SC - HELP!!!!!

[Phil & Susan Troy]

needlwitch at msn.com wrote:

> I could not have put this better myself. Please, for your sanity, put
> emphisis on the word DELEGATE. A head chef does very little actual cooking,
> they oversee everyone else doing the work. This is how they stay sane (Well,
> mostly anyway). And try to have fun, too.

Of course, many executive chefs will abandon the hands-off approach for a
while and cook for the relaxation of it, and that is how _they_ stay sane and
have fun. But yes, the kitchen should be organized so that the cooking will
still get done if the chef is either forced or chooses to become purely managerial.

I generally go around and annoy people, to get a sense of how tired people
are, how close to hurting themselves, when they ate/drank/sat last, and if
they are interested in learning of an easier/better/faster/safer/etc. way of
doing the job. An offshoot of the latter is that we in the SCA don't pay our
cooks, as a rule, and cooks that can walk away from such a job feeling they
have learned something valuable that they can use in their own kitchens tends
to make them remember the experience fondly, and come back next time.  

Another aspect of the hands-on thing is that I will not ask anyone in the SCA
to do a job I'm not prepared to do myself. So, while I make a point of trying
to behave more like a chef than many kitchen heads in the SCA do, I also make
a point of being sure to take part in pot washing, butchering, and peeling at
least some of the 100-pound bag of onions. I find this has an excellent effect
on morale.

Other useful things to remember include having, in effect, a bouncer. Ideally
this is someone who knows you, your speech patterns, your moods, and your body
language. In short, someone who can tell when you are stressed out and
thinking about too many things at once. This person will be able to tell when
you have bits of information falling out of your ears and being lost forever.
One of his/her biggest jobs is to spot and intercept the people who absolutely
must have a half hour of your time to discuss their allergies and what happens
to their skin, lungs, etc. whenever they eat even a smidgen of nutmeg.
Obviously this needs to be taken care of, but it doesn't absolutely have to be
done by you, unless you have for some reason deviated from your plans. Most of
that will/should be repeating the mantra, recipes and ingredients are posted
on that wall.

For the larger events, where some of the prep work can get extremely
monotonous, I have had excellent results with having everyone take a break
every so often to do something absolutely silly. For example, at a Twelfth
Night feast I ran a few years ago, we had everyone stop all work while we did
Inspirational Readings from "Ed Wood: Nightmare in Ecstasy", and on at least
one occasion we spent five minutes learning the Oompa Loompa Song from "Willy
Wonka And The Chocolate Factory". I will never forget the expression on the
face of a certain Royal Peer who entered the kitchen in the middle of one of
these breaks, index finger upraised and mouth open in the early stages of
pontification, only to turn on his heel and leave without a word, but with an
_extremely_ confused expression. Again, this did wonders for morale.

Adamantius 
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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