SC - Lutefisk

[KKimes1066]

>
>....as opposed to here, where one person volunteers to run the whole thing
and then has to browbeat his/her spouse and 5-6 friends into being "kitchen
staff" and bribe the local impoverished college students into serving or
cutting veggies or what-have-you...
>
>
>> The Kitchen Heads job is to vet all the recipies, with guild members
>> help, do the expansions, do a kitchen schedule, line up the crew,
>> do the grocery lists and budgets, and then do a massive grocery
>> shopping saga usually the night before, or that morning. The
>> emphasis is in sharing the fun in the kitchen...we all like to cook and
>> so it wouldn't be fair to bogart all the work, you see.
>

Well, I suppose that my group is somewhere inbetween the two. Thanks to alot
of promotion of how fun it is to cook period stuff, I now find myself in the
position of having to beg a peer who is going to take on an apprentice in
another artform to PROMISE that the said apprentice will be allowed to
continue to practice in MY artform. I'm over run with hopelessly
over-talented newbies...what can I say? And my saddest day as a cook was my
proudest day as a teacher----the day Lord Valerie graduated to Cook from
Dishwasher. I now have to clean up after myself, but the good news is that I
don't have to do it ALL THE TIME. Sometimes I clean up after him!

And I was very very happy to find a pair of extremely talented cooks who
moved into the area admit that maybe, perhaps, it is a good thing to cook
from original sources. They are now doing so more and more.

The newbies are being dumped into the cooking culture properly from the
start. About 4 times a year or so (we are a really huge, land-wise,
Barony---larger than Rhode Island) we have a "redaction party", and happily
make messes in the kitchen with food. At about $5.00 a head, we get to try
all sorts of interesting things that we couldn't/wouldn't serve to large
crowds. It's quite fun!

Finally, it is very handy to have someone tendlerly lead you by the hand out
of the kitchen when you are plainly about to faint from exhaustion, or to
hand you a chair and a plate of food and stand over you till you've sat at
least 1/2 hour. These are all good reasons to get a cook's guild going. Even
if the guild does not foster event cooking (a decathalon sport), it fosters
individuals with a sympathetic appreciation for exactly how much work you
are doing for them, at no personal gain.

I suspect that the non-cooks who are the "core workers" secretly enjoy
washing dishes. They start the washing off with this little ceremony: 

Standing in front of the kitchen door, my husband will loudly sing in his
deep baritone voice: "Hi HOOOOOOOOOOOO".
He is quickly joined by several other gentles (usually guys) who answer 'Hi
HOOOOOOOOOOOO" at a higher note. Finally, they all, at yet another, higher
note, sing together "Hi HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO." (Someone invariably interjects
"Ouch! That hurt!"). Then they all pitch in:  "Hi ho, hi ho, It's off to
work we go.....". You get the picture. The kitchen is sparkling in no time.
It's funny, but the shenanigans often result in MORE dishwashers, even
unknown ones. The poor dears don't know what they are getting into when they
rush up to compete in the "sing loudly for as long as you can contest". And
then they get marched into the kitchen.


Toodles

Aoife

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