I can’t play the “I don’t know how to do that” card in the kitchen at home.
No outs
Whether it’s prepping vegetables, cooking, or just cleaning up, I can’t get out of that work by pleading ignorance. Remember, I had a professional background in a restaurant kitchen. As noted in a previous post, https://restaurant-entrepreneur.net/my-restaurant-routine/, I still worked the kitchen to keep my hand in it.
“Didn’t you operate a restaurant?” or “Didn’t you do this for a living?” These are questions that will tell the tale of a true restaurateur.
My foodservice career was doing just those tasks so helping to prepare and cook food plus clean up is a given. Definitely, I still know my way around a kitchen.
A kitchen tip
My advice to clean as you go was well received by my wife, and she follows this protocol to this day.
My mentor relayed the story about a busy night and the decision to leave the steam table sauces for cleaning the next day. After cleaning the cheese sauce with a chisel the next morning, he quickly realized this was something that would never happen again.
Bringing it home
My brother told me about a Michelin Star chef in France who he visited on a Sunday, the chef’s day off, and his wife asked him to prepare a whole fish. The last thing he wanted to do was anything in a kitchen, but reluctantly he used his precision skills to fillet the fish perfectly in no time.
The value
The benefits of these culinary skills and methods with the focus on maintaining a clean organized kitchen are hard to place a value on. I’m just happy that I can contribute when needed although my wife is an excellent cook as I’ve noted before.