Reality Bites

     It's worse than I expected.  Culinary school did not prepare me for real life kitchen work.  No wonder some of my classmates referred to school as "Cooking for Dummies".  I long for the days when two people work on making a lentil side dish and breaks every hour.
     I reported to work at Zucca promptly before 10:00am and did not sit down until I was driving home in my car at 6:15pm.  I cooked more in one day than in the last 6 week block at school.  First, I was assigned three sauces, Alfredo, Bolognese, and Marinara.  I'm used to two people making one sauce!  This took over 4 hours just to get all the mise en place.  Instead of two onions to dice, we're talking 10 lbs.  The hardest was getting 3 gallons of cream from a plastic bag with a hole in the middle of it, not even in the corner of the bag.  I am proud to say I only lost about 3 ounces.  Of course, I had to familiarize myself to where everything is kept in this very small kitchen with little space for prep work.
     After the sauces, I made another giant batch of meat balls.  At this point, I realized I'm making food for paying customers.  What if I missed a spice, and it tastes horrible? The sous chef fried up a test piece of meat ball just in case.  And it was delicious!  The meatballs were portioned out to 3 ounce balls and baked off.
     No time to relax and enjoy the snow flakes falling outside.  There was pasta to make!  I was given the recipe for 11 lbs of pasta dough which required 44 eggs! I got good at cracking, nary a shell in the eggs.  With an electric pasta machine, I made pasta sheets and then cut them out to make tortellini.  The goal was 90 tortellini; I made 142 before my shift.  I was definitely in the groove.
     I still don't know why any one would choose to work in a kitchen if they can do anything else.  It is such hard work that never ends.  I didn't use the restroom until 4 hours in.  I didn't eat anything all day except for a bite of meatball.  And no one else did either.  I'm not afraid of hard work, but I was beat.  Luckily I have the next day off.