Tag: chef

Beef Strogayesplease

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I ate a whole beef stroganoff yesterday. I know that doesn’t mean anything. What is a whole version of something that could be any size. But I did. I made it myself too. I enjoy cooking so making that wasn’t an ordeal and although it was my first ever attempt, with a quick skim over a recipe I smashed it. Genuinely it was incredibly tasty. My friend had given me a huge chunk of unsliced sandwich meat a few months ago and I had stored it, along with a few other vital lifesaving things, at the back of my freezer in case of the coronapocalypse. Well that doesn’t look like it’s happening so in my belly it went. I used a whole tub of sour cream which I just checked contained sixty grams of fat and apparently my daily allowance is only seventy. Not that that would stop me repeating it all over again. I also added mushrooms because it wouldn’t be right without them and asparagus because I always like to fuck with recipes. I have a habit of cooking enough for two people every time and usually just eat it all myself. How I’m not a big fatty is beyond me. I wish now I had taken a photo of my delicious creation but I neither planned on writing about it nor am one for taking photos of my dinner. I’ll see what Google has to offer.

Beef stroganoff is something I rarely eat, it is surely some kind of 1970s throwback that has survived to modern times. It does though have an emotional connection in my mind, or heart, or even soul. When I was a young child I used to go with my Grandma to a department store in Edinburgh called Jenners. It is, or at least was to my young mind, quite a respectable and reasonably fancy place. It is massive and appealed, perhaps still does, to a slightly wealthier clientele, especially old women of that generation twenty-five years ago. I suddenly feel old. Where has my life gone. Twenty-five bloody years ago. Gasps for air. Anyway, one of my favourite parts of the day was lunch and it was in the upstairs restaurant that I discovered beef stroganoff for the first time. Red meat, mushrooms and cream. What wasn’t to like. There has forever been a connection and while I have probably had the dish ten times in my life at most, last night was my first attempt at making it myself. I have no idea what my grandma ate all those years ago, but had it been the stroganoff, I’m sure she would have approved of mine.

What Could Have Been

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The one important thing to remember when we’re worrying or being down on ourselves is that we’re not alone. While our lives are unique there are similarities with others; we’ve all loved or hated someone, worried about something that has been fine or has been a complete failure, regretted doing or not doing things, enjoyed our own company and been painfully bored, and so on and so on. Emotional similarities are easier to point to because we can all say we’ve experienced a moment of happiness. This happiness is comparative to less happy moments in our lives and we’ve all experienced happier and comparatively less happier moments. I imagine me running down the beach is not unique but also not everyone has done this. We can always shape a feeling to fit.

Today then I experienced the emotion of regret. I regretted an inaction in my past and the course my life has taken as a result. I was listening to a podcast with a chef and a restaurant owner discussing cooking, food, techniques, food as art etc and I remembered a desire I had when I was about sixteen to become a chef and open a restaurant in Dublin. That was my plan. I’ve persuaded myself that the only reason I didn’t do it was because I was persuaded against it, that life as a chef is volatile and hard work. In reality there are an infinite number of reasons life didn’t take that course, one of them being that I just did something else. But I felt regret, that I should have done that instead of whatever I did do. I can admit this because like I said, we’ve all experienced the same emotion and probably a few out there over that exact scenario.

The truth is though that the mind plays many tricks on us and in this case I craved an idea. It is nothing more than an idea, and worse than that it’s a fantasy of an idea. We imagine this situation, what could have been and it’s always perfect. Life isn’t necessarily bad, I have it good in many ways but like everyone we have days which vary in degrees of satisfaction. In times like today we fantasise, but that’s all it is, it’s a fantasy and it’s not real. I then later dreamt of being a writer and after that an actor.

I don’t say any of this in a bad way, as I write this I don’t feel sad. Of course what ifs are not always fun and don’t always signify positivity but they’re just examples of one version out of an infinite versions of possible realities. We also don’t know whether we would have survived in that version, perhaps I would have had a heart attack by now from all the rich restaurant food I was eating. I would probably be much fatter than I am, but as a chef I would also be on a steady diet of amphetamines so that would have probably cut my appetite considerably. It’s fun to explore these moments but also not worth taking them too seriously. There’s a reason we never made it happen then and despite the fantasising now, there’s a reason we’re not rushing off to do it anytime soon. And it’s not likely because we can’t.

Work Life Balance Bullshit

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I was discussing with a friend / taking the piss out of the concept of the work life balance today. He owns his own company which means either there is no such thing as a work life balance or that he has created one he has to be comfortable with. I remember doing a training session for a new teaching job a few years ago in Athens and we had to do a one hour session on the importance of finding a work life balance. It is fair to say it was mocked widely as we went through it and this became clear why when the job seemed to take up six of the seven in my week shortly after, with very little reward. Now my mate works six out of seven days and this is normal for him but for me it was a travesty of existence. I had been used to working whenever I needed to and I would do it in a way that consisted of giving up on life for a month or two before giving up on work for the following six. I have worked on christmas tree farms, at language camps, picking fruit and so on. All pretty exhausting jobs but ones which as long as you’re willing to just work intensely allow you to save a little before finding somewhere interesting to enjoy life.

These days I have started to look beyond that despite it’s obvious benefits and am willing to find something I enjoy and which I would be happy to spend more time doing over the course of the year but far less intensely while doing it. People often don’t know what to do with themselves when they’re not working but I always enjoy my own company. I realised recently that my problem, if you want to look at it negatively, is that I treat life like a series of hobbies, let’s just say I’ve put far more value on life than work over the years. But that is me, not somebody else and it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. The chef who goes into his restaurant on his day off so he can experiment and cook something for the pleasure is potentially finding the balance that suits him. My six months of pleasure were great but I always hated the extreme nature of dropping everything and disappearing into work mode somewhere random. There was a balance but it also felt like living two extremes.

Clearly there is no formula you can teach someone and people have to find their own way. We must also recognise the futility of it when we’re working six days a week in jobs we dislike but need, especially when our manages then proceed to lecture us on the importance of finding balance. There is something almost perverse about capitalism heartless joy in that respect but everyone at every level needs to hit their figures. That is the reality of the work life balance. The man at the bottom works so the guy at the top can enjoy his life. Two very different types of figures. I wonder how long that can last. In the meantime it does make disappearing away into the forest sound rather appealing.