"Montgomery Hounchell" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:41:19 -0500, "Julianne"
wrote:

Hello Jul...

to put the sweet potatoes in the crockpot at noon? Will the sweet corn
be
caramelized or just plain yucky? How horrible it is to have your food
laid
next to someone who is very accomplished!

I have to smile at this one. I see it from the other side of your
postion. I have often been asked at social gatherings to go in the
kitchen and do the meal. Most of the time right out of the blue while
I am attending one. I have agreed many times with the stipulation that
I only help and not do the whole meal alone.
During those prepreations I have had to take a few minutes out and try
to talk to the co-ladies who are in there. I have to give them my
little cooking speech.
All recipes are subjective. There isn't any such thing as one which
isn't right for someone.
When I first began to cook I worked under a German Chef who had been
cooking for over fifty years. And this man taught me more in those two
years then I have learned in the past forty.
One of the first things he taught me was that tastes were as far left
as they are to the right.
Once I over baked some calzones.. They were as dark brown as one could
get them before they turned black in ashe. Smile. I was going to toss
them out when Chef Otto told me: "Nein, erlauben die Leute haben sie"
(no, allow the people to have them)
I set those "over baked" calzones out on the line. (steam tables)
beside some others which I felt were baked perfectly. The dark ones
were chose faster than the light tan ones were .
I was surprised but that point has been proven over and over again in
the following years. Everyone has a different taste. There isn't one
taste for anything.
Once in my first year of cooking I worked extra hard and long over a
large pan of mashed potatoes. I made absolutely certain there were no
lumps in them. At the end of the meal I had five or six people tell me
they felt my potatoes were NOT right. As there were no lumps in them
as their mom always had. Smile.
So I tell the co-workers to relax and fix what ever they are fixing
the way they like them and it will be "correctly fixed"..

I don't know of the number of entrees, vegetables and starches I have
learned to fix which I wouldn't eat as it is not of my taste.
I do not mean it isn't good, it just isn't my cup of tea.
When a Chef gets hired on a job. He is either hired as a Chef or a
cook. There is a difference. In a kitchen there is a main chef. He/she
is the one who decides on all of the recipes.
If there are six cooks in a kitchen and the menu calls for meat loaf.
If one were to allow each cook to cook a meat loaf you would have six
different meat loaves. So there has to be a leader. In some places
he/she is called The lead Chef.

My point, is that I always cook my food the way I like for me. But
most of the food I cook now is under Chef Tom. He tells me how he
wants the recipes to be. We will discuss them and after a few months
of working together one learns how he wants it fixed.

I love to watch others cook. I love to watch the cook shows on the
food network. I learn so much. It is one of the facts of cooking which
I have always found interesting. One will never learn it all. No
matter how long one cooks there is always thousands of different
recipes to learn.

My cooking at home is totally different than cooking for the public.
I cook and eat as healthy as I can figure it out to be. At work I am
required to cook it for taste which comes from grease and oil.

I would love to cook for a living but frankly, I have invested so much
into
being a nurse and I really do love it.
always welcome

Yes, I see your point. How nice to have a double intense feeling for
different things.
I have always admired people who have dedicated themselves to the
medical outreach of others.
I have a sister who was the lead nurse for transplants in a large San
Francisco Hospital for years. She took me with her once and I sat in
this room and watched about six operations she was involved in.
It was amazing. But I felt so bad for those sick people I don't know
if I could do that.
I was a photographer for the corners office for thirteen years. I had
to photograph all the deaths in three counties which were classifed
not natural. Most of these deaths were violent. I never did get
comfortable with it. I was always upset for hours after we left the
scene. While many others there didn't seem to be bothered at all.

Glad to see you here I hope you always have as much fun as you are
having
now with your job. I hope the women in your life paint it with color and
drama the way that men are leery of recognizing.

Yes. I hope so too. I have found that moods come and they go. I have
woke up from my sleep and discover a mood or feeling which seems to
just have come on it's own. I can feel wonderful for no particular
reason or I can feel sad for no reason. But I have discoverd that I
can control my moods to a certain extent by forcing myself to think of
the positive things in my life.

I have discovered that if one waits long enough, a few days at the
most the bad moods will go away and contendful ones will come.

I think hope plays an important role in my life. I have hopes that
something nice will happen. I have hopes that tomorrow I might find
something which will make my life have more meaning and maybe find a
purpose to it.

I was a husband and father for most of my life that I find it most
difficult to find a deeper meaning to my life without it. I do alot of
thinking. I lay on the sofa, and I turn off the t.v. computer or
anything which might be a distraction and I lay down and think about
things. I do this on purposes. I look at things in my life and I try
to evaluate them. If I need to make changes etc.

I kind of believe that we have time tables. We do certain things in
our lives at certain times. I was a father until my children were
raised. I am not a father in the same sence as I once believe that
role to be. Actually my grown children have kind of taught me that.
Smile. (Father I would rather do it myself!)

I did that work (rasing children) when it was time to do it. And now I
must push onward and find another role which might be of value for me
and my self worth in the remaining years I have.

I don't know what the future will bring. But I do know that I need to
take an interest in my state of health. And that dieting is very
important to that end. I know that the human mind with its many moods
can play an important part to a person's motivation towards their
health.

I certtainly believe I could have remained in that state of depression
and a state of just giving up from the American Dream. It was
dangeoursly too close for me. I could have stayed there and lost many
good years of my life. I get chills thinking of how close I came to
just staying in that defeated state of mind and allowing my body to
live under those unhealthy conditions.

Thanks for the nice chat..

Monte

Your message is inspiring in more than one way. Starting backwards, I
have observed how easy it is for people to ruminate over failures and losses
in life. I think that your habit of forcing yourself to think about the
positive things in life is remarkable. Being devastated by a loss is normal
and recovery comes at different times for different folks but there is
always a reason to go on. You have to be willing to look for it, though.
Currently, I have a friend who lost her boyfriend almost two years ago in a
car crash. Her continued depression, lack of sleep, etc., is worrisome.
Her comment to me is that she doesn't want to get better because she doesn't
want to forget. My comment to her was that no one, especially the boyfriend
would want to her to commit to a life of misery.

Being a nurse means taking care of sick people or in my case, as a
consultant, taking care of the nurses who render direct care. I have never
like watching procedures and death is never pleasant. I worked with
critically ill patients for over ten years and many of them died. We
learned how to cope with death but none of us ever felt good about it. It
made us better nurses to remember that the 'code 14 in bed 13' was also a
husband and a father, grandfather, etc. and that the woman who came to bid
farewell after the code was called saw the handsome groom she met at the
altar many years ago. Nurses get burned out but never for feeling real
emotions. Shooting pics for the coroner's office would be disturbing. I
love to take pictures (especially alligators) but I cannot imagine looking
at a corpse and wondering what grotesque feature should be the focus of a
photograph. I cannot imagine shooting something deliberately ugly in order
to capture an important detail. However, like nurses, you offered something
important to the survivors, especially when your pics would be a part of a
murder trial.

Onto lighter things, your comment about different tastes was illustrated
perfectly yesterday morning. I went to my boyfriend's camp and woke up to
rain. As the whole camp started stirring, I offered to make breakfast. My
bf's ten year kiddo was all excited that we were going to make french toast
and proceeded to ruin it. I got so mad at the kid. He poured a whole bowl
full of milk and added an egg. "too much milk', I told him. He wouldn't
listen but conceded by adding an additional egg to the two cups of milk. I
was livid and left him in the kitchen to ruin breakfast.

He made this nasty soggy french toast (using soft white bread which I
personally would not have recommended) and served it with lumpy powdered
sugar. No cinnamon, seasonings, vanilla and certainly no french bread for
true pain perdu. By that time, the men came to the table and proclaimed it
to be like Christmas. After all, who would make french toast for them if it
wasn't a grand occasion.

I kicked myself in the ass and learned important lessons. First, cooking is
a way of taking care of people and people appreciate care. Second, the
kiddo has the right to be creative and learn lessons in the kitchen and have
the opportunity to contribute to our bizarre family life the same way the
rest of us enjoy. Third, if the kiddo messes up the kitchen, it is easier
to insist that he clean up behind himself. Fourth, if the kid is taking
care of stuff, you can get outside and catch fish sooner.

I have been steadily losing weight. I do enjoy food and cooking. I
probably enjoy cooking more than eating and will frequently cook things that
I cannot eat (I am highly allergic to fish and hate cooked green food).
But, I do have a problem with the position that food should not be enjoyed
but rather regarded as simply food. I am not arguing that that approach
might work for some but I can attest to the fact that one can eat well
without overdoing the calories.

I wish you every success in the future. Hang around ASD for a while. I
love having a chef available for advice!

j