there's a chef in you and a chef in me

I cracked 421 eggs today. Four hundred and twenty-one eggs. That's thirty-five dozen plus one eggs. If you're curious what a person with zero formal cooking training can do in a hotel kitchen, crack eggs is the answer. To put my egg cracking adventure into even more perspective, I have a visual exercise. Occasionally when you crack an egg, a small piece of the eggshell falls in, and you quickly snatch it out because you really don't want to chew your eggs and feel that random particle of hard crunchy thing. My hand slipped, and a piece of shell, the size of half an egg, fell into the pot into which I was cracking eggs. It disappeared completely. I stuck my hand into the pot to fish it out, and my hand was completely submerged in raw egg. By the time I found the half-egg-size shell at the bottom, the egg liquid had reached above my wrist. At least they say eggs are good for your skin? Oh! And I learned how to crack eggs with both hands!

After I finished with my vat of egg, I cut enough mushrooms to feed Africa. Okay, that's a huge overstatement, but it was a lot of mushrooms. Imagine the largest salad-serving bowl in your house, triple that capacity, and then triple that again. That's how many mushrooms I cut. What's really funny is that even after all that egg-plus-mushroom action, I could still really go for a mushroom omelette.

Despite the whining, my kitchen experience was quite interesting, and I look forward to the next two days in there. The head chef actually speaks English pretty well; everyone else communicates with gestures and super broken English, and I communicate with gestures and super broken Korean. The kitchen staff are all really nice, and they bear with my pathetic Korean-speaking ability like champions. I think anyone who becomes a chef has got to love food, and anyone who loves food has got to be a good person. Anyway, I'm glad I conveniently have an uncle who manages a hotel, and who can tell people to make space for me in the kitchen. Who knows, maybe I'll end up being a chef after all?