Small Bites

There are few perks to professional cooking: sitting down for a meal usually isn’t one of them

Image credit: Photo by qmnonic via Creative Commons

Recommended by the Editor

Non-Traditional Turkey

A Word on Eggs

By: Mecca Bos

It’s catering season, which means a few things in my life—my friends, family, and laundry are neglected, showering becomes an every third day or so endeavor (don’t even talk to me about hair washing,) and my cabinets look like old mother hubbard’s.

In otherwords, I’m bizeee. Back-to-back doubles mean I don’t have much time for regular people stuff like sleeping and eating. For the month of December only, I’ll admit to being a pretty challenged food editor.
 
Last night I was at an event with chef Erick Harcey of Victory 44 and we were discussing the fact that neither one of us had eaten all day. He said that his wife thinks he’s crazy when he gets home at midnight only to discover he hasn’t eaten. We laughed.
 
But that isn’t exactly true. There are few perks to professional cooking, and sitting down to the grand meals we serve to the general public usually isn’t one of them (my dual career notwithstanding). What we do eat: teensy tinsy sandwiches culled out of baguette butts and the nubs of expensive Gruyere that get stuck in the spinning mechanism of the Robot Coupe. We get to taste the smoked trout pate canapé for which the customer is paying three bucks a pop. We get a lick of caviar off the spoon. We get superhuman doses of caffeine (I’ll cop to picking up the guilty pleasure of ice-cold Coca-Colas again, for this month only) and we get the surreptitious little tastes off fingertips that are the right of any cook worth her salt.
 
As it turns out, by the time we get home, our bellies are pleasantly, if not completely full, and we get the four-week-only thrill of watching the waistband on our pants go a little slack. When we finally, finally, arrive home after 12, 14, 16 or more hours on our feet, our reeking, aching tootsies get to rest on the coffee table while we down a goblet of wine or a bottle of beer, our significant others long since asleep. We dial up an ugodly a.m. hour on the alarmclock and drift off, sometimes right there, beer in hand.

+ METRO's resident foodie Mecca Bos contributes to the magazine's food and drink section. She blogs for metromag.com between meals. See more of her work on her author page.