Almost FUBAR in the Kitchen

Our soul food kitchen is compact, to say the least: Jam-packed with all sorts of things, which, surprisingly enough, I use pretty much every day. My kitchen equipment is what I would call workhorse high-end: Not necessarily shi-shi brands, but well-known commercial stuff built to last. Because basically, I can’t really afford to have shit break down and leave me in the lurch all of a sudden. And even were that to happen, I do have redundancies and work-arounds, just in case.

With one exception: My gem of a juicer. Angel is the make. The thing ain’t cheap. But it’s amazing. Can do pretty much anything. And while I do have other avenues to manage juice extraction, this beast can handle things like nothing else in my kitchen. Like pulping the shit out of rhubarb stalks, no peeling necessary, into this lovely reddish juice that reduces down into a phenomenal rhubarb vinaigrette.

However.

In the course of making this rhubarb vinaigrette recently, one of the two rotary thing-a-ma-bobs got stuck inside the main feed chute. I mean stuck fast. Had never happened before. Go back even just a few years and I would have absolutely panicked in such a situation, dropping everything else I was doing, trying to force a solution, and most likely, making things far worse if not totally unfixable. That didn’t happen, though.

First, I continued on making the rhubarb vinaigrette, letting that reduction sauce play out in its own time. Meanwhile I soaked the stuck components in hope the jammed pulp would somehow ease out of there. Nope. Tried using some bottle-nosed pliers on the contraption, but also no-go. More soaking. Still no.

I’ll spare you the iterations of failed attempts. Suffice it to say that eventually, mostly with time and patience, the crisis was averted.

I decided to write about this not just because it’s pretty fucking challenging to find something new each day to write about. But more so, because I think this most recent period of my life working as a chef has had a healthy influence on how I approach problem-solving. I suppose that’s somewhat self-evident, but not anything I have given much thought to. We are putting out fires — sometimes literally — most everyday in our soul food kitchen. And as a result, you slowly become acclimatized to dealing with these daily challenges with, if not a cool head, at least a non-panicky one.

Or maybe it’s just an ageing thing, and I’m simply responding to most things more slowly.