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Life
White poached chicken. Recipe here.
In another life, I worked in a commercial kitchen. I might even have mentioned it a time, or ten.
However, kitchen work taught me an awful lot of things, the least of which is that the amount of energy that goes into getting your meal on your table at a restaurant is astronomical.
For example, a brie cheese and herb stuffed chicken breast, with sundried tomato reduction sauce, chat potatoes and baby vegetables.
A popular dish in the kitchen.
So, a few days before you order your meal, I am chopping enough herbs to see us through the next 3 days of prep, generally 500g of each herb, parsley, dill, rosemary, mint and thyme. I have 40 chicken breasts defrosting in water in the kitchen sink and I am prepping vegetables. This included turning 10kg of carrots into batons, 10 broccoli and 10 cauliflower into florets, top and tailing 5kg of snow peas, peeling 10kgs of potatoes and putting them on to parboil whole, before chopping them into a dice, slicing 7-8 large zucchinis and then blanching the lot, before refrigerating everything.
You see, nothing in a commercial kitchen is done small scale, so while the chicken breast and vegetables is not a hard dish to prepare by any means, it is all done in bulk ahead of time, sometimes up to a week ahead. Prepped vegies were used for most meals, so we prepped the above amounts every 3-4 days.
Once the vegies are done, I’m hopeful that the chicken breasts will have defrosted enough to work with. A quick poke in the icy water lets me know I’m good to go, so I start to set up, stalling on needing to julliene a 20 litre bucket of stirfry mix.
First is the bain marie tray I’ll set the chicken in so I can fridge it afterwards. Then the cling wrap, catering size, set at the top of my chopping board. Then comes the brie – I need to cut 40 pieces of brie from the wheel and maybe an extra bit to nibble on. What? It’s a perk.
I set the plastic container of herbs up next to me, with the brie laid out on another piece of clingwrap, spaced out so they don’t stick together. I work fast, moving backwards and forwards, doing 3 things at once. Somewhere, in a trip to the coolroom, I’ve dumped the semi-defrosted chicken into a colander and set it above a bucket to drain while I finish prepping. I beg the apprentice to sharpen my knife because I’m not fantastic at that yet.
Once I start, I need to hit a rhythym, as fast as I can.
Pull out a sheet of clingwrap. Grab a chicken breast and in one motion, remove the tenderloin and any excess fat. Throw the tenderloin into a spare container, slice through the chicken breast to create an internal pocket, dip a piece of brie into the herbs and shove it into the cavity. Then slice the clingwrap off, wrap the breast and pop it into the metal bain marie container.
Repeat. Forty times.
Then scrub your hands, scrub your chopping block and knife, throw any remaining herbs out (chicken blood, cross contamination issues) and put everything in the fridge, well covered.
That’s the chicken done for the next few days service.
When an order comes in for chicken that that week, I don’t cook it. I’m on cold larder/desserts/dishes/general runner (depending on the night and whether the other kitchen hand is working), but I do run to the coolroom and grab the preprepared chicken from the fridge, in between doing everything else I’m doing – which sometimes, depending on the day, would be scrubbing walls with a scourer. Yay.
A chef grabs a handful of cooked diced potato from the bucket and sets it aside, ready to deepfry. The chicken probably takes the longest to cook of any meal, except well done steak because you can’t precook chicken (unlike the roast meals and various other things). The chicken is panfried to crisp the skin, before being thrown into the oven, still in the pan for 30 minutes.
A minute before it comes out of the oven, a chef drops the chat potatoes into the deep fryer, the serve of vegetables into the boiling water to reheat them and mixes a few tablespoons of pureed sundried tomatoes with some cream in a saucepan. All this while the chef is making another 4-5 dishes at once.
The chicken comes out of the oven, is sliced in half, set on the chat potatoes and the sauce poured over. The vegies are salted, buttered and put on the plate too, parsley is sprinkled and the plate is sent.
The customer, usually, appreciates how much work has gone into the dish, they enjoy it, they pay and they leave.
Let’s now look at cooking for children.
With children, the amount of effort I put into a meal directly corrolates to how much is eaten.
If I spend the morning prepping and then spend 2 hours cooking and bringing the meal together, you can guarantee that they won’t eat a mouthful. They’ll hate it, or be too tired, or too hyper, or SOMETHING.
They won’t eat it.
If however, I make a quick tomato sauce, pour it over pasta and serve it with grated cheese, they’ll whinge that there isn’t enough.
While family cooking means that there is always less work to be done than in a commercial kitchen, I sort of miss the satisfied feeling of seeing an empty plate come back and a quick report from the waitress on how much they enjoyed it. Not to mention missing getting to play with food for a living.
Cooking for children is definitely harder than cooking for a restaurant. Trust me.
However, commercial kitchens are more stressful. Give me a screaming baby over a screaming chef any day. At least I have a chance that the baby is screaming because it can, and not because I fucked up.
What would you prefer? Cooking in a restaurant for appreciative customers, or feeding your children day in, day out?
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Except for the busy fuck-off highway running along my front fence, I live in the middle of nowhere.
It’s great for a few reasons, lots of space, very little pollution, farmland all around. I get to watch the sheep and lambs in spring and the cows are constantly chewing my hose fittings on the communal farm pipe off and breaking them.
It means we can plant trees without worrying about how big they’ll grow and we can have animals on the property without anyone saying anything. Ducks? Sure! Let’s get ducks! And chooks while we’re at it. And a rooster to crow and wake us up.
It also means that an impromptu duck singalong doesn’t bother anyone. Except the chooks.
I get spectacular sunsets and sunrises, because I can actually see the hills surrounding my property..
Sunrise.
Sunset.
Of course, living in the middle of nowhere means that I am extra careful about my internet privacy. When you live in a suburb with only 6 houses in the main stretch, you can’t afford to let anyone know where you are. It’s not like being able to say I live in Hobart and knowing that so do 10,000 other people. Unfortunate.
I get to make up for it with views like this from my mailbox.
Winter has been horribly dry, as you can tell. We’re slowly getting some rain now and it’s amazing how fast things start to green up.
I’m hoping for a wet spring, because extra water is never bad.
These aren’t my paddocks by the way. These are the ones that have had the irrigators running, watering them all winter. Stupid weather when you spend all winter watering the paddocks so the stock can eat.
Of course, when you live in the middle of nowhere, sometimes your animals get confused about where they should be laying their eggs.
This duck for example, is sitting on the side of the road. Sure, she’s under my hedge, but on the wrong side of the freaking fence. When she discovered I was stealing her eggs from this nest, she started laying under the pine tree, next to the post box. Again – outside of my property. She’s come right now (I think) and she appears to be laying in the nesting boxes. Of course, I might be entirely wrong and she might appear in a few months, bringing ducklings from MILES away.
You just never know.
There are downsides of course, the closest supermarket is 30 minutes drive away and most of our shopping is done 45 minutes from here. All our hospital appointments require an hour of driving to reach and if we ever get pregnant with a 3rd baby, we likely won’t make it to the hospital on time. Also, an ambulance takes 20 minutes to get here, on a good day.
And it means the neighbours (the one further away, luckily) have roaring parties and rev their cars at god awful hours. But hey, we’d get that in the suburbs too.
All round, it’s pretty lovely living so far out.
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My skin is terrible. So terrible that in most photos of me, I utilise the power of the ‘heal’ tool in photoshop.
I think most of it is EDS and not healing very well, or very fast, but my skin = shocking. I get a lot of period related pimples and they take forever to heal, leaving me with giant red spots all over my face.
Sexy, right?
I’ve had some sucess with using an insane amount of vitamin C to help with healing, but as for skin products, I use very few.
So I’m asking your advice, my lovely beautiful internets on what works for you. My skin is combination/oily and at the moment, I use a garnier daily moisture cream and avon clearskin cleanser and warm water.
Obviously that regime is working SO WELL.
However, while the vitamin C isn’t really helping with the pimples and healing, it does seem to be having some effect on the bruises I develop. 80% of the time I don’t look like a beaten wife. I used to joke that someone seeing my legs would think that Nathan was hitting me. Luckily the bruising seems to be limited to my legs/bum/back, with a few on my upper arms. I don’t think I’d cope very well if I was bruising everywhere – lovebites are disgusting looking and even worse if they’ve just appeared for no reason.
So what do you think would work well for my face? My skin is quite sensitive and I’d like something that cleared up blackheads too, as *shudder* they are the scourge of my life.
Dammit, I’m broken enough, the least I could get would be awesome pretty skin! Wouldn’t it be nice if pimples stopped with the end of puberty?
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Seven died the other day. She followed our neighbour’s car onto the road and was hit by a car coming the other way. A stupid accident, a stupid mistake. Unlike Susie, this one wasn’t preventable, as Seven was an escape artist extraordinaire.
But this post isn’t about Seven. Not today.
Since Susie died, I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling the dogs home website, constantly looking at the dogs needing a home and wishing that Nathan agreed with me. All those sad faces, needing homes, dammit, I’ve got a good home and I want a new dog. I miss Susie a lot actually, and now Seven too, as much as I try not to think about it.
Eventually, I put my foot down and made Nathan take me and the kids to the dogs home – knowing that most of the time, the dogs are adopted before they get put on the website.
Of course, I fell in love with the 6 week old puppies because they’re just! so! cute! but they were all spoken for (fantastic).
We walked around all the kennels, my heart breaking for the dogs who didn’t have owners.
‘Look at that one. Pity we didn’t have more land, he needs a job to do,’ I said to Nathan as a 4 month old Kelpie x Blue heeler ran around his kennel, chasing his tail and bouncing excitedly at the sight of new people.
‘Oh! Look at her ears!’
‘Poor girl, you’re 9 and in the dogs home? Where did your previous owner go?’
And then, we found her.
Amy looked at her, nodded her head and said ‘This is our dog. We will take her home.’
She wiggled in the bottom of her kennel, every inch of her body pressed up against the wire, straining to be patted. She didn’t jump, or bark or whine, she just leaned into the wire and looked at us with giant pleading eyes.
‘She’s beautiful’ said Nathan. I agreed readily. A startling white patch over most of her face left me with the impression that one of her eyes should have been blue, not brown.
‘How old is she?’
I read her card. Six months, or thereabouts.
‘Still young enough to learn lots.’
‘Yep.’
‘How long has she been here for?’
‘Ummmmm, since the 30th June it says.’
‘Ah right, she’s only new then.’
‘Yeah.’
While we talked, we were busy pressing our fingers through the wire, stroking her head and ears. She pressed closer to us.
‘You like her?’
‘Yes.’
We wandered back to the front of the dogs home, looking at the puppies again.
‘Your decision’ says Nat.
‘Okay. We’ll ask about the pups first, because it’s very likely they’ve all got homes.’
5 minutes later, yes, the pups all had homes. So we asked about the lovely natured Border Collie, whom we both adored.
Now, before I say anything more, a 6 week old puppy is always going to be my preference, simply because they’ve not had time to learn any bad habits – it’s just how I think. But the look in the collie’s eyes, I was pretty sure she was our dog.
No. No prospective adopters for her yet, no holds, nothing.
So we started the ball rolling.
Almost 2 weeks later, a yard check (I emailed through photos), a conversation with the lovely girl on the phone and a deposit paid, she came down with a stomach virus and the desexing that was meant to happen didn’t.
So we waited a little longer, for her to get better, for us to get more ready. Of course, Isaac then broke his arm and if things are going to hell, you DEFINITELY need a puppy around the place to take your mind off things.
But, when we brought her home, she was just perfect.
And this time, this dog, she’s going to be a mostly inside dog. I’ve lost enough dogs to this highway – I can do without losing anymore, thankyouverymuch.
Ah Seven, we’ll miss you. We were meant to be bringing you home a friend, not losing you beforehand.
This is the new pup. Amy has named her Maisy, after some backwards and forwardsing, but it seems to suit her. She is a dream with the children at this point, not jumping, or bowling them over. Isaac is still unimpressed every time she swipes him with her tongue, but he’ll cope.
The best bit? She seems so freaking grateful to be here with us and not at the dogs home anymore. Rescue dogs are amazing.
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