1. i kick off every week being really productive. nothing revs your engines quite like cooking for 80 on a sunday morning.
2. free food every sunday morning… food that i know is good… because i made it!
3. keep in touch with folks i wouldn’t normally see. i love keeping tabs on all my favorite swimmer + runner folks.
4. who doesn’t like making some extra cash?
5. 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.
6. practice improv skills. nothing like realizing you don’t have buttermilk 10 minutes before showtime and you need to make buttermilk pancakes for 80.
7. 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.