The Sous Chef

​Hello and welcome back to Blogville. It is so nice to see you. This morning I am sipping on a honey mandarine and orange tea as I write to you. This blog is a bit different as I am using a euphemism to tell you about something I recently experienced but prefer to keep the actual details confidential. I mean, I’m a pretty good cook but I would not consider myself a Chef, so right there you know the salad is symbolic.

You know, I used to make fantastic salads. People used to really benefit from my salads and would tell other people about them and that I had made one for them. Sometimes I even made more than one salad for them, or sometimes there was more than one very special ingredient in their salad because the ingredients were much better if they stayed together in the same salad.

I was making great salads when the pandemic hit. I was only able to make a few salads here or there during the pandemic so I decided to retire from making salads. I wrote a book to help people talk about making salads and self-published it, so I focused all my energy on making sure people heard about my salad book, instead of  making salads. 

I believe that what made my salads work were the very special ingredients selected and how the ingredients went together. For example, there were times when the salad was almost made and we realized that the ingredients may have worked when they were freshly combined in the bowl, but as they spent time together one or the other started to wilt. Like me, there are many chefs out there who have experience and expertise in putting ingredients together to make salads work, while their are others who are still learning which ingredients work best when combined. 

Sometimes there was a risk that the new ingredients may negatively impact on the whole salad, so we would take it out. We would place the ingredient back on the shelf, or in the fridge, until there was a new salad that the ingredient may work better with. There was nothing wrong with the ingredient, and there was nothing wrong with the salad, but they just did not work together. It was better to start over than to serve a salad with ingredients that simply did not go together.

There were other times when the salad ingredients complimented each other, and even though a new ingredient began to wilt or to impact somehow on the salad, I just had to tweak it a little. I might consult another chef that had plenty of experience tying salad flavours together in the past and see if they could do the same for this salad. Most of the time that was all that was needed and the salad came together just fine.

I think you should know that, in general, salads are often put together with great care while other times, the ingredients are just thrown together. Most salads out there have ingredients that are matched by nature, without a chef’s help. Some have one main ingredient and others have two main ingredients. When the basic salad is ready, or sometimes even before it is ready, new ingredients are added. Some have only one new ingredient while others have many new ingredients, usually added one at a time, but not always; sometimes multiple ingredients are added all at once. 

I bet that when you saw I was talking about salads you automatically pictured a chef’s salad or a Cesar salad right? There are so many salads out there I cannot even name them all, and many that even I probably have never heard of. So I can only speak about the salads I am aware of, or have played a role in putting the ingredients together. I am not talking about all salads by any means.

When I was just a selected ingredient myself, my own salad was pretty standard. I would describe myself as a pretty average ingredient while the ingredient added before me brought a little spice to the salad, but the Executive Chefs made it work. As a result, our salad worked pretty well overall. As a result of my own salad experience, when I decided to become a sous chef myself I already knew there were many different salads and salad ingredients. 

In my career as a sous chef preparing the salad ingredients, I worked very hard to make sure that the Executive Chefs had everything they needed to bring their salad to success. Most of the time the salads were a hit, but sometimes an ingredient may have needed to be tweaked, or sadly, sometimes even removed and put into a new salad. I took pride in watching my salads come together. 

Recently, I was asked to return to the kitchen. I had not made a new salad in a long while but the idea of creating them again was very enticing and so I said yes. 

However, while I was away from the kitchen, things had really changed. Many sous chefs and  Executive Chefs were new, and there were many more customers asking for salads that required new and often rare ingredients. The kitchen itself had changed and it was hard to find the ingredients I needed to create the best salads. 

Just when I was starting to learn the kitchen changes and find the ingredients I would be needing, I discovered that I was actually hired to make soup and salads. That came as a shock and I knew I could not do it. My specialty had been salads and though soup may have some of the same ingredients, the process is very different. I started exploring the kitchen and learning where the pots were kept and where I could find the basic ingredients for soup. After a short time, I was starting to get accustomed to the new kitchen and kitchen staff, and I was told that I would be waiting tables as well. 

When I said yes to returning to the kitchen I did not realize that it was not just to create my salads, but to make soup and wait tables too. Since returning to the kitchen was something I had wanted to do, but did not need to do, I left. Luckily I really had not started to make any salads yet, I had just made some calls about being able to get the proper ingredients. So, sadly, I went to the Maître D’ and handed in my apron.

Thank you for reading this very different blog today. Life offers many opportunities and challenges. I believe that people should strive to try new things and even retry old things, with or without success, so that they don’t look back and wonder if they ‘should have’. Every life experience teaches lessons we can learn and benefit from. If you care to comment, you may do so here or by reaching out to me at [email protected]