I'm finally home!

I'm finally home and it feels like i've been gone for an eon. I'm restless, thirsty and all i want to do is laundry for some reason. I don't actually feel like cooking, which is weird because i always feel like cooking. I think the respite from my normal routine has shaken my very foundation and left me asking the same questions that creep into my brain when things get really tough in my life. Am i really doing what i love? Am i doing something worthwhile with my life? Am i actually making a difference doing what i'm doing? But now i'm not exploring these ideas from a place of frantic stress, but rather an off-centered place of calm. I can actually hear bird chirping outside my window and I think i would normally have tuned that out due the reflex I have when I’m at work of tuning out all unnecessary stimulus, while I’m attempting to concentrate in something. My mind is pleasantly clear, maybe it’s the second beer I just started. 

Anyway…I haven't heard the clatter of the ticket machine spitting out orders in like 2 weeks. It's a really amazing feeling, actually. The jolting fear that i forgot to order something from produce or the fish company or some other purveyor hasn't struck me in a few days. I’m not sure what it’s going to be like when I get back to work tomorrow. I’m actually excited to get back to cooking, but I’m pretty much dreading the state of my mis en place. After two weeks the menu is probably going to look a little different than I left it. But thus is the nature of my chosen profession, the constant, unrelenting controlled chaos that is a small, ill-designed kitchen.

I wanted to start posting some pictures from my trip and begin the process of chronically the events of Culinary Corps, as well as my days before and after. So with out further ado, here’s my trip to NOLA:

The night before I got on the plane at SFO, I stayed with my homeboy Nick and his girlfriend Erin. They are some of the coolest peeps that I know and their apartment is awesome and is situated right across the street from Duboce Park in SF. I went to Bi-Rite and got stuff to make dinner and stunk up Nick’s apartment with merguez sausage and threw it over some pasta with mushrooms and a quick ragout. Delicious! And of course after dinner, Nick put his mixologist skills to work and pored me a perfect Manhattan, my first Manhattan in fact. Again, delicious! 

It was the perfect way to start my trip and I couldn’t have asked for better company than Nick and Erin. Woke up at 3:30 the next morning and caught a cab to the airport to catch my 6:00am flight to NOLA.

As I sat down in the plane, I had no idea what to expect when I touched down in NOLA. I knew basic facts about the city. I looked at the weather report and everything looked amazing for the time that I would be there. I knew there were afew things that I really wanted to do when I got there, but I was essentially leaving things up to chance.

In terms of my expectations for the volunteer work I was about to get into, I was pretty much at a loss for what was coming next. I knew from talking to Christine and e-mailing back and forth that she was uber-organized and that the trip was going to be planned out to the letter. I knew what the itinerary and all the events we would be taking part in, but that didn’t account for last minute changes that would inevitably happen and the ultimate variable of group dynamics. Who were these people I was about to be thrown together with for the next week? I was dying to find out!

I sat there in the plane and imagined myself cooking in some small, hot kitchen, stirring a big pot of crawfish with crazy cooks yelling all around me and hot boiling crayfish water leaping all over my arms. I was freaking out a little, and luckily the trip was nothing like that. Well at least the big pot of crayfish never made an appearance. The rest we can leave up to interpretation. Haha. I was definitely ready for anything and looking forward to meeting all the people I had chatted with on our conference call.

Here’s some pictures of Louisiana as I was flying over. The Mississippi river was as brown as everyone told me it was going to be. And it dawned on me just how surrounded with water New Orleans really is. There’s the Mississippi river on one side and then there’s lake pontchatrain on the other. The reality of the flooding really begins to set in when you see with your own eyes just how the geography is situated.

It was an awesome way to start a visit to the Crescent City that would really test me in ways that i'd never been tested and pushed me in directions i never thought i'd like to be pushed in.There will be more posts to come, i need to go change my laundry.

-GDP