Sit Down and Stay a While

Oh my, well, that's over.  Let's hope that will be my only six-day week of the summer.  Because the only reason you should agree to work that many days in a row is so you can go to Antarctica.  I hope my fellow breakfast cook enjoyed his three-day weekend, and never gets another one.  :)  I did celebrate by hiking up the hill last night, having a nice little fire, and watching the sunset.

It's rained steadily most of today (well, since I woke up at noon -- the sun set about midnight, and this day off is dedicated to laziness), affording the opportunity to read through some of my previous notes on cooking.  A few days ago, when it was quite busy and I was plating my 87th side of bacon, I was reminded of the eternal hustle of the fancy restaurant where I trained.  I'm thankful to no longer carry anything/everything (boiling pots of stock, fifty-pound bins of oysters, endless quarts of dill pickles) up and down a steep flight of stairs.  I acutely recall the failure-panic of trying, in way too short a time, to prepare for service, and my resentment of seemingly minor requests or additions to the systematic labor thereof.  If something prevented me from finishing slicing lemon wedges by 2:25, I just had to press on with the other parts of readying my station and hope for some spare, salvaged moments to catch up on the lemons.

Which brings me to: oatmeal to go.  My fellow Americans...for fuck's sake, can you not even handle instant oatmeal at this point?  Like, we could give you the already-boiling water -- for free! -- and you could effortlessly have oatmeal.  Since you placed your order the night before, I intuit that you are capable of planning (perhaps next time you could purchase instant oatmeal packets).  Since you're taking it to go, I intuit that you do not care about the pleasure of sitting and eating breakfast (consider injecting yourself with caloric fluid).  Since half the time you order it plain, unadorned by raisin or pecan, I intuit that you do not care about food in any way (wood pulp is pretty much equivalent to plain oatmeal).  What kind of sadist interrupts the earnest cooking of eggs and pancakes to procure oatmeal to go?

Please, stop doing this.

Gosh, I had a lot to say about that.  Let's just calm down with a look at these pretty rain-spheres perfectly cupped by amiably outstretched leaves:

 

Rock the Mag-bus

This post is coming to you from, I think, the false summit of Sugarloaf Mountain, where I await my more intrepid hiking buddies. (Don't worry, I have the bear spray.) It's a lovely day, and the sun was pretty much directly overhead by 9am, which means we sweated through our shirts in about ten minutes. 

On an unrelated note, I thought you might like to know I sighted the elusive bull moose(!). There were dozens of cars pulled off the road; I thought there'd been an accident. But wait -- everyone had a camera or phone in hand -- in a rush the fellow in question cantered across the highway and disappeared back into the woods.

I don't have a segue for this, but I want to share a picture of our party bus.  It's situated a solid twenty feet away from the dorm to allow for raucous celebration without interrupting everyone's sleep. Or at least that's the idea. When a manager (rather lit) ran through the dorm berating us, room by room, to play corn hole at midnight, I wondered if it might be wiser to have a Quiet Bus for those of us inclined to unwinding with knitting and Sherlock Holmes audio books.

Fleshy Fungal Fruits

As I usually enter through the rear kitchen door and fleetingly glance into the restaurant at extremely busy or slow moments, it catches me off-guard how charming our little place is:

A truckload of flowers were delivered a couple weeks ago, and with attentive weeding and watering (not by me) are holding up pretty well.  One of the dishwashers is regularly pulled for gardening duty, resulting in several bathtubs' worth of rhubarb, which ends up in tasty strawberry-rhubarb coffee cake.

Drinking beers on the stoop the other day, hearing stories about employees of yore really put my own efforts into perspective.  I have not (yet)

- peed myself and the common room couch* in a drunken stupor
- arrived to work drunk
- nearly come to blows with my boss's husband
- strewn random foraged mushrooms about the employee kitchen to dry, only to later consume and sicken from them†

*it was later aired and burned
†due to utter lack of effort to identify shrooms, some guys risked paralysis and death; apparently drying mushrooms smell pretty icky


Maybe I can only handle one order ticket at a time, and maybe I forget about the potatoes darkening in the deep fryer for an ill-fated extra thirty seconds; maybe I spray everyone and everything when I wash dishes, and maybe I don't actually distinguish between over easy and medium eggs...but you can count on me never to throw food or spatulas at or sexually harass my coworkers.

Continuing this vein of self-affirmation, I chose a great hike for a great day -- the Triple Lakes trail, seen on this perfectly clear sunny morn (featuring Lake 1):

I hoped for a moose carefully plodding the shallows each time, but Lake 1 was empty, Lake 2 was bare, and Lake 3 dotted by a few ducks.  But it was gorgeous, and the 1,000-foot gain to the ridge had some rewarding views.  I even passed a troup of impeccably-confectionery-chocolate-looking mushrooms.

Copilot

Three of the six sweaters selected for my summer wardrobe have the word "Antarctica" on them, which has prompted a lot of conversation.  I don't want to be that guy that always brings it up and tells stories about the one same thing, but it's cool when you're meeting someone and they're excited to hear about it.  And a lot of people up here have a friend who's worked there or are scheming to get down there themselves.  It was nice to find out the guy who runs the flight-seeing tour desk and I have a mutual friend.

It was even nicer scoring a last-minute unsold seat on a plane!  My friend did all the work, calling and sweetly repeating our names almost hourly in the hopes we might get to fly on the clearest day we've yet had.  You can see how happy I was, as this is post-eight-times-barfing (in under 90 minutes!), and I want to do it all again:

This is not Denali, but another gorgeous snowy peak on the way:

I don't know if it was sitting copilot, having eaten three forms of peanut butter, the increasingly swirly low clouds, or just too sensitive an inner ear, but that was a lot of heaving.  Ok, since you read that gross sentence, here's another picture:

Into the Woods

Local fungi anecdote: apparently somewhere "south of Fairbanks" are acres and acres of morels.  Like a lower-level mafia figure, a guy appeared in an old pickup truck at the cafe and without preamble offered to sell us these delicacies picked by a woman he knows from around there.  Just making his way down the highway, over a hundred miles or more, hoping for deep-pocketed mushroom enthusiasts.  My boss sprang for a pound at $20, not too shabby.

And...I finally made it into the park!  Remember that car every other kid had in high school, a ten-year-old Toyota with faded paint, a million miles, worn out brakes, a tiny middle front seat?  That's our company car, used to shuttle employees up to the other restaurant we run up at the canyon.  If there's space, we're welcome to tag along.  I got dropped curbside, hustled past the busloads of tourists, and started hiking the easy paths by the entrance.  There are about fifteen miles of trails with little elevation gain, including one that intersects with the scenic railroad.

The wooded areas are pretty similar to what we have out back of our place.  Now that I've got the lay of the land, I'll tackle the peaks and more involved trails.

It could be coincidence but it seems the increase in traffic has caused our neighbor mooses (meese?) to retreat back into the wilderness.  I went with a friend on one of my regular hikes today, past the at-first-alarming-but-now-reassuring-signpost moose leg.  It just so happens that she has a coworker who collects bones, putting them to decorative use about her employee housing in a non-serial-killer fashion.  You be the judge:

Order Up

It turns out the more nonstick omelet pans you jerk around, your skills might just slightly increase.  I continue to pass off B+ eggs in whatever fashion possible.  Next time you're at a restaurant and it looks like the bacon is just casually draped over the edge of your eggs, or the potatoes are piled gracefully -- distractingly -- while nudging your yolk, know that it is not chance.  No, it's artifice, and it's hiding a mistake.  Wow, what a generous amount of raisins on your oatmeal!  (Please don't realize that the oatmeal itself is aging, gluey.)

And it makes me feel better when someone who's been cooking for many years, experienced with the idiosyncrasies of our grumpy, always-way-too-hot oven, burns the bacon just as often as I do.  This I can master, though, with the super technology of the timer.  Its one flaw: needing to be set.

Now I just have to quell my murderous Pavlovian reaction whenever the horrible dot-matrix ticket printer blipscree-spits out an order.

Walking off stress is pretty awesome in this place, though:

Even when the mountains are foreboding and you can't see an inch into the murky river, at least you don't have to worry about toast being sent back.