A Full Day

Pierluigi is closed on Mondays so much of Tuesday morning is spent preparing things in advance for the week, mainly sauces for the week and chopping a fair amount of veggies that will last for the next few days. In that equation, I have become more or less the designated tomato guy. This week I spend about an hour washing, sorting and cutting two large bins of cherry tomatoes. It is pretty mindless work, but gives me the opportunity to observe much of what's going on in the rest of the kitchen. I am also regularly called away for a minute or two to taste something, see how a certain step of a recipe is done etc.

As I was chopping away Antonio was preparing a fresh batch of crema di fiori di zucca (zucchini flower cream sauce). The process is longer than it is labor intensive so he interrupted my cutting every 15 minutes or so to explain the next step. It starts with finely ground prosciutto and zucchini in a large pan with a good amount of butter. Before the ground mash goes into the pot the butter melts and begins to brown just a little bit, for that extra hint of flavor. After that cooks for a few minutes you toss in the cream and zucchini flowers. This mixture cooks incredibly slowly to the point were the cream just begins to rise, not boil, just more upward a little. At that moment you add the key ingredient, saffron. Antonio said technically you put in .375 g for every liter of cream, but you can go more or less. As he has told me many times before you cook with the eye, you bake with a the measuring cup. I'm hoping to give this recipe a try over the weekend and will post details after.

After that it was time for lunch, a simple penne with tomatoes and basil, potatoes with red onion and pancetta and what they call wurstel, but really just seem like foot long hot dogs. After lunch we returned to the kitchen and made final preparations before customers began to arrive. I helped Giuseppe and Giovanni peel a mountain of shrimp, yet another simple task they seemed to do twice as fast as I did. Giuseppe peeled every single shrimp in exactly the same manner in only three simple motions. First he pulled the head off, then grabbed the legs and removed most of the shell almost as if he was unwrapping it, and then pulled the tail off. I tried to follow suit and managed to rip the first few in half as I tried to unwrap the upper shell, once I got the hang of that I wasn't peeling enough off so when I went to pull the tail off the flesh came along with it. By the last few I had more or less got in down, but they piles sitting in front of the two chefs dwarfed the one in front of me.

This week, for the first time in awhile, I had nothing to do until the later afternoon and so could stay in the kitchen until the lunch shift ended. I also am now deemed competent enough to be helpful once the meal starts, which before, reasonably so, wasn't the case.

While I rarely produce any dish entirely on my own, Antonio has me do bits and pieces here and there. Getting the oil, garlic and chili pepper going for an amatriciana, a scoop of crema di scampi for risotto, 8 mussels and a healthy pinch of parsley for a simple mussel and tomato sauce for one, pureeing white beans for clams with beans and tomatoes, serving two portions of penne with butter and parm etc. For about half an hour I was occupied with the leftover pieces of a tuna which had been scraped off the spine. They were small pieces for pasta dishes but before cooking them all the sinew needed to be removed, a bit of a slow process even with a very sharp fillet knife.

I generally work on the large island in the middle of the kitchen which has two sides divided by a row of containers in the middle that hold all the prepared sauces, pre-chopped veggies etc. While I was cutting the tuna a little piece of plastic landed on the side of the cutting board. I thought little of it, that it slipped out of someone's hand as they opened a jar perhaps. However, it was shortly followed by a large caper. I looked around and saw nothing suspicious until I lowered my head to look under the shelf that sits above the center of the island and saw Giovanni on the other side of the island straining a freshly opened jar of capers. I restrained myself from doing anything at that moment, but his time will come.