Kitchen nightmares.

I hate my job.

OK, lot's of people hate their jobs, so this should probably sound like a bit of a banal statement to the vast majority of you.

Thing is, I didn't hate my job before. But my workplace is rapidly doing it's absolute best to burn me completely the fuck out. Somehow, with every passing week, it seems I work harder and harder and harder, for the privilege of earning less and less money, and I'm frankly tiring of it.

At this juncture, the honeymoon period hasn't just worn off, it's jumped straight to the "plotting to kill your spouse and collect the insurance money" stage, or at least quite near abouts.

I am the only cook. This is, by and large, one of the core problems as it is, because it's simply a fuck of a lot to handle just getting orders out while running all the stations, and not having anything come out burnt to a crisp or forgotten or done wrong. This also means I'm the only one doing the prep most of the time, which is also something of a bear, but no big deal so long as I have time to do it, But lately, my hours have been dwindling rather rapidly, meaning that I have less and less time to actually get the prep work done, and on top of that, despite my hours shrinking, we've been getting more steady business, meaning I'm too busy cooking orders to work on prep at all. Which leads to lots of fun days wherein I get swamped with more orders than I can handle as it is, with the added joy of running out of bloody everything in the middle of a rush. And then comes the surprise orders for tempura bits for the sushi, or requests to come up and help with the sushi or wash dishes (as there is no dishwasher either), meaning further delay of often vital prep.

To top this off, there's an increasingly flippant and even condescending attitude towards my presence there that I'm getting rather agitated with. The other day, the waitress had the audacity to actually walk up and take one of the pans off my goddamn range while I was in the middle of setting up mise en place for a fried rice order. I've gone from being respected as a cook who knows what the hell he's doing, to being treated like another of their long line of idiot teenagers that have filled the whites before me, constantly being second guessed and nitpicked over everything I do, usually with disastrous results. I've actually had to goddamn fight over things so simple as how to rapidly thaw a box of shrimp. I have less authority over how things run in the kitchen apparently than random fuckwit friends of the owner's who claim to have worked in a sushi bar once, who in today's instance actually deigned to dictate the nature of the yakisoba recipe.

And now the aforementioned waitress has basically turned my goddamn kitchen into a daycare. During the lunch shift I now have to deal with the accompaniment of two screaming 5 year olds running amok in my kitchen, and of course, their parent's idea of "discipline" basically amounts to talking to them in a displeased tone. That old cliche about the definition of insanity springs instantly to mind whenever I witness her explaining for the hundredth time that they are not to leave their little corner in the back of the house. Tonight I also got the oddity of her recruiting her older daughter for clean up work. Yes, that's right, unpaid child labor, right in my kitchen.

And for all this, I make barely enough to pay the bills, and much of my food throughout the week comes from my meager tips. I've had to borrow money twice just so I'd have enough cash to eat over the weekend.

This will not last much longer, thankfully. Earlier this week I was informed by my landlord that he is losing the house, and as a result, I have to move, within the next several weeks. A perusal of the local housing scene has made it abundantly clear that I'm unlikely to find anything satisfactory, so I've decided to take advantage of the situation and use it as an excuse to get the fuck out of this redneck ass town, and start looking for a job elsewhere, and a cheap flat to go with. At this point, even if I'm making minimum wage, if it's at least full time, I'll be doing more comfortably than I am now.

For the most part, I haven't really been doing much cooking even, I've simply been too burned out, and have even fallen in with the dreaded frozen meal again. However, there have been a few shining beacons in the darkened wasteland of my recent diet, which I shall recount thusly:

1) Numbered by utmost importance, is Hola! Mexican Restaurant. A friend dragged me along last weekend, and it is, quite simply, the best restaurant in Central Oregon. Absolutely, and utterly, fantastic. The lomo de puerco I ate during my visit was, quite simply, the most delicious and perfectly cooked piece of pork I've ever consumed in my entire life. We're talking blow job good here. I have difficulty thinking about it without tears welling up in my eyes, it was like a tiny orgasm every time I took a bite of the absolutely fork tender, deliciously moist, perfectly seasoned pig. A further sampling of my friend's mole poblano provided one of the most complex and well crafted blends of flavor I have ever experienced. We finished the meal with a not at all bad and actually quite delicious coconut flan, in which my only quibble was simply that it didn't taste all that recognizably like coconut.

2) Sushi. I have sort of stumbled into an informal and unspoken arrangement whereby it seems I can make myself sushi all I want, so long as I'm providing the main ingredient. This has led to some interesting experimentations as a result of my cash-starved situation, and so far I've made sushi with such oddities as canned kippers (rolled with cream cheese and eel sauce), smoked mussels (prepared similarly to the "spicy tuna" roll), and probably the oddest, turkey pastrami, which went through several iterations. However the piece de resistance was when I lucked out on a sale and got a hold of our next item . . .

3) Oysters. The nearby Fred Meyers had a sale on medium oysters, and I leapt upon them. $2.50 for a 4 oz jar of oysters that is normally $5 was too good to pass up. Now, I have never actually had oysters that I recall, excepting some utterly vile canned smoked ones I was once subjected to by the owner of my previous Japanese restaurant job, but I decided in my head that what sounded like a good idea was to tempura fry them and roll them into a maki with some mayo and tobiko and whatever else sounded good. I wound up picking up some shiitake mushrooms as well, and sauteeing them with a bit of salt, pepper, and a dash of chili oil, and then rolled them with the fried oysters, spicy mayo, green onion, and carrot, into a Japanese style maki (which I am not very good at I might note, a great shame of mine). However, I still had 4 fist sized fried oysters left after making two rolls to bring to my computer shop guy, so I decided not to let them go to waste, and to eat them with a bit of ponzu.

This was really the best route to take. Because those oysters were absolutely incredible. Rich, melt in your mouth texture, wonderful flavor, and a touch of the sea that for once is welcome, instead of off putting. I eat them and I want to move to the coast somewhere, and live off them for the rest of my life. The sushi by comparison was simply too busy, and too much going on, and it drowned out the magic of the oysters. Even the tempura I used seemed to be just a bit too much getting in between me and the good stuff, and I now understand what Bourdain sees in the damn things, because I honestly just want to eat one of the buggers raw now. The closer to the primal essence of oyster, the better. Shame I'm not going to be getting them that fresh any time between now and I don't know when. In the mean time I think I'll settle for tweaking my frying method to cut down on extraneous breading.

I hope they have more tomorrow. They were almost sold out when I got today's.