Vocabulary Lesson #1

I'll be using some terms that are born during a life spent in professional kitchens in this blog. These terms can have applicable meanings to home cooking, and in a series of posts about "Vocabulary", I'll discuss what those meanings and home applications are.

Sometimes, like today, the vocabulary units will be phrases. Other times they'll be words.

The phrases today will be "in the weeds" and "working hard".

1) "in the weeds": swamped with work; needing, but possibly not willing to ask for, help.

This happens more often in the restaurant setting, but can happen in the home setting. This doesn't only happen to cooks. Being "weeded out" (a variation) can happen to chef that's running the expo (a phrase that itself will appear in a later post), and it can happen to servers and bartenders alike.

Being in the weeds, I imagine as a phrase, has an origin in the idea that you're off in the wilderness, alone, and overwhelmed. It is a way of life that anybody having ever worked in the industry has experienced at least a few times. If not, that restaurant isn't busy enough.

In the home setting it can occur when you have too many projects about to be done at once, probably revolving around a holiday season when help is scarce or less than actually helpful.

2) "working hard": two connected definitions. The first is a variation on 'working'.

'Working', in the restaurant industry is what you tell your boss who's asking for something now. "Working!" is what you yell out to appease the chef. It's a promise that the needed dish is very close to being done, when it may not have yet been started. That happens. That also gives you agita when you're the one running the line and the guys tell you "Thirty seconds," and you see them scrambling with the pan.

When that person running the line comes back to you in two to three minutes and demands that dish and tells you they needed it five minutes ago, you shout "It's working hard!" That's the essence of the first definition of 'working hard': it's an even more strenuous promise that whatever it is will be ready very soon. Seriously. I mean it. It's in my hand.

The second connected definition I used in the post yesterday, and derives from the fevered pitch to get a dish done. Usually you don't want to let things boil like crazy unless you're trying to boil all the scuzz off of beef or chicken bones. I've worked placed where a giant kettle would boil--and then discard--the water from a set of bones three times before it would actually go to make stock. Fill the kettle up, boil it like crazy for a five minutes, then toss it. Do it again. And one more time. Now fill it up for a fourth time, all those impurities should be boiled away, let that guy simmer for and we'll get serious.

Generally, you don't want anything to uncontrollably boil, and that's the essence of the second, connected, 'working hard' definition. If something is boiling wildly, you'd say it's working hard. Simmering would just be 'working', but for a real hard boil, used mainly for impurities and cooking pasta, we call that hard.