new guy to be trained

well, two weeks in the dishpit and things are going...interestingly. The job in the pit is great with no responsibilities or no decision making needing to be done. Dish is dirty, wash it; pan is dirty, wash it; baking sheet is dirty, yep you guessed it, wash it. Ahhh, sweet retirement. However, now the new fun begins in that we have a new guy in the kitchen. He is about 26 years old, red sealed and culinary school trained, worked in restaurants in PEI as well as YK (though by the sounds of it he had one gig that lasted 1 year and the rest were between 6 to 8 months only...kinda telling me something here) and has a deep seated passion for cooking. However, passion for cooking and passionate talent for cooking I am finding are two different things.

I have been told that I get to train him on salads and I am in charge of showing him the ropes of salads to make sure he fits in. So I decided to take a more free style way of training. I gave him my 2nd cook write up on what the 2nd cook duties are and it is even timed (8:30 - clean appliances like deep fryer or griller if required, 9:00 - prepare lunch salads, 9:45 - prepare hot sandwich for the day...etc) as well as all my salad recipes (creamy and vinaigrette) AND a 5 week salad/sandwich schedule that had the 3 mixed salads and sandwiches written down. So basically a blind monkey with one arm could come in (assuming that someone had either read the duty list to him or had it transcribed to braille cause, well he is a blind monkey) and run with it and not screw up. He didn't even have to plan a single thing as all the salads were planned out and scheduled for him. His response to this wealth of knowledge? Mentioned to me 'wow, this is organized, thanks' and put it on the shelf and then just started doing his own thing.

I figured 'fine, let him do his thing for a couple days, see what he is capable of and then turn him left or right if something is wrong'. One day later I get yelled at by Radio for not training him right and that I want to go to night shift and "he is your replacement. He doesn't get trained, you don't go to night shift". I think this is the first time I have ever had a position where I have to teach my replacement to do the job I am leaving. What gets me is that they don't want me to teach him to do things, they want me to make him a carbon copy of how I make salads and sandwiches so that essentially they are not getting a new salad guy who might bring in new ideas and salads, they want me to program this guy to be a robot me cranking out the same salads that I did. To me, that is just mind bogglingly strange. New cooks in the kitchen are good cause they bring in new flavours, new talent, new ideas to a slowly stagnating pool.

For instance, we have two 1st cooks in the kitchen right now, which has already proved in my mind the saying 'too many cooks spoil the soup'. One of the 1st cooks took the chance of having too many people in the kitchen to go on a first aid course, leaving the other 1st cook there to make decisions and prepare supper. On the menu was chicken and the 1st cook in charge asked me if anyone had ever done a teriyaki grilled chicken breast with grilled pineapple on it. No one had ever done that as a supper item but it had been done as a lunch sandwich (I called it the Maui Wowie Chicken Burger). I did mention to him that he might want to grill the pineapple and leave them on the side because not everyone would be receptive to the idea of pineapple. Last I saw in the kitchen he had the chicken grilled, teriyaki sauce in a bowl ready to glaze the chicken and the pineapple draining. I then got hijacked to go to a Health and Safety meeting (basically another way for the safety guy to waste 2 hours of his work time on meaningless crap but still have paperwork to prove that he is doing a job), which I slept through most of it, and when I got back to the kitchen I saw that the other 1st cook had returned and the chicken was now covered in a Dijon mustard sauce that we had on the roast pork tenderloin about 3 nights ago. I thought the Hawaiian pineapple chicken idea was a great one but the other guy didn’t agree so it was thrown out and we had the same chicken that we normally have.

Granted, there have been some issues with the guy concerning size. While I have been told by some that ‘size does matter’ I think that in salad this is especially true. Smaller is often better, to a point. We had a potato salad last night in which the pieces were so big you had to cut them with your knife before eating. Imagine a regular russet potato (baker potato), cut it lengthwise in half, lay that flat and cut it ¾ inch wide and that was his potato salad. Thing was about as big as my mouth, could only get in one at a time and even then I had a full mouth I had to really chew to get down. I saw this once it hit the line and of course Radio came up and gave me crap for not stopping him and forbidding him to put that salad out. I responded by telling Radio that I am not about to punish or lecture the guy for a sin he has not already committed. I am not going to give him crap for the size of his cuts and show him how to cut until I see him make a salad and then correct the salad that he already did. The dressing he used was great but it was just the size that was too large. If I had showed him how to make my potato salad off the bat (dressing, ingredients and size) I would not have learned a new type of dressing. So today I get to tell him about size and portion control when doing salads and thank him for letting me know of a new type of dressing for the salad.

Other than that, the interesting fun that we are having here is that 20 feet from the cabin they are drilling 1600 holes to blast in to the ground. Of course they drill mainly during the day but do some drilling at night as well. I can look out of the window and see the cabins clear as day and just up on the ridge behind them I see the drill as well. Radio still has people living in the cabin and I think our poor breakfast cook has not slept in 2 weeks time, first cause of the traffic up and down that road during the day and now the drill moving and drilling at night. Tomorrow they are going to start blasting the area. Blasting within 20 feet of the cabins. Of course they are allowed to because most of the people in the cabins are day shift so when they blast during the day no one is going to be in the cabin in case of flying rock or someone walking to the bathroom during the time of the blast.