Kitchen Duty

I worked a short stint in the college cafeteria before getting a job in the accounting department. Not my favorite job by far, but my favorite part was cutting up the big squash before scraping out the insides to cook. It must have been an attempt to find some moments of fun in a distasteful job. I would go digging in the giant utensil cabinet and grab the hugest, most gigantic knife I could find. Usually, it was a long machete type blade with wooden hand grips on both ends. I would position the large squash crosswise on the cutting board and swing the huge blade one-handed from over my head to cut through in one slice. I noticed fellow kitchen workers stayed at least two tables away while I was engaged in this part of the process. Can’t imagine why…. 

 Once I was assigned to making gravy. Making gravy for 200 students entails the use of a 20 gallon steam kettle. I pulled out the recipe and began adding the ingredients and adjusting the kettle temperature. After waiting and re-checking the times mentioned in the recipe, the gravy was still a thin soup and had not thickened. I had added arrow root powder as a thickening agent. I pushed my large wire whip to the bottom of the kettle and felt something large and firm down there. So I grabbed the barbecue prongs, stabbed it, and pulled out a large rubber ball. I didn’t remember adding that! 

As it turned out, I missed the part about stirring in the thickener and had just dumped in enough arrow root powder to thicken 15 gallons of gravy at once. The swirling action of my later stirring had formed it into a round ball at the bottom of the kettle. 

 But the craziest experience in the cafeteria came one day when I was assigned my most hated part of kitchen duty. I had to clean up after lunch had been prepared, including the larger 40 gallon steam kettles after the cooked food had been dumped out. I leaned over one of the kettles and craned my neck to asses the difficulty of my job. Sure enough, the food had caked and dried onto the inside of the huge kettle. 

“There’s no way I am gonna start scrubbing until that stuff softens up!” I told myself. Turning the knobs behind the kettles, I started them filling with water. Now a small spout takes a considerable amount of time to fill a 40 gallon container, so I left the kettles and went to the front to move dirty containers and utensils to the wash room. 

After a few minutes, my ears picked up the faint sound of water hitting the tile floor in back. A row of huge kettles overflowing onto the cafeteria floor flashed through my mind. I took off for the back of the kitchen and used a support pole to slingshot around the corner. Still running, I began to reach for the knob to turn the first faucet off. And I almost reached it. But good old physics took over. 

I was putting on the brakes hard to slow down from a dead run. Now I don’t care if you’re wearing rubber-soled combat boots, when you’re trying to slow down that fast and your feet hit a greasy tile floor covered with water, you’re going down! My feet shot forward and out from under me. The edge of the kettle knocked my reaching arm over my head as my butt hit the floor. 

 But I didn’t stop there. I still had a considerable amount of momentum carrying me along. I continued sliding past all 3 large kettles, on my butt, with one leg straight in front of me and the other bent slightly and crossing under it. This kinda gave “flying by the seat of your pants” a whole new meaning for me! The combination of my velocity before I tried to stop and the lack of friction on the wet, greasy tile allowed me to continue on through a crossing walkway on the other side of the room. A large machine with a cement platform finally stopped my speedy trip across the room. 

I still had so much momentum that when my straight foot hit the concrete platform, I was raised back up to my feet with no effort on my part aside from keeping my leg straight. I had slipped and landed on my butt without slowing much at all, traveled about 15 feet in a sitting position, only to be tossed back on my feet when my heel hit the concrete platform. I just stood there for a couple seconds in shock, with water dripping from my forearms, legs, and backside. Then I skated back to the kettles and turned off the water valves.