Do Not Shoot Your Meatloaf: November 2009

Oh, it's gonna be one of those days, I thought Saturday morning as the first of what was to be a two day long string of cluster fucks occurred. I'm not sure what it was, but it was likely the text from Sonja that she was still feeling like crap after leaving early Friday after having thrown up.

Friday is sorta kinda an almost day off for me. I was happily sitting at The Quarters, alternating between reading my book and watching a fifteen year old game between the Packers and Cowboys, had just finished my steak, and was well into my second beer (I saved you a seat, T) when Sonja came over to tell me something. She didn't feel very well then, but an hour later she was throwing up in the dish room trashcan. Time for her to go home.

The walk in compressor had failed the weekend before after struggling along the past couple of weeks, and had just been fixed Friday afternoon. Knowing my luck (and used compressors of dubious origins) I opted not to prep up for the weekend, which would have filled the walk in. In the event that the compressor failed over night I didn't want to be stuck with a bunch of food with no place store it. So, short a cook with a ton of prep to do first thing.

From there it went down hill.

Something went horribly awry with the batch of dough that I started first thing in the morning. Ok, I went horribly awry. Like a dumb ass I forgot to add the second of the two gallons of water that make up a batch of dough. I cranked the bowl up into position, set the timer, hit the start button, and wandered off to do something else for the fifteen minutes the dough would be mixing. About seven minutes in Danny walked by and asked, "What the hell did you do to the dough?"

Nothing, I thought. Did I?

Checking, I saw that yes, I had screwed the pooch. The dough wasn't dough at all, it was a mess of still-dry flour with randomly sized chunks of something almost dough-like spread throughout. This is never recoverable, for the flour particles which did get bathed were saturated and adding the second gallon of water would only result in a very loose batter with thousands of small clumps.

So, of course, that is what I did. Then I added more flour so that I get the paste out of the mixing bowl more easily. And paste is a very accurate description of what I pulled out of the bowl in handfulls. Fifty pounds of paste. This I put in a tub and left on the floor in the back kitchen, where it has given us hours...ok, minutes of entertainment since as it has risen, threatening to consume passersby, until punched, kicked, or stabbed to collapse and start over.

The rest of the day went about the same, as did the next. No matter what I did, it was wrong. I added an extra cup of water to my cupcake batter, which actually turned out to be a good thing, and whatever I prepped, it seemed to be at the wrong time. Since a lot of stuff was still spread throughout the various small coolers where it had been shoved when the walk in died, it was impossible to easily tell what was over, under, or just plain stocked. I thought I should do cheese, but we're running out of sausage; I started chopping bells, only to hear Danny yelling for ricotta.

Add to this chaos a ton of Mexican tourists, Saturday being a holiday commemorating one of their more popular revolutions, the usual dining-in-public-challenged crowds of our neighbors to the east, a handful of locals with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and the young lady who seems only to want me on the back burner just in case someone better fails to come along, and it makes for a very miserable day at work.

Yesterday was pretty much the same. All of it.

After work I went home, fed the dogs, made myself three grilled cheese sandwiches, parked the Boston Lager next to the couch, and settled in to watch Donatella Arpaia judge on Iron Chef and Next Iron Chef. Not a bad night.