When I started this blog back in 2006, it was to chronicle my time at New England Culinary Institute. I had been a computer tech most of my life, and this was a pretty drastic change of career, so I wanted to document everything that happened. Some of it was fun, some not. I remember the time I had there, and most of it was useful, but it didn’t last too long. I never did graduate, finding that I learned a lot more during my internship than I did in the actual training kitchens. Why spend $30,000 for another year when I was getting paid to learn on the job? Add to that various health issues (not the least of which was Type 2 Diabetes that kept me out of school for an entire month) that had to be taken care of before I could have gone back anyway. I decided it just was not worth going back.
I did learn one very important thing: culinary school does not prepare you for the real world. You’re learning the basics of cooking in a (mostly) controlled environment. When you’re in the kitchens at school, all your equipment is laid out for you. All the ingredients are present and fresh. All your pots and pans are clean and on the right shelves, and you have someone there to clean up after you. The closest you get to real world cooking is if your school also owns a restaurant, which NECI did. They had the Main Street Grill, where the first-year students worked lunch, and there was The Chef’s Table – fine dining for the second year students. My experiences at the Grill (and working the buffet at Vermont College) were not even close to comparable to my later years spent working at a country club or managing a pizza restaurant. I was “surrounded by idiots” as the owner put it. Assuming my team made it to work, I largely could not depend on them. There was one guy at the pizza place I could count on; everyone else was either too high, not high enough, or too busy staring at the busty waitress at the counter. The equipment was either damaged, broken, or missing entirely. The owner can’t always afford to repair stuff, so you may be dealing with a gas oven that does not stay lit, and the pilot has to be lit with a flaming piece of parchment paper. We were constantly running out of clean pans and silverware during dinner rush because the dishwashers were out back doing a puff and pass (assuming they could be bothered to show up for work at all that day.) It was not uncommon to run out of something and have to take a special off the menu because once again your food provider shorted your order. I even had to close a restaurant an hour early because the closing manager didn’t show up for work and I could not stay. I’ll get more into that stuff in later posts.
It occurred to me that the reason I stopped keeping the blog up to date is not just because I gave up on a culinary career, but blogging was too inconvenient. I would occasionally find an app that supposedly made it easier, but most of the time it was clumsy or required a computer that I didn’t have with me. Ever since buying an iPad Pro, I use that a lot more than my actual laptop. While looking for a replacement for Evernote (which has become WAY too greedy lately) I was surprised to stumble across an app called Ulysses that not only worked as a notes replacement, supported Apple Pencil, but also had built-in WordPress publishing. SOLD! It runs on everything, including my phone, so I could take a picture of something and post it to my blog while it’s fresh in my memory, not hours later when I forget the context of it. (Okay, so ducks don’t have or need context, but it sounds good.) And, maybe I have this delusion that people actually care what I have to blog about. I can dream.