In fact, one of the people whom I often want to follow around is a soft-not-oft-spoken prep cook nicknamed “Jedi,” who does have a quiet “force “channeled in his work.  Focused and stealthy.

During my first few weeks I asked around the kitchen, wondering how long others had been there, what their story is.  Jedi was one of the long-standing stand-bys.

He said some people ask him when he’s going to get a real job.

“This is the real job,” he said.

It’s a real important job in the kitchen.

In a fast paced kitchen, the steady push of a prep cook takes a little pressure off the line cooks.  Whether the restaurant seats 20 or 120 people in one night, the time frame for prepping for those guests is always the same.  On busy nights, help is often needed.

Among taking care of standard fare like straining stocks, chopping parsley and cleaning vegetables Jedi is sort of the in house charcuterie go-to guy.

Bullish in appearance with thick hands, I can’t help but imagine little knockwursts for his fingers as he makes the restaurant’s assortment of pates, sausages, and other meaty delights.  Being a charcuterie fiend myself, I’ve always been keen to seeing what he’s working on.

One way to use meat scrap is to turn it into something on the charcuterie plate.  Pig heads go into head cheese, pork scrap goes into sausage, pheasant livers go into pate.  It’s economical and delicious.

The fun part of prep, to me, is being able to execute recipes and thinking about what makes the food tick.  For example, yesterday I made a double batch of fresh pasta dough.  It’s fun to make a giant dam of flour to hold 40 egg yolks and 8 whole eggs, which you get to mix together with your hands.

Long after the task was over, I asked one of the sous chefs a question.

“Marcelle, you have flour on your nose,” he said. The front of my black pants were grayed from flour and my arm hairs suspended small particles of flour as well.

One of the things I inherently like about cooking is thinking about the concepts behind it, and letting it become an engrossing, meditative exercise, and so perhaps prep allows for more of this for me.  There’s a pleasure of physicality in working with the dough, and only the dough, feeling it to sense what it needs, and when it’s done.

It’s easy for me to get lost in pasta dough.  It’s not as easy for me to get lost in a case of, say, picking 100 parsley plouches.  Plouches are a delicate, floral segment of parsley used for garnish, and some bunches of parsley are plouchier than others.  The parsley we had in house yesterday was not very plouchey — lots of thick, large leaves that weren’t nearly as small or appropriately spaced out enough for plouches.  Going on thirteen bunches I only had 65 plouches, and needed 100, so I kept on picking, cursing the parsley in my head for its awkwardly large foliage.  In these less glamorous moments of going through, say, a case of collard greens or a bus tub of ramps, a lot of prep cooks play games with themselves.

One night, I had a tub of snap peas in front of me, all of which needed the strings removed.  It was going on a few hours and monotony was getting the better of me.  I turned to Jedi and asked, “Am I just slow or is this how long it takes everyone?”

“How many can you do in 10 minutes?” he asked.  ”That’s what I do, and then after ten minutes do it again.”

As a chronic daydreamer, I find I also have to keep myself from getting too meditative.  I have to keep myself in a fine balance between staying focusing in the task at hand while finding stimulation.  Another thing I’ve done while prepping is to get in the mindset of practicing presence, focusing on the here and now.  When I feel my mind wander I try to gently bring it back, often trying to resettle focus on the item in front of me — how will it be used?  Where is it from?  How will it taste to people eating it?

I like that I’ve been sleeping again.  There’s a healthy amount of nervous energy that absolutely should go into the work of a line cook.  Mine manifested as insomnia and obsessing over prep lists for the next day.  I like that prep work gives me exposure to the products and going-ons in the restaurant without the crunch of plating for service.  I don’t see being a prep cook as being my path any more than a line cook but the exposure to knowledge is important to me, and for here and now, this is where my path has led me.

As I continue to write about food, I like knowing that I have a better understanding of how it feels to be the people who work these jobs, these real jobs, for their living.  I thought it could be mine, and it will be for the short term, but many, many bus-tubs of vegetables worth of thinking time has shown me the true leanings of my art, and for that I owe it to the experiences I’ve had here.

The menu rotates with the season, and right now the season is booming with berries, tomatoes, squash blossoms, and all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, many of which end up on my line.  (Luckily, because we are cooking after all, we also get to taste!)  Here’s what I get to prepare:

– A rendition of a Lyonnaise salad with warmed frisee, shallots, and smoked shiitake mushrooms marinated in red wine vinegar and maple syrup (to mimic bacon) topped with, and here’s the clencher for me: a soft-poached duck egg.  The Cadbury-rich yolk is balanced with a punchy dijon dressing.  If I were eating at the restaurant, this would be what I would order.

– A tri-berry salad: a base of warmed Fantome farm chevre decked with blueberries, black raspberries and raspberries.  Next, a Sarveccio cheese frico sits on top with a bundle of Creekside greens dressed with a tarragon berry vinaigrette.

– Bean salad with fried squash blossoms: in my opinion, the sexiest dish on the line.  The salad is composed of wax beans, green beans, daikon radish, grilled scallions and tomato, topped with tempura-battered squash blossoms, chili threads and pea vine.  I love the spicy cashew garnish.

– Proscuitto and grilled cantaloupe with arugula, warmed Oaxacan string cheese, sweet onion, grape must, olive oil and toasted hickory nuts.

– Green salad:  The greens we get really make this salad.  A few farms supply the greens but there’s really nothing better than having a salad that owes so much of its flavor to the greens themselves.  In the Creekside mix on the menu right now, you’ll find lots of hard-to-find goodies like baby tatsoi leaves.  Gotta love the sungold tomatoes on this one — for someone who grew up hating tomatoes, the sungold was the gateway tomato for me: tender skins and sweet, juicy orbs of goodness inside.

– Cheese plate: So many choices.  Really, it’s scary how much good cheese lives in the low-boy cooler.  Hook’s 15 year chedder, Pleasant Ridge Reserve along with a number of Fantome Farm goat cheeses.  Maple-cayenne candied hickory nuts and honeycomb to boot.

– Charcuterie: whey-fed house proscuitto, coppa, lardo, duck liver pate and knockwurst.  My favorite night was when it was reported that one person ordered this for dinner and we found out she was a petit blond woman.  Props lady, that could’ve been me.

One thing that’s really nice about cooking all these things is getting to taste them.  Every salad that gets dressed and season must be tasted, and we check our products in part by tasting.  A lot of what goes onto the line must be prepared daily (poached eggs, fricos, etc.) and what does hold over usually only has a day or two in its prime and after that it goes toward “comida”, or family meal.

Family meal is a daily staff meal during which items on their way our get used up to feed the staff.  Although the restaurants limits waste in a number of ways (preserved meats, pickling, and such) the staff meal plays a large part in reallocating product that may not be quite as pristine as we’d like to serve our guests but that would do just fine in a salad or casserole for a roomful of hungry cooks and servers.

Thank goodness for family meal.  I always joke that I get the “man meal” when I go out to eat.  Yes, I eat like a lumberjack.  My last meal out was a meatball sandwich with waffle fries, a side of coleslaw added on the side with a slice of oreo pie to go and believe it or not, I finished among the clean plate club.  The job demands a lot of physical stamina and as a result I’ve been eating like a 15 year old boy.

Family meal is usually at 4 or 430 and by the time you leave around 1030 or 11 or later, I’m usually hungry again.  There’s an old saying, “never trust a skinny cook” but trust me, despite all the tasting and my killer appetite I think I’ve actually lost weight on this job!

Photo credit www.gotime.com

First a little about how I landed the internship, just to put it all into perspective…

I interviewed Chef Tory Miller for an Our Lives magazine interview in the summer of 2010.  Locally, he’s been named Chef of the Year, and is a James Beard Award nominee. I had approached him because obviously he’s earned recognition for being a very accomplished chef, and relatively young at that.  But I also really wanted to interview the guy because he does things like food outreach to middle schoolers, donates his talent to charities and drives a wagon around the square every Saturday during the Dane County Farmer’s market.  And, being half-Korean, there was perhaps a tinge of Korean pride rooting for “my people.”  (Hey, I think it’s allowed, how many Koreans are there in Madison?)  I followed up with him after our initial meeting and was offered an internship for the fall, which didn’t work out due to school-related commitments but I landed something for the spring of 2011 instead.

I’ve been a server, and I’ve cooked a lot at home, but this is my first back of the house job.  Ever.  Hence, FNG.  I’m very green, and with that, for every moment I’ve been blue in the face with frustration or bordering on tears from trying to get things right, I’ve also been rewarded with amazing growth and, with what my friend Tim reminded me is the chance of a lifetime.

L’Etoile Restaurant has appeared in Saveur, Gourmet magazine, and numerous other foodie publications.  It’s the kind of place Harold McGee, yes, THE Harold McGee, chooses to dine, and he did, just a few weeks ago during one of my shifts.  L’Etoile has a reputation that stems back to Chef Odessa Piper, who established the restaurant in 1976 along with a slow food mantra to support local farmers and sustainable agriculture.  Today, the restaurant carries on in the same vein with influences from Chef Tory and his supporting sous chefs.  Around the kitchen, as I hear ideas going back and forth, there seems to be a lot of whimsy: excitement over novel ingredients and non-traditional renditions of classics, all the while an honest dedication to keeping the menu true to the spirit of the ingredients it features.

Talking with Tim (who was in the Marines) brought up an analogy for me, and that is that working at L’Etoile is like joining the Marines.  The few and the proud.  I was told by Chef Tory, and other employees, that L’Etoile was like nowhere else.  Going into this, I thought, well sure — the restaurant appealed to me because I knew that the reputation it has is only maintained over this course of time by finding people who can keep it true to its mission to support farm-to-table dining and sustainable practices, and this is what’s visible to the public eye.

Behind the scenes, you see an incredible work ethic.  When people ask me about L’Etoile, my response is usually, “It’s intense.  Good, but intense.”  I struggle to concisely relate the experience of it, as if I’m talking to a civilian.  A lot is asked of you.  A lot is asked of everyone.  And everyone works long and hard, with perfection in mind.  This is by far one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I consider myself a very hard worker.  I graduated high school in three years and had my choice between UCLA and Berkley.  I participated on the American Culinary Competition team at Madison College and worked most hours I wasn’t at school, which left very few hours at home.  And yet I feel I’ve grown exponentially more as a person than perhaps even as a cook at L’Etoile in that I’m being pushed to new limits that I didn’t know I had.

There are a lot of times that I’ve thought about giving up the line; last night was one of them.  At the end of the night the sous chef told us we did a good job but the clock had beat me again and again and again that night.  I reached my limit.  And then there are good nights, like tonight, when I felt I was able to stay on top of the flow of tickets, that feel like small, but significant triumphs, and I think to myself, whether I beat the clock or not, I’ve gotten through it, and working the line is giving me unique access to techniques, presentation and a more holistic appreciation of the food, which is what it’s really about for me.

In the kitchen, the flow, or movement, of people within it is called a dance.  And it is, when you see the fluidity of good line cooks and chefs weaving to and fro during service.  I think I’m realizing that I just happen to have two left feet.

One of the sous chefs mentioned how — and it’s a good thing in his line of work — he’s very anal retentive.  Everything has a place, down to the position of a spoon in a ninth pan, so that, say he’s working a station, muscle memory kicks in and the spoon is there because it’s always there.  Muscle memory must extend to a concept that I think he phrased nicely: “the economy of movement.”  In one swift movement, do as much as you can, where you can.  Time not only puts money on the line, but product quality and timing as well.  The economy of movement sets the tempo for the dance music.  If you’re not dancing fast enough, not keeping up with the rhythm all the other parts of the kitchen sync into, you’re going to throw it off in a domino effect that filters down to courses after yours, to servers delivering your meal, and ultimately to customers whose meals are timed to give them a smooth procession of courses without feeling rushed nor kept waiting.

I think some people have that innate sense of rhythm, and some don’t.  Some of this is trainable, and certainly having a well-prepared game plan helps, but coming out in the black in the economy of movement is beyond simply muscle memory.  It’s every bit of a head game to always keep your head ahead of even yourself.

Can your mind think three steps ahead, faster than your hands might even be able to move, and read tickets for yourself and the person next to you, staying on time down to the minute, and staying cool as a cuke all the while adrenaline makes time seem ever-pressing and yet warped at the same time?  Some almost seem to get a high out of riding that rush and coming out on top.  But in my estimation it takes the stuff of a very certain type of person.

I wanted to see if I could be that person.  There is so much to be learned on the line, and I thought my learning curve would boom, and it has.  Working where I do, with access to local, sustainable ingredients and a talented staff is a once in a lifetime opportunity and that’s not to be discounted for all it still has to offer me.  Already it’s shown me how much further I can push my limits.

Each day I do more in less time than I possibly think I can and yet I do. The same sous chef, who can also be a classically hot-headed chef, said that if he throws more stuff at us, it’s to make us a better cook.  And it does.  We’re held to very high standards, which I like, because the restaurant is one of the best in the region, and nationally.  The stakes are high because there’s a long-standing reputation to uphold and that’s exactly why I wanted to be there.

But despite my passion for cooking and what the restaurant stands for, is working the line going to be the best use of my gifts?

Probably no.  And that’s okay; I think one thing that this internship is showing me is the true nature of my nature.  On one hand, I went into this knowing that I’m accident prone, somewhat clumsy and that I do tend to prefer to work alone, although I also see a tremendous value in working with others.  On the other hand, I think I am a highly motivated learner and I excel in tasks in which I get to use my head, and especially creatively.

The idea of cooking in a high end restaurant really appealed to me for the potential to learn from dynamic chefs and develop creatively while working with food.  Now, throw in sharp objects, a kitchen full of people also holding sharp objects, open flames, and a string of unrelenting tickets waiting to be made and you get a splintering of people who a) get a high off of riding the wave and coming out on top and b) people like me who become a deer in headlights and stay up at night thinking about how to get through it all again the next day.  I’ll put it this way — I’ve had to lull myself to sleep with Tylenol PM the last few weeks to stop myself from running through my prep list for the next day in my head.

Each day, I feel as if I’m gambling a bit.  In three hours or so, how do I get my station stocked enough for the night when it seems like there is more to do than I can fit into those hours?  And yet more or less, I’ve made it through each night with everything I need.  But it’s an incessant head game for me of trying to do enough to be ready for the night, but not too much as to take away precious time from other tasks.  There’s always an emphasis on speed,and precision, which is good.  In our most challenging situations, we can learn the most about ourselves, and I think this internship is already showing me what cooking really means to me.

I love the idea of cooking for people and having them enjoy my food.  I love the continuous learning in an endless field of possibillity that is cooking and then experimenting with the concepts I learn.  But I’m finding that cooking on a line in a high-intensity, high-prestige environment may be something that is working against my natural grain as someone who is very much stuck in my head, perhaps always a little out of sync with the rhythm of the dance in the kitchen because the sound of my own drum is perhaps too loud.

My diet is plagued by what I call “man meals”… too many lumberjack breakfasts and such.  I’m actually looking forward to coming up with a lot of healthy recipes this summer to offset my penchant for comfort food in the cold months.

I was proud of myself the other day: at the co-op I averted the Ben and Jerry’s aisle (yes, in my eyes it is an aisle because all else fades away, and the frozen food aisle becomes the Ben and Jerry’s aisle, with a chorus of fat, dairy-fed cherbs) and instead bought a quart of strawberries and a bunch of bananas (albeit not local) all for the price of what I would have spent for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.  Keeping Ben and Jerry’s out of the freezer is also my way to help my boi out during the juice fast.

I actually walked home tonight and was going to hit up the corner store for the appropriately titled “Late Nite Munchies” flavor for some brain juice as I finish an article (keep in mind that if I’m keeping said ice cream out of the freezer this means that I was prepared to eat the whole pint so as not to leave evidence).

Wah-wah, the store was closed.  And so was the store another three blocks down.  Apparently divine intervention was going to keep my home ice cream-free. I continued walking home, still fending off a sweet tooth, and I made myself a plate of strawberries instead.  They were delicious.  Then knowing strawberries are so delicious and no one has ever died of heart disease from eating too many strawberries, why does Ben and Jerry’s haunt me so?  I like fruit, and I like veggies, but the Richards have a fatal flaw and that is a genetic obsession with ice cream.  My grandmother’s signature question during visits was “Would you like some ice cream?”  It almost didn’t matter what your answer was, she would ask until you conceded to, usually coffee, ice cream.  I remember my dad used to eat a giant bowl (like, the entree sized bowl you would serve a stew in) and he would pile on whatever selection of ice cream he had on hand.  Usually, there were multiple half-gallon containers in our freezer, and believe it or not, I really wasn’t into ice cream as a kid, except for rocky road.  Then, I had an ice cream coming of age, as if the ice cream cooties saw melted away into a seductive, creamy treat that turns my head every time.  My uncle Rich and I talked about this the last time I visited — we Richards have it bad for ice cream.

‘Til death do us part, Ben and Jerry’s?  Or is it better to remain star-crossed lovers?

I may still chop up the pickles really fine and put them in a zippy egg or potato salad.  When life gives you punchy pickles make…potato salad?

C’est la vie.  That’s the good thing about pickles — it’s a pretty cheap way to experiment with produce, so I’ll probably keep messing around with things that come to me in my CSA (community supported agriculture) share from Young Earth Farm.  Each week is a pleasant surprise.  For example, although I like kohlrabi, I haven’t really done much with it to date so maybe I’ll give pickling another go with them.

I heart pickles and fermented foods.  At work, they pickle everything from rhubarb to mushrooms and although getting the pickling liquid to balance takes a little finesse, I really like the idea of being able to come about the right proportions through  taste, and all the options that open up for you when you can do that.  Obviously, I’m no pro yet, but here’s to practice makes better.

Photo accessed from www.photocrush.tumblr.com

I used a few of mine today in a roasted corn and garlic scape salsa that will appear with a “tofroom” taco filling recipe in next week’s Isthmus (stay tuned!)  For the scape component, I used grilled scallions for inspiration and did some stove-top “grilling” in my cast iron skillet — the scapes almost take on the texture of tender grilled asparagus.  Lightly brush them with oil and sprinkle with salt and let slightly char in a cast iron over high heat, or if you already have an outdoor grill in use, try them on the barbie wrapped in foil.

I saved the other half of mine for refrigerator pickles…this is a test run, so I’ll report back in the next day or so to report back on how they taste!  I went with a sweeter liquid, thinking these could be really good on something salty like a salami sandwich…

Garlic Scape Pickling Liquid

1 1/2 c. white wine vinegar

3/4 c. honey

1/4 c. salt

3/4 c. water

1 tsp. black peppercorns

Cut your scapes down to the desired length (mine were about 3″ long, and I threw in a few cloves of bulb garlic since I love pickled garlic so much).  Place in glass or heat-safe container (make sure you’re not using something with a lining that could break down and leach into your food when exposed to acidic liquids.)

Bring pickling liquid to a boil and make sure salt is dissolved.  Pour hot liquid over scapes and keep them submerged with a plate or bowl.  Let sit in refrigerator until…pickled.  My guess is that by tomorrow mine should be good to go — we’ll see!

A garlic scape tempura also came to mind as potentially killer idea to try — imagine the crazy whorls of fried deliciousness these could offer…

Their season is relatively short, so snatch them up before they’re gone, muggles!

Rock on, Plaka Taverna.

Photo credit: Amezcua Photography

Marcelle Richards founded the Gastropacalypse Test Kitchen in February 2008 in Madison, WI.  Inspired by feedback from friends who had tasted her cooking, she came out of a post-graduation funk by hosting a series of community style dinners designed to test out her recipes on participants.  The GTK has since transitioned to a web-based project still steeped in the fun and passion she derives from making and eating food.  Here, you’ll find Marcelle’s home-crafted recipes, media clips, and foodie musings.

Marcelle has an appropriately titled BS degree in Zoology from UW Madison, and also received training through the culinary arts program at Madison College and on the job as an intern at L’Etoile Restaurant in Madison.  When Marcelle isn’t playing with food in the kitchen, she enjoys food blogging and writing.  She is the Our Plates writer for Our Lives and regularly contributes to the Isthmus as a cooking columnist, restaurant reviewer, and occasionally, as a features writer.

Photo credit: Amezcua Photography

After waiting 40 minutes for a chorizo omelette and a breakfast sandwich (really?!)  lukewarm versions of the afore mentioned selections were set in front of us.  But something was amiss, very amiss.  My toast was stale and cold.  The cheese had melted and re-cooled to plasticized webbing all over my tepid, weeping omelette.

Do we eat it?  We were really damn hungry after waiting so long for a breakfast that even in a rush should only take minutes to cook, plate and deliver hot.

Cold eggs make hardly the breakfast of champions.

“I’m taking this back,” I said, after a few confirmational pokes to my potatoes to confirm that we shared the same internal temperature.

I found a server and explained our food had been delivered cold after a substantial wait.

“Feel it,” I implored, shaking a clammy potato round.  “It’s cold.  We’d like these hot, please,” I said as I held out our plates.

She didn’t say anything, but after more minutes passed our food arrived again, toast still cold, the rest of the food decidedly more hot but by what means?

I wolfed down my omelette only to realize that in place of the corn salsa listed on the menu roasted red pepper (an abundant item on the daily specials) had wound up in my omeltte instead.  At this point I was too peeved about waiting an hour for an egg breakfast to care.  It was a brand of grumpy that even coffee can’t fix.

I’ve had very pleasant experiences at Marigold, but something I’m finding at a lot of my old favorites is a disturbing new trend of inconsistency.

I’m usually very forgiving but sorry, Marigold, the only response I have for hot-turned-cold food is a cold shoulder.