Special Thanksgiving Report

Hey there, hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving eating and family/friending it up.  I thought it would be interesting to dissect how to feed 1,000 ravenous cold-weather workers on an entirely food-based holiday.  We barely even have football to distract us here (18-hour time delay plus rebroadcasting), and in order to fit everyone in the galley at some point, people sign up for one of three meal times—meaning they are extra crazily starved, waiting all the way from breakfast to 3, 5, or 7pm for their big meal.

Despite some impulsive actions and questionable life choices, I think it’s safe to say I’m on the rational end of the thought spectrum.  I like to plan.  And more importantly, I tend to base my planning on reality: facts, informed opinions and estimations, whatever evaluative bits are at hand.  It’s also helpful to build flexibility into one’s plans, of course.  You always need to react and adjust to what actually happens versus how you imagined it would go, as well as keep something in your pocket for the unexpected, like a foreign invasion for instance.

I’m going to try to be diplomatic, both to exercise a positive attitude and on the off chance someone reading this wants to fire me.  Maybe our bosses’ own optimism and/or faith in our skill led them to not even decide a menu until a week ago; not specify what they wanted for those dishes; not assign prep to any particular team or person; not decide to start cutting the 60 turkeys in half until two days before; underestimate the amount needed of every side dish by a factor of at least three; and only truly realize the deep deep shit they walked us into during the first of three giant feast seatings.

Picture six people standing in a row, each with a cutting board, each with a sack of potatoes.  Now picture two more such set-ups across the table.  (If you’re keeping score, that’s eight people times 25 pounds per sack, about five sacks each, for 1,000 pounds—about 2.5 times what we prepped before Thanksgiving.  Roughly 1,000 pounds of potatoes were consumed, which is not that crazy for 1,000 people when you think about it.  Key takeaway: THINK ABOUT IT, JUST FOR ONE MINUTE, AND YOU’D KNOW 500 POUNDS OF POTATOES IS [CENSORED FOR OBSCENITY], ahem, not enough FOR 1,000 PEOPLE.)  Before and after the potato brigade, we peeled and cut a couple hundred pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes.  These were immediately cooked and served.  If only some of those fun times had been had the previous day, when I fumed over the asinine process of blanching, icing, draining, and later toweling off root veggies so that the oil could more closely cling to them previous to their roasting.  Now, we were able to cut down the roasting time from 30 to 10 minutes, all with a mere five hours of unnecessary and infuriating prep, which all went out the window when we just roasted the additional 300% more of them for 30 minutes in a mad frenzy day-of.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.  The pies, thankfully, were amazing—the bakery folks made all the crusts from scratch with actual butter, and I enjoyed some fantastic pecan pie and cranberry cheesecake.  Let’s all just remember dessert, and that we got a free glass of wine, and that we will not let this happen again.

Yes, I would like to science please

This is a sign on my dorm’s bulletin board (advertising lab tours) that’s pretty adorable:

Speaking of which, I got learned some scienceology this week.  Every Sunday night there’s a science lecture.  The teams doing fieldwork here report in laymen’s terms on their research.  Apparently, teeny tiny snails the size of lentils, officially known as pteropods, are sentinels of ocean acidification.  These scientists were refreshingly well-spoken presenters.  They talked about how cool (haha) it is to dive here, and the unique challenges of trying to do anything with your hands underwater wearing multiple pairs of thick gloves.  They collect specimens, scope them out in the lab, and subject them to varying conditions to measure how they’re affected and how they might possibly adapt.  Long story short, as carbon dioxide gets swallowed by the ocean, it is broken apart into oxygen and carbolic acid (maybe? I think?).  Our snail-friends’ shells get eaten away, which is sad, as they are pretty, and unfortunate, as they are a key link in the food web between phytoplankton and d&jk#xlpwty, which eat pteropods.  I’m pretty sure I’m now qualified to be a marine biologist.

I am also now qualified to be a space physicist (pretty sure that’s what we’re called).  The friendly young grad student who runs the LIDAR operation invited some kitchen folks out to show and tell about upper atmospheric iron ions.  With his toolbox of laser parts—

—he blasts lasers (pew! pew!) into the sky, and records the distance and speed and stuff at which they reflect back off of iron particles.  This, too, tells us about global warming.  You might be beginning to think that Antarctica is a vast left-wing conspiracy to brainwash people into believing humans affect nature…

After a few solid weeks of dense gray clouds and limited visibility, we’ve shifted to rather warm weather (it’s 30F today!), and I lucked out with a totally gorgeous, sunny evening for a pressure ridge tour.  The ridges (where the sea ice and pack ice meet near the shore) have been building and pushing up higher over the last few weeks, and a mama seal had a pup right smack on the trail we hike.  We walked nice and slow and quiet and they seemingly remained asleep, big and little piles of fat-fur.

Oh yeah, and I work in the kitchen.  So, roughly nine hours a day, I make-believe a jar of capers, a handful of anchovies, tomato sauce, and leftover breaded-conglomerate-of-salmon-and-filler into “seafood puttanesca.”  One nice surprise was getting to make spanakopita from scratch.  My contribution included squeezing water from thawed frozen spinach, but my team thrilled to the chef-ly glory of brushing real butter onto phyllo dough, mixing and seasoning the filling to their own standard, and selling out halfway through lunch.  We listened to Greek mandolin folk music and remembered for a few hours how pleasant it is to make good food for people you like.

P.S.—Thanksgiving is happening in like 36 hours and almost no prep has been done.  More on this next time.

TGI Fry-Day

Before we begin, a brief note: I try not to mention names as people may not want to be written about, but I have to tell you that my sous chef is Willie Nelson.  He’s a great guitar player and singer, but he claims not to know many of his own songs.  Now then…

I closed out this workweek manning the deep fryers for Captain Dan’s Infamous Seafood Platter—a lunch featuring breaded “buffalo-style” shrimp (fresh from Lake Erie?), scallops, clam strips, oysters, and jojo wedges (those orangey seasoned steak fries).  At the beginning of the shift it was unclear what exactly made this homage to Long John Silver’s infamous…but it happened as I was cleaning out the sludgy burnt bits from the FryMaster.  Sometimes boys are such boys.  One cook bet another $5 to eat a spoonful of said oily nastiness.  Despite how disgusting it looked/was, I can believe that it wouldn’t taste horrible.  Actually, it probably tasted just like all the deep fried stuff.  Unfortunately, we forgot that it was still about 400 degrees, and my friend burnt his tongue pretty bad.  On the plus side, the other guy decided it was only fair to pony up $20.

In other cooking adventures, I was given free rein to invent some soup.  Leftover rice and a desire for something different led me to Thai roasted red pepper red curry rice soup, a mouthful of a name for a simple tasty belly warmer.  The next day, I wanted to recreate mom’s crowd pleaser ham-corn-potato chowder, but I’m limited to making vegetarian soups.  In order to make up for the lost flavor and heartiness of the ham, I roasted a ton of garlic and margarine (because the precious, rare butter is reserved for Thanksgiving), and mixed in lots of extra milk powder (mmmm, dehy milk, keeping our hardworking scientists and forklift drivers strong).

And in grammar news, we were thrilled to pull cases of hushpuppies from the freezer and find that they were “ovenable,” and recommended for serving as “grabitizers.”  It’s kind of like, “Well, you should probably deep fry these, but…yeah, why not, they’re ovenable.  Let’s put them out after the champagne toast, but before the first course.  An amuse bouche, if you will, or, let’s say, grabitizer.”

Here's a picture some guy took of a penguin near here:

There Is an Unlimited Supply of Gumbo File Powder at McMurdo

Unexpected Items I’ve Come Across In This Kitchen:

- three different brands of tamarind paste

- pizza-flavored croutons (*homemade*)

- vegetarian taco filling with surprise potato filler

- Leanies,™ a soy-based weenie substitute

- aphid-infested celery

- 240^th Navy (Marines? some kind of uniform type people) birthday cake

- frozen, boxed, every item pre-made sushi kit (*this was a special treat for our own company party which I unfortunately did not attend*)

- unlimited supply of mint chips

Unexpected Items I’ve Come Across In Antarctica:

- crazy/silly/robot facial expression stickers

- a main pipeline inexplicably labeled “PANCAKE” (see photo)

- stylish like-new pillow cases

- a set of smooth, dark stones perfect for replacing ice cubes

- 3-in-1 foot soaker/massager/scrubber that no longer heats water

- programmable embroidery machine

Drug, Booze, and Vinegar Cocktails

I spent much of the previous week shivering in double sweatpants and sweatshirts, broken by brief periods of sweating, visiting medical, and shambling past my hard-working colleagues to procure yogurt and mashed potatoes.  At least everyone could see I was one-quarter dead and didn’t begrudge me all that sweet, sweet time languishing in clammy pajamas.  And then science came to the rescue.  It’s amazing what a course of antibiotics will do.

The observation tube is back this year, and I delighted in tiny fish, krill, and mini-jellyfish, along with the gorgeous cut-crystal underside of the ice shelf.  My friend was lucky enough to be in there when nearby divers were working, so you can see what it looks like from the outside.

Yet more news in science, I made it through an entire lecture about sea spiders, which are like giant (2-8”) daddy longlegs but with almost no body.  Some issues under study are the relation between ocean oxygen content, polar gigantism, and the sea spider’s utilization of oxygen.  They speculate that the relative isolation of the Antarctic ocean, its cold temperature, its relatively calm tidal action, and its high oxygenation all contribute to the ease with which animals stay flush with oxygen.  Sea spiders spend their time walking around poking and sucking juices out of sponges, jellyfish, and other gooey things that end up on the ocean floor. 

The most interesting thing I made in the kitchen lately was a vinegar-based Carolina barbeque sauce.  At first it struck me as pretty disgusting: vinegar, more vinegar, some vinegar-based hot sauce.  Because I couldn’t handle that, I included ketchup, honey mustard, molasses, and dfjsdkjfnbmb (secret ingredient).  It was terrible to try to gauge on its own, but on pulled pork it was surprisingly good.  Not as good as sugary red KC Masterpiece, but decent if you insist on having Carolina-type barbecue.