It’s Sunday, it’s March, and it rained all day today. So, it was a particularly slow day at the restaurant, and I was bored. I hate being on the line when it’s slow, because we get one or two tickets at a time, and other than that it’s just standing around and trying to look busy. What I usually do on days like today is escape to the walk-in, look through the mise-en-place and the produce section, and find something to prep. Anything that might need to be done, to give me something to do. We might have a few cases of lettuces or vegetables that haven’t been cleaned up and put away yet, or there might be things that need trimming, peeling, slicing, dicing, etc. Today I took out a big box of baby beets, a box of baby carrots the size of a finger, and a box of watercress. We’re a farm-to-table restaurant, and we buy very high-quality, organic produce from specialty purveyors. Some of the stuff we get in is absolutely pristine, and perfectly fresh. The beets for example come with their leaves on, and the leaves are fresh and tender enough that we use them in one of our salad mixes. The carrots are so thin and delicate that we can’t use a peeler to peel them, as it would take off too much of the vegetable, and we would also lose its nice roundness. Instead we brush them lightly with a clean scrub pad, to remove all the grit and fibrous strings.

On Fridays, I have a big prep day, as quite a lot of produce comes in for the weekend. I usually trim up a few cases of the baby beets, and wash and dry their leaves as well as dandelion greens, mustard greens, and frisee. Then I mix the dandelion, beet greens, and mustard greens for our farm salad, and put it away in a huge plastic container. Sometimes I go through 8 or 9 cases of produce at a time. For me this is one of the most fun things about working in the kitchen. I get set up with a cutting board, a few plastic containers to sort things out, and a cup of our restaurant’s delicious coffee, from Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Then I start tearing through the mountain of produce like a machine, trimming things up, getting stuff put away, and transforming the dirty mess into organized mise-en-place to keep the kitchen running smoothly through the marathon of weekend service. I like this type of work because I can handle my business, get things done, and nobody bothers me because they know I take care of my products. It’s also my connection to nature. Living in the city, people are usually removed from nature. Going through all the beautiful, quality produce, reminds me of the abundance that nature has to offer.