Fast food and I are not typically found in the same room but allow me to clarify; I think whatever your body tells you it needs to eat in the moment is a great choice. Most of the line cooks I know that work at busy high-in restaurants live off of Taco Bell because their days are so exhausting, demoralizing, and full of screaming sous chefs, insurmountable amounts of dinner tickets, gallons and gallons of prepped food and liquid to be hoisted, hauled, emulsified, reduced, and properly chilled down, and then at 11:00 pm when service ends they have to clean, restock, and scrub down their stations...

I discovered February had come to an end when one of my coworkers remarked that there was no “29th” day of February as I labeled and dated a package of smoked salmon I had just portioned. I blinked stupidly, decided he was right and pondered the concept of leap years as I ripped off a new strip of masking tape and marked “3/1” on it...

It was the sort of Tuesday that made you question whether it was actually Monday. The kitchen I currently run closes at 3:00 pm and I faithfully watched the seconds tick by till the clock struck three before bellowing out “86 Kitchen!”...

This year I discovered a new tool; To encourage people and myself to think of three ways to phrase something before blurting it out. Its benefits are three-fold:

1. It gives you the opportunity to say something more clearly or kindly.
2. You sound very wise when you pass on this knowledge.
3. You get to peruse a shockingly large list of adjectives you didn’t know you knew!...

The month of December was a special time in my professional life. Let’s just be real here, I currently run a small kitchen program out of one of the more “well-to-do” coffee shops in PDX. We poach eggs, toast the toast, whack pits out of avocados with vigor and then carefully shingle, and sometimes shmear, the lovely green fruit onto toast and sell it for $10 a pop. And the locals can’t get enough of it, it’s fascinating to watch...