The Outsider's View on the Inside of a Kitchen

This cooking adventure started when I began to realize how limited employment would be for a recent economics grade in the worst recession my generation has ever seen. I wanted to learn

more about the thing I love most- food. I called a partner in my family's Rendezvous Farm, and asked him which culinary school he recommended.

I ended up exactly where he recommended- his kitchen in Aspen, Colorado where our farm provides a good portion of the produce and protein. I put in a month a free labor in the banquet department, literally learning how to peel a potato, and then 200 lbs. of them. Banquets are a whole different animal apart from the main kitchen. There's a lot behavior similar to what you'd expect in a frat house. You basically live with each other and definitely see more of each other than your family or friends, so I think you'd be hard pressed to distinguish a frat house from a banquet kitchen outside of the ability to cook.

When Chef let us know that we could spend the off-season at Blackberry Farm outside of Knoxville, Tennesse, I shot him an e-mail asking to go, thinking they wouldn't need a

butter-finger with zero kitchen experience in their kitchen. I thought wrong. I spent the next ten weeks in culinary boot camp. There's absolutely no more beautiful a setting for this boot camp than Blackberry Farm. The kitchen is literally footsteps away from the farm. When we arrived we were still gathering summer squash and vibrant peppers for dinner and towards the end were picking arugula with a touch of purple from frosty nights and countless bushels of collard greens. Not everything was pure bliss, though. Every day around 6 pm, right around when service started, my hands began to shake and the hives that developed on them got a little worse. I had no business making soups, purees, emulsions, or anything remotely technical in a kitchen, let alone line cooking, but it taught me how and it taught me fast. Sulli, the butcher,let me hang out down in the butcher shop and patiently showed me how to break whole pigs down, and even the basics of chicken and fish fabrication. I'd post recipes for things I learned, but its more accurately recorded in the new cookbook and I'm not well versed on copy-writing issues.

The book is gorgeous anyways- check it out at Blackberry or Amazon.

Back in Aspen now, I've graduated from banquets to Bar/Soup station with a goal of learning as much as possible about cooking and the relationship between my Colorado farm and the restaurant it supplies. We gained a butcher while I was gone, and hopefully I can squeeze some knowledge out of him as well. As the title implies, I'm an outsider getting an incredible opportunity at an inside look of a kitchen, simultaneously gaining a free culinary education. I've been in the kitchen for 6 months now and only written one blog. I learn enough in one day to double this entry, so I'll make it a habit to start writing regularly. I'm on twitter these days as well.