femchef

[femchef]

[femchef]

can i ask a restaurant question? i watched a short from a youtuber asking her coworkers about knives they cook with. it looks like they are at work, but they’re talking about knives they bought/were gifted. is it common to cook professionally in a kitchen with equipment you bring from home?

@intobarbarians This is such a great question!!! Ahhhhhhhhh ok ok here we go:

Alright so - there are CAVEATS, but the short answer? You bring your own knives.

More specifically - if you are a savory chef/line cook, you bring your own knives.

Ok so there’s a lot of interesting culture that’s specific to career culinarians (line cooks, prep cooks, bakers, pastry chefs, etc., etc.,):

First, know that standard kitchens DO have their own house knives. They are super beat up, typically no one sharpens the r hones them as often as they deserve or require (sharpen every 2 weeks for heavy use, hone with steel as needed, hopefully at least once a week). These are the knives you reach for in emergency (or occasionally hazing). They are old and battered and have seen things and they’re not even 2 years old yet. The knife you need the most is the chef’s knife and even though you KNOW you have five on hand somehow they’re all missing except for the thin one with the shittily balanced weight in the tang, and the last person who used it didn’t wipe off their minced chives before they stuck it back up on the magnet strip. **

Well-funded kitchens and larger facilities will often contract with a company that comes and sharpens knives and rotates fresh blades every two weeks (this is typically the same person/business who sharpens blades for barbers and ALSO is typically a farrier in the local area if you are somewhere with a lot of stables). However, two weeks is still too long in most cases for the amount of use these poor abused tools get.

Nearly everyone brings their knife kit/knife roll***. It sounds pretentious because reality tv plays it up too much - but it’s practical. That kit travels with the owner too - it comes to work with you and leaves with you. Because if it doesn’t travel with you it’s going to get kidnapped by one of the eight close quarters people you work with daily with ruthless efficiency and you will never see it again.

Quality knives are expensive - the cost for nicer individual knives ranges from 375$ to 2500$, and typically you will carry 5-7 knives in your personal kit. I worked with a line cook who dropped 1500$ on a boning knife (look it up - skinny, long blade, thin and whippy, with a gentle curve on the back; typically for cleaning and filleting fish). ****

Ones get really personal - a lot of folks on the line will show off their knives - either when they first meet as an ice breaker and a dick waving contest, or just because the topic of knives came up, or because they are complaining about the sad knife in the magnet again.

Mentoring chefs in kitchens will occasionally gift beginning/in training young cooks some of their first pieces for their knife kit - it’s actually really, really sweet and especially significant if your mentor gives you one of their old knives to keep and care for in your kit.

Kitchens have a very prevalent journeyman/guild/master mentality, it’s very practical and oftentimes a bit old fashioned. Combined with high stress, constant on the job training, and having to work in close quarters for extreme hours with limited groups of people, it gets to be really intense and dramatic, so that sort of meaningful gifting happens in moments of intimate acknowledgment of someone showing significant skill advancement. It’s not surprising that a lot of folks talk about their inside stories in that light.

For culinarians who start with school, your knife kit is one of the first required purchases, along with your books, and accredited schools require their students to sit and pass a knife safety course and skills exam before permitting them to start practical classes. The kit bags tend to be clunkier, and the e knives are standard and basic - a lot of students begin to pick new, individual knives of more expensive quality and replace the originals in their early kits, it’s interesting to watch and see who does it. Students tend to find their first roll or slim case for their kits - easier to carry, more personalization (this especially), wanting to look cool and not like a student fresh out of culinary school.

[** the exception to this are the secret knives in the locked/hidden pastry cabinet separate from the house set; pastry folks are less likely to bother with knife kits on a regular basis, though you see them more often in the pastry kitchen than you used to]

[*** again, pastry is an exception fairly often - they just. Don’t tote personal materials around like that, mostly because there are TOO MANY TINY THINGS]

[**** yeah don’t spend that much on a boning knife please.]

[femchef]

I’ve told this story ten thousand times and I will tell it for the ten thousandth and first: whenever I think about wearing a costume to work on Halloween, I remember the time I saw a doctor breaking what must have been devastating news to a sobbing patient while the doc was dressed as a ketchup bottle.

[femchef]

inktober day15: single young mother travels to far off lands, defends family from unscrupulous adventurers.

inspired by a cute wolf spider mom i rescued from my parent’s bathroom a few weeks ago. her babies weren’t as blob as these are but i got very tired in the home stretch of sketching this.

also i think i’m actually getting better with inks which is neato.

[femchef]

Charleston, a Sussex farmhouse, was a country retreat for artists and writers of the Bloomsbury Group and the home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. The drawing room fireplace is heated by a Pither stove. The surround is painted with figures by Duncan Grant in the exuberant decorative style that eventually embellished every surface in the house.

The Fireplace, 1994

[femchef]

Halloween Gifs Masterpost / part 2 🎃🍁🌒

Made by @pereczke 🥨 (aka me)

Make your Instagram stories cute and spooky by the #mintober hashtag! Mintober is an art challenge by @mcmintea , check out her work, everything she makes is a masterpiece!

[femchef]

im a fucking sucker for the “character gets so badly injured that they can’t think clearly and start calling for help in a distressingly vulnerable way.” characters who start using nicknames for their friends they haven’t used since they were kids. characters who start begging for their brother they haven’t seen in years to be there. characters who would usually use their parents’ names or call them mother/father/etc crying out mama when they go down. u understand.

[femchef]

When a cat is fat and soft and warm. Reblog if u agree.

[femchef]

Dog toy plushies have fundamentally different souls than that of regular plushies. Unlike regular plushies, which are content with just existing (and just go to regular heaven when they get destroyed and don’t mind being resurrected), dog toys seek Valhalla. This is why you don’t need to feel bad when your dog/cat/especially strong bird rips it to shreds, because this was the warriors death they were seeking all their life

[femchef]

I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.

When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.

I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-

I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.

The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."

Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.

So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.

[femchef]

yak scared of pumpkin not clickbait

[femchef]

Less magic schools. More magic universities. Unlearn the simplified models of your secondary education. Discover how to reference scrolls written by a wizard possessed by a different wizard. Identify bias in the voices that whisper from beyond the veil. Have your institution be accused of promoting a Merlinist agenda. Become addicted to energy potions.

[femchef]

Medieval kittens, from a 13th century English manuscript, (Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 533, fol. 13r) 

[femchef]

strangely common misconception that words have basically the same meanings in every langauge and that translation is just a matter of identifying which exact word in the target language corresponds to the word in the original language

[femchef]

I made soufflé egg salad sandwiches today!!! So squish!!!! 🍳 ❤️ 🥪

[femchef]

My wife's favorite sleep noise app is the kind that lets you mix different noises, one of which is a snoring shih tzu, and she loves to create soundscapes that imply the dog is in imminent danger