Escape from the smothering home

Well, another busy week.(which one is not busy?)

After cooking a buffet dinner for 40+people in 7 hours with a 5"X20" sized kitchen. I and my lovely helper really need a long recovery, for our body and our kitchen.

But no matter what, I really hate to stay at home for my holiday and doing nothing. Once I am so bored and going to have another nap to waste my holiday , my friends called me out for BBQ. It is a quick and simple one. And I just found I didn't go out near the sea for so long. So I just take my newly bought "always ready" camera bag and tripod and rush to Tai Po. 

Everything is so nice. I am so tired and I really love sitting down, doing something simple and relax but not at home. Hope you all will enjoy the photos.

Don't pray for the easy life.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.

Phillips Brooks

US Episcopal bishop (1835 - 1893)

From the last post till now. I had done battle every single day. 

In the past 2 weeks, we have 3 events in shop. 2 of them was happen within 3 days, and it is across Friday.Which is the bloody day for all kitchen.

As a chef, sometime we pray for easy life as we wanna do more focus on our food, or even design some new things. Workload somehow will beat you up. Right after the event, I need to fight for the Friday, and Friday, I need to fight for the day and event ready for the coming day event. I need to design 2 new special dishes within 24 hours. And I made it. The price is, I vomited 3 times on Friday. Thank you my assistant to make this happen. 

To be honest with you all. I didn't like my kitchen very busy. I am not a lazy boy as I always think busy days make time goes even faster. But I always hope I need not to compromise the quality to gain the speed. In addition, more food we sold somehow reflect a lower sales, as they didn't drink much. However, once I know we broke the sales record since we opened. I feel my effort worth. I didn't got more salary if the sales getting higher. But, to make the task done beautifully, I feel extremely excited. When the customers said I put a lot of effort in food, even for a very small cheese platter, I put miso in it ; even the tomato garnish, i slow baked it for 2 hours.Somebody notice it. I am touched.

And yesterday, our boss just give us a wonderful incentive dinner. It is amazing!

Hope I can keep fighting and be a stronger man.

All food are created equal

Time flies. I had been in FnB industry for nearly 10 years. 3.5 years of bar tender, 4.5 years of service, 2 years of kitchen. May be I am not the great chef, may be never can make it. But, I still have my own stand point which I never wanna compromise.

I am a believer of all men are created equal, also food.
Every food ingredients are created for same reason. Even thought  some were more expansive.
Truffle and bottom mushroom. Waygu and Charolais. Thai rice or japanese rice. They are all equal.
I will take extra care of the expansive food ingredients as I don't wanna make too many wastage.
But cooking in their best way to speak, should be the same. I grill my US prime ribeye and my Waygu ribeye with same attention, even the US one may need extra care to cook to the perfection.

I am not saying these things to show my "saint's thought" but respect. I learnt this when I was the bar tender. The way I served a sparkling water should be the same as sparkling wine.No different. Respect. After tough job as chef, I respect more people who worked "undercover". The one who clean the restroom, the one who collect trash, the one who deliver. We may never notice them as they are very low profile, but I love them. I hope, I can be the one who can serve the public one day.


Photo below was the food I cooked for the special event. World famous Japanese beef. But, I spent most of my time to cook the perfect rice. Which I loved the most in the dish. A very low profile ingredient which made a huge different.

  

Project One: Nocturnality

Dear readers! ( if I got) Sorry for being lazy this month. It is a tough month for me. Just finished a toe surgery and come with a very busy beer fest.@ LKF.

 

But it's all right~ As you see, I got a hot lady stay with me in a very hot day. And they did a really great job in helping us!

Ok, back to the topic. Project One: Nocturnality. My blog name is called Project zero, as i think it is like a project. And the main reason behind is, I just found so many things happen around me, sometime, it is beautiful. I got a big DSLR but which I never bring along with me until I really need. So, I bought a nice , and comparatively more compact camera, X100s.

And if you know more about me, as a chef who worked in LFK, Nocturnality is the best adj. to describe me.I work from 1500-0000, sometime 0100 or even 0300. I am nothing more different between an Owl or bat. Yes, it is also the main reason I cannot buy a normal digital compact but a APSC senor one with better High ISO performance.

Being Nocturnality is not always bad. I wanna show you two groups of photo, which normal person hardly did. As during the day time, you can hardly take this kinds of photo without the distraction of the people. You can even set a tripod at on a very busy Time Square and use more then 10sec of exp. time to take a single shot. Ok, there you go! Hope you all will enjoy it!

I just found how beautiful our city is.

I just got a small operation on my toe for the ingrown nail. Hardly walk for a week after that. Today, I just go and check out my ability to walk to workplace and have a very small stop at work. After that, I walked to IFC's city super for finding out some ingredients for the music and beer fest this weekend.

I was amazed by what I seen.