has told me--"criss-cross, like you're playing Jenga"--and they slide out of my constructed tower into a plate-spreading mess.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," I say, as I try to reassemble my tower while spooning on the chopped eggs. The greens collapse under the weight of the egg--it's now more like a trashpile than a tower. "Fuck you greens," I mutter, trying to fluff them up with my fingers. I fish the hot chunks of bacon out of the pan with my bare hands, swearing even more as the bacon grease stings my fingertips.

"You know," Wally says as he sidles up, "you can use the tongs to place those." He reassembles my salad and tops it with a nasturtium blossom. It looks perfect, effortless.

I guffaw a little--partly because he's right, and partly because I was too focused on doing things correctly to also do things logically. "No shit, Sherlock," I laugh. "I'm just doing things the hard way." I don't know how he moves the salad around so gently, but I wish I had his touch. He caresses the greens--I'm manhandling them.

"It'll get easier," says Wally as he loads up another bowl with greens.

Either that or I'll start doing things that make more sense, I think.

Even though I'm covering the non-rush orders fairly well, I'm still disappointed in myself enough to keep making mistakes. Fishing four hot cobblers out of the convection oven, I sear the top of my hand on the grill rack, leaving a tender pink welt. Annie watches me shake my head in shame as I run the burn under cold water.

"Anything I can do?" I ask her, as the sting starts to dissipate.

"Nope...Wally's prepping a fruit plate, and I'm taking care of wedding prep for tomorrow..." She watches me as I straighten up, my face blank with frustration, exhaustion, or both. "And, you know, we're just making food."

She's looking at me with a wry, weary smile, the kind that you only get once you start to see your job as a job. It's a smile I'm sure I've held many times in publishing--a smile that says, Yes, what I do is important, but it's not the end of the world. 

"Don't beat yourself up," she says softly. "This isn't New York--and I'm not saying that because we're less professional, or less ambitious or competitive. It's just that...you don't have to be stressed out here. You can move at a more normal pace. You have time to learn things. And we make mistakes all the time. The trick is learning how to get over those mistakes, how to keep them from affecting you."

"I know," I say. She's got a hardiness that I haven't yet mastered--in any jobs, friendships, or in really any aspect of my life. "I guess I just get bent out of shape when I want to do something well."

"That's cool," she said. "But just know that while you're getting stressed out, I'm never going to get stressed out. So I'll be here to help. You don't have to do everything right away."

I'm just like an intern again--out of my depth, for the first time in ages, and learning something new. Perhaps the adrenaline rush I'm experiencing is more about the novelty than about the nerves.

Thursday: Sampling Lardo and Bacon Marmalade, and Hitting a Groove

Thursday night arrives like a blessing--another slow night, to learn as much as I can while the pressure's off. Thankfully there are 15 reservations on the books, which means at least a good number of orders to take and salads to finesse. We've got a wedding on Saturday that will require our full attention, and having no idea what that will demand of me, I'm happy that Wally's able to walk me through the steps of the kitchen today. He starts me on the big demand we'll have to fill during the wedding: for lots and lots of bread.

Wally walks me over to the giant mixer in the back room, where I load in 8 pounds of flour and 3 1/2 pounds of "starter"--a big batch of dough in which yeast is still reproducing. It's gloppy and smells powerfully sour, which makes for a great crusty loaf of sourdough bread. The recipe for the starter was passed down through Maryann's side of the family, carried with them all across their journey through the Willamette Valley over a century ago. "They used to sleep with the starter," Maryann tells me as we roll out loaves of dough for rising, "to keep it warm enough to keep growing." This starter makes the bread that's served every night in the restaurant, and every Sunday as pizza dough. It has had a permanent place at the Inn ever since it opened, and it's the perfect slice of table bread--a soft center and a crunchy crust. Wally's making 4 batches worth tonight, which should take us through the wedding and into pizza service the day after.

It's also a good night to take a closer look at the charcuterie--Geddes brings out a loaf of a thick marble-white substance. For a second I worry he wants to experiment with substituting Mangalitsa lard for table butter...not something that makes me too excited. But no, he wants to start including house-made lardo on the charcuterie plate. Wally slices off a piece, as thin and translucent as onion.

"Do you want a taste?" he asks, curling it off his knife. This is only the first in the many tasting moments I'll have all day, and I start to formulate a conspiracy: are these lovely island chefs plotting to fatten up the city girl before she returns home to the world where supermodels walk the streets and unrealistic expectations of beauty are endorsed everywhere? I consider the dangers of the kitchen diet--eating breakfast at 10 am, staff meal at 3:00pm, then family meal at 10pm. But then I also consider the daily walks I'm doing, the climbs to and from my bed, and the 8 hours of standing at attention behind the cold station. I place the slice of lardo on my tongue, and it melts instantly--buttery smooth and redolent of bacony goodness without any of the chewy burden. "It's delicious." I say, but I make Wally put it away before he can offer me another slice.

Still up for tasting, I let Chris beckon me over to take a taste of his Mangalitsa bacon marmalade, which will be coating the pork entree served on tonight's menu. He's cooked up the bacon until it's crisp, then sauteed onions in the bacon fat, and tossed both together with some red wine vinegar. One taste and I'm convinced that he could be selling this as a jarred commodity--it's perfect for spreading on thick slices of morning toast, gooey and delicious to eat with scrambled eggs.

As I'm tasting the marmalade, I start to think of all the individual items that would make great take-home items from the Inn's menu...including, perhaps, my own fixed-up version of the peanut butter cookies. Yesterday's lard-baking experiment didn't go so well, and I picked through various options for fixing the too-dry crumbly cookie dough. What did using lard take away that made the cookies so dry? I threw the question out to the audience at Foodpickle, and someone responded with this comment: "Lard is 100% fat while butter is 81% fat and 14-18% water. If the recipe you used called for butter, than you could try adding some moisture back into the recipe. I'd try adding some milk or water." I decide to try it, and drizzle a small portion of the dough with heavy cream. I work it into the dough and sample little bites until it tastes buttery enough, then scoop it out onto a Silpat sheet.

And it works--the cookies come out moist, buttery, and addictive. I'm practically crowing with pride. "I fixed the cookies, what what!" I say to Wally as I drop a plate of them on the station counter. Geddes grins with his first bite, and I'm dancing with self-satisfaction. Chris gets why I'm so excited. "You know you're becoming a chef not when you can make something, but when you can correct something." But the real validation is when he reaches for his third cookie.

I'm coasting on my triumph as Wally and I prepare family meal for the day--rolling out a few balls of pizza dough and topping them with the leftover bits from the kitchen.

Geddes decides to phase out the chicken pâté he's been serving all week so he can start on a fresh batch of duck pâté, and so we spread it out on one of the pizzas. I'm a huge fan of chicken liver, but a full slice of it on pizza, topped with diced cornichons and pickled onion, seems a little too much for me. But as with most staff meals, every slice is snapped up.

The dinner rush comes as predicted--the wedding couple has arrived, so we send especially pretty dishes their way--but remains relatively calm. Wally has enough time to make a face in his ball of dough.

I wash more greens in the middle of service, as we seem to be having a rush on salads tonight, and spot a little visitor on one of our leaves.

This is the price you pay for pulling ingredients direct from the garden...and even though we have to compensate with extra vigilance as we set up our station, it's nice to remember how closely we're sourcing things.

As the night wraps up, there seem to be few dark spots. The wide callus developing on my right index finger is a reminder that I've been chopping--correctly, it seems, for the first time--for almost three days straight. Holding the knife properly and preparing food for eight hours a day has left me sore, but more skillful than I've felt in a long time. And I'm emboldened by what I've done well: prepare salads, finish tickets on time, win invites from my coworkers for hikes and bike rides and tastings of great ingredients. I dig into my plate of tacos at staff meal with gusto--learning to get by in this kitchen tastes great.