The books are cooked, the fix is in....it is officially tee minus 62 minutes to cocktail hour. And, oddly enough, I still don't know what the cocktail du jour is.
Fridays at work are a piece of cake...cake dripping with chocolate sauce, topped with sweet strawberries and a bowl of freshly whipped cream to dip your toes in. One cafe is closed, one is open, and I have a quiet office to myself to ponder the affairs of the vagabond finance fairies. I still have 38 unanswered (and unopened) emails but you really have to draw the line somewhere. Enough is enough.
I did have some concerns abour the lack of prep that was attended to on Thursday afternoon. My staff never let up for a minute, yet still....very little in the way of advance prep was prepped in advance. Tuesday will suck like a hoover for all of them. I, goddess of the demi monde and convection oven that I am...waved my magic tong and lent a hand. Well, actually, I jobbed it out, but who's going to quibble when they see that I got meat...lots and lots of meat and cheese cut for them. 5 turkeys, 2 hams, 2 roast beefs, and enough cheese to choke a rat are all sliced and ready to go. Before you get yourselves all excited, none of it is portioned out. Getting it cut is as close to godlike as I come. They'll have to deal with the weights and measures themselves. I also baked more cookies than Mrs. Fields. Kids like cookies. I don't care if you're 3 or 83, who doesn't love a cookie?
I must confess, I sampled a few. I have a theory that broken cookies contain zero calories. However, break them yourself and the calorie magic doesn't work. They have to be naturally broken. Since I was baking them they had no time to actually break in transit. After all, they were only moving from the pan to the oven and then to a rack. No time for damage. So, upon close inspection I discovered several mutant varieties. Cookies so distorted in shape that any child would run screaming for cover at the discovery of such a cookie. Loathe as I am to waste anything, naturally, I put those cookies out of their potential misery. A warm and gooey chocolate chip cookie , what more could you ask for? Don't answer that. I was at work, after all... how much could you possibly hope for there?
The quiet of the kitchen also gives me opportunity to inspect the kitchen. The pizza area was quite impressively clean. I did discover 8 hardening slices of swiss cheese left in the deli cabinet. By the time Tuesday rolls around those cheese slices could be strapped to the bottoms of a bums feet and he could walk a mile before his flesh touched the pavement. I appreciate the attempt to protect my food cost, but those slices will deal like cards on Tuesday.
The walk in refrigerator and freezer demand some attention. Nothing rattles my cage more than disaray in the boxes. I hate seeing cheese and produce and eggs and salad dressing on the same shelf. I hate seeing half a sliced turkey far and away from the whole turkeys. They are family, they like to be together. They talk turkey when no one is listening and the cut turkey ends up feeling bad about himself because he is not privy to the conversation. I hate seeing the quiznos shit mixed in with the house shit. I hate finding 4 grapefruit clinging to cover in the bottom of a box...put those suckers into a bin! It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't something I'd photograph for Time magazine, either.
The new chef, that naughty boy....failed to locked his coolers at all. tsk tsk tsk. He doesn't know me well enough to know that constant threat of a kick in the ass is as real as the nose on his face. All he needs do is query the 'bonbon' to know I mean business. She has enough footprints on her ass from me to lead Hansel home again. 5 crumb like things on the stove top and a bag of rolls beneath his spotless counter and I'm none too displeased. Something does have to be done about that Mets hat, though....if he'd don a Yankees hat I might not ever insist he wear something professional. The hat situation is my fault, however..they are on backorder.
To the back of the kitchen, the cold prep area. I don't have much to say about this area. The music coming from this part of the kitchen generally sucks but it seems to keep the bonbon and the teamaker happy and productive. There was a festering bucket of sanitation fluid and a disintergrating towel swimming in it, but hey...at least they did have their sanitizer buckets out, eh?
There has been a knotted hairball on the floor of the ladies room for a week. It looks like someone had a huge almost dreadlock in their hair, yanked it out and tossed it on the floor. I know this strange guy comes in to clean the toilets every day (or sniff the air, who knows?) but apparently, he comes sans broom. I look at this thing every day and wonder if anyone else has noticed it. I leave it there because I wonder if the bathroom sweeping fairies will come for it.
Okay...time to wash the dye out of my hair, get my self presentable for date night, coax some ice into a glass of Tito's Handmade Vodka, pick up Lou and have at this weekend.
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