Big Love

I'm not about to start an essay complaining about my new job. It technically hasn't started yet so that wouldn't even be a feasible task. I'm totally excited but insanely overwhelmed. I've started the training for being a chef at Jamie Oliver's opening restaurant in Stockholm, Stureplan, to be precise, probably the snobbiest and wealthiest quarter of the city.


Today we trained for about 10.5 hours and were bombarded with great information: we learned the most intimate details about every single type of meat on the starters, the origins and all the stories behind each tomato and bottle of olive oil, the myths and legends about mozzarella and flying pigs, the regions which all of these fancy products come and the names (and nicknames) of the producers. We learned how to extrude pasta, and everything about the machine, down to the reason for it's ferrari red color.

We were visited by butchers and produce suppliers with broad presentations on everything from how to slice entrecôte to quizzes about which E numbers correspond with which additives, and where blood oranges get their red color (I got the answer right, which was anthocyanin—thanks to my chemistry/ botany teacher from high school for making sure I learned that fact...the produce guy was super impressed!)

A lengthy lecture on food safety took a few hours, and now I'm forced to take all metal out of my ears, and cut all my friendship bracelets (ouch.) Since the restaurant is part of the Jamie's British franchise, we are following the health and safety rules of the UK, not of Sweden, so some things will be very interesting to have to adapt to.

We've partaken in quizzes, tests and some fun games around teamwork and values and all that stuff. We've built towers out of spaghetti and marshmallows in competition for the highest, made mini-skits about what we will bring to the team, whipped egg whites until they were stiff enough in the bowl, to be able to hold the bowl over a team members' head without them getting covered.

We've even had some homework: a creative project where we were each handed a small bag of fresh uncooked tagliatelle and linguini and were told to go home and make something with it that didn't involve cooking it. Wow, people came up with cool stuff! I molded the pasta into a dough and built a little cow figurine and a noose, symbolizing all those cows that the butcher who'd come in yesterday showed us..... yeah, I think it was a bit morbid, but seriously, trying tying a noose out of a piece of linguine and tell me that it's not difficult. I probably broke 15 strands until I got an okay-looking one with four loops.

Somewhere around the end of the day our managers and head chefs all got really embarrassing in a set of tacky ABBA costumes with a bunch of fruit stuck down their pants and shirts and just... well, the pictures says it all.

I've had an incredible time but I'm totally beat. There's not much room left in my head for much else. I need to digest and process this information before I can sleep or even eat. On my way home I burst into a manic laughter/ crying spell and tried to go to the gym to burn off some of today's adrenaline, but then to my dismay was 15 minutes late to the last gym log-in so I couldn't get inside. Disappointed, I turned around and went home. On my way up from the subway I had the strongest longing for a cigarette... and I'm not a smoker. All the empty packs on the ground looked sexily inviting and the waft of others' puffs tickled my interest. I thought to myself, wait a minute, I'm working for this brilliant chef with healthy and environmentally sustainable values and after a day of training I'm stressed enough to crave a cigarette? That's kind of sad... actually very sad. I've even joked that I might take up smoking just so I can get some breaks in there when I'm working, and have a legitimate reason to go outside and get some light. No... seriously just kidding. I'll have to find some other non-active herbs like clover to smoke, or as Hanna suggested, get chocolate cigarettes so I can just pretend! Nah, no worries. Instead I went home, cleaned the apartment as a way of de-stressing, down to changing the bag of the vacuum cleaner, made food, smelled my amazing lilies that are opening up and tried to think of all the positive stuff.

Now I'm going to take a hot shower and defuse some nice essential oils because that'll help.

PS. I wish I could post some photos of the kitchen/ restaurant but it's strictly forbidden to share images before the opening!