Friday The 13th

"I don't know, but I've been told
Eating my food will never get old"

Well, there's my attempt at rhyming for you. My Chef's rhyme involves something more vulgar about Eskimo something being mighty cold but since it's my rhyme and my blog I figured I should at least make it about food.

I'm learning a few tricks (not so much about cookery but about presenting plates) and we, as a team, are still learning what works best. Chef has given up his helm at the pizza oven and has trained one of the boys to make as well as monitor the pizzas while in the oven. It works better than Chef making the pizzas and having someone else monitor and rotate them through-out the oven as they're baking. After all, the person who made the pizzas and placed them in the oven is more likely to know where which one is in the cooking stage than anyone else in the kitchen. So that's done. It frees up Chef to teach me plating and to teach his Sous-Chef how each dish on the menu should be cooked.

My role? It depends on the day. When there's four of us, I make salads, run in the back for last minute things we need, and learn how to both plate and cook at the same time. Last night we had a few tables, thankfully not all ordered at the same time, and it all worked very well despite the fact that for half the night our printer didn't work and the servers had to hand us their order chits. When there's Chef, Sous Chef and I in the kitchen, Chef will go back to doing pizzas with Sous Chef doing the hot side and I look after salads, starters and plating the hot food the Sous hands to me. When the Sous Chef is off I take over cooking the hot side and have one of the boys do salads and plate for me. We figure with this system we can feed no matter how many people we get. It also helps if not all people at the table order from the same station -- if the order is spread out: some pizzas, some starters and some hot stuff, we're golden. Even if the orders are all pizzas we're still golden because Chef can always step in and help the pizza boy. The opposite is not true as one, and only one person can cook on the hot side due to limited space at the stove.

So we made it through our first Friday. Friday the 13th, at that. Don't look now, but this could all be coming together.