If You Don’t Want to Get Bit, Keep Your Hand Out the Cage!: First Published 1/30/08

I’ve already told you that I can rub people the wrong way, inside and outside the kitchen; but it manifested itself in a pretty pronounced way yesterday when we were making Beef Bourguignon. Apparently, sometimes I don’t let people get enough stove time or don’t let people fabricate meat the way they want to…but not fish or “icky” meats, because girls don’t want to touch icky meats. So as soon as we were ready, I took some beef tri-tip cubes out of the fridge and separated it into three portions for our teams and then started cutting the beef into forkable pieces. One of my classmates came over and took some beef off my board, telling me she wanted to cut some too, I said fine. Fast forward to the end of class when we were getting some butter noodles ready and I apparently usurped the butter noodle duties of one of my classmates who proceeded to fly off the handle. Suffice it to say, when I get into the kitchen, I don’t fuck around. I don’t sneak off to the back of the room to bullshit with people and steal wine from a fucking box because I need a little bit of a buzz to get through class or go down the hallway to hang out with work study students. I am always by the stove or by the table looking for things to do. Excuse me if I want things to work out perfectly. As I said to her and to many of my other classmates, “if you want to cook something, or if you want to get on the stove, just say so. That’s all you have to do, just say so.” But if you sit there and don’t say anything when I grab some black bass, or chicken or shrimp or ginger root or venison and start to fabricate it, then you can’t get pissed off when I don’t see something getting done and decide to jump on it…especially when the chef stood right-fucking-next-to me, put his hand in a Le Creuset pot and said, “put some butter in this and get the drained noodles in it.” Basically, I’m not going to apologize for my behavior in the kitchen when my shit comes out nice! It’s like I told my buddy last night, “I’m an animal in the kitchen, if you don’t want to get bit, keep your hand out the cage!”