Undressed

I work in a small catering kitchen next door to my house. I'm a prep cook, given much more freedom than I've earned to play with the foods and flavors. My boss has owned and operated a smattering of eateries around the neighborhood, but this one has stuck. (He leaves a lucky trail behind him: one of his old locations is now my favorite pizza place; another is a favorite cafe among the hipster population.) It's a simple little spoon. It's smaller than your typical rowhome (which aren't spacious to begin with) with a modest pantry, a mismatched collection of reach-in refrigerators, and an oven that to be perfectly honest scares me just a little bit. (It looks a lot like European ovens, which are universally intimidating.) 

Earlier in the summer I had a job at an ice cream shop. I've worked there every summer for four years; I didn't always hate it, but it was never particularly fruitful or satisfying. The thing was, it's a seasonal gig, which is convenient because I go to school six hours and several states away (also where I got started cooking in a professional kitchen) and hate having to reapply for jobs. I'm not entirely lazy (though I could go toe to toe with any sloth, three toes as they may have); I hate, hate, loath, despise the scrutiny of job interviews and the inevitable realization that I am essentially unemployable. So I stuck with a job that was just a few sizes too small, and before long it started to suffocate me.

Meanwhile in the Little Kitchen that Could, my boss was securing a Special Job. It's a year long contract feeding nerdly little medical students as they take their exams; you can imagine, feeding, say, your future brain surgeon or grandchild's pediatrician is a great responsibility. This ain't your ordinary picnic. As I like to see it, Boss decided to pull together an Avengers-style team of super cooks, because the future of America's health and well being begins and ends with this lunch spread. 

He got me, and he got the Boss Chef, a ladle-wielding, cigarette smoking, no bullshit cook.

My mentors tend to look like this.

I'm the Robin to Boss Chef's Batman. I set up her spoons, I take out her trash, and when she doesn't come in, I step into her toque.

Simply put, I make dressing for pasta salad.


A basic dressing is built upon a 2:1 ratio of oil to acid, and from there you can go as wild as you want (or don't want: growing up, my best friend's mother was from Sicily, and she unfailingly dressed her salad in nothing but olive oil and red wine vinegar, 'das it).

I like to play around with dressing. We make them from scratch for each salad, so depending on the ingredients at our disposal, the pasta we want to use, or the flavor we want to realize (I say 'we' because the kitchen is one conglomerate, congealed entity, like stew), all bets are on as far as a 'recipe' goes. Today's recipe went like this:

• 1c Extra Virgin Olive Oil (from a tin, so you know it's fancy)
• 1c Plain Old Veggie Oil (not from a tin, not so fancy)
• 1c Red Wine Vinegar (so there's your two to one)
• 3/4c Fresh Chopped Parsley
• 1/2c Fresh Rough Chopped Oregano
• 5-6 Garlic Cloves
• 2tbsp Minced Marianted Garlic 
• 4-5 Whole Roasted Peppers
• 1tbsp Salt
• 1tbsp Pepper

Undressed, it looks like so: 

So you shove all that into a food processor. Our handy dandy processor has two options, 'ON' and 'OFF' (the tricksy OFF button also features 'PULSE'). So you start to pulse until it looks like roasted pepper salsa (which is delicious, if you stop here, no one will judge you) and the garlic cloves are properly minced. Then you stir it about with a spatula or spoon, just to keep it on its toes whilst preventing the herbs from getting smushed along the bottom. Then, forgetting about pulse, you press that ON button and you never look back.

A steady hand is a learned skill, one acquired after several burns, spills, and standoffs (there are steady chefs and there are trigger-happy chefs; I may not be a chef, but I'm certainly trigger happy). That said, with a steady hand, start to drizzle, drip by drip, the oil and vinegar into processor and watch that baby emulsify. Don't be afraid, a steady stream never hurt anyone, but if you dump all that oil in at once you will have a BP style spill that will harm the wildlife in your kitchen irreparably.

Think of the seals. Keep that hand steady.

You may think, 'Holy guacamole, Robin, that's lot of dressing!', but it is, after all, intended for several hungry med students and what is imperially referred to as a big ass pasta salad (well, two pounds of pasta). But have no fear. Play around with measurements, just never forget the 2:1 ratio. We cook for the greater glory of food, after all, not the bureaucracy of numbers. It's all to taste. If you don't want to play with measurements, if you keep this in an air-tight container (a pretty salad dressing flask works just nicely, or mason jars, or Tupperware, I don't know your life) it will hold for about a week.

Among my greater prepping duties, I make the the dressing, cook the pasta, dream up a few ingredients to toss in, then package it up neatly. This salad also features whole wheat penne, about two cups of blanched snap peas (they have their own built in timers, it's brilliant), a small carton of grape tomatoes (because measuring is simply too much work), a whole julienned pepper (yellow, because this is color by cooking) and about a cup of chopped green onions, all washed and parted with wax paper.

Cin cin!