seven pleasant things
- long, super awesome email from my friend who’s traveling through southeast asia
- surprisingly delicious pancakes, even without buttermilk (curses!)
- friends showing up for brunch this morning
- all three letters of recommendation accounted for
- excellent genius playlist
- no one drank my ginger ale in the d.school fridge
- absolutely perfect weather
seven things i like about being a short-order brunch chef
- i kick off every week being really productive. nothing revs your engines quite like cooking for 80 on a sunday morning.
- free food every sunday morning… food that i know is good… because i made it!
- keep in touch with folks i wouldn’t normally see. i love keeping tabs on all my favorite swimmer + runner folks.
- who doesn’t like making some extra cash?
- i make people really happy. direct quote from yesterday: “oh my GOD, i’m so glad you’re here… you saved my life.” a little dramatic, perhaps, but definitely makes me feel appreciated.
- practice improv skills. nothing like realizing you don’t have buttermilk 10 minutes before showtime and you need to make buttermilk pancakes for 80.
- develop grace under pressure. there’s more of a parallel than i might have imagined between managing a backlog of 30 breakfast orders and managing a complex project with tight deadlines at work.
so this makes any sense at all, a little context: i’ve been cooking for two undergraduate dining halls (they’re actually mini dining halls, we call them “eating clubs“) since my junior year of college. i invite you to do the math with me: spring quarter of junior year, all of senior year, all of grad school (2 years), and now the beginning of… whatever it is i’m doing now. this is year #4, folks! anyway, the way it works is that meals are provided to the students M-F by a professional chef, they fend for themselves on saturdays, and then sundays are student-run. there’s a student who cooks brunch on sunday (short-order) and then a student who cooks dinner (most certainly NOT short-order!)… but more frequently they just order pizza or something. i started just cooking for one of the four clubs, but now i cook for two of them. i’ve developed quite a loyal following, in part because of my fabulous breakfast quesadillas (to which there is a facebook group dedicated) and in part because of my ability to make things really quickly. every year there is always a large contingent of swimmers and runners who live in the residences that i cook for, and it’s nice for me to stay in touch with them, since i wouldn’t get to normally.
probably irresponsible... but mighty tasty.
