random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Fearless Prediction

Sometime in the middle of April the Detroit Lions will trade Roy Williams straight up for Chad Johnson. Both need contract extensions, and both need a change of scenery.

[>>]posted at 6:20 AM by BG - click to email
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Monday, January 07, 2008

Scenes From The Grill Part II

"Really Dude? We're worrying about shit that doesn't matter right now? Is that what we're doing? We're worrying about shit that doesn't matter. Jesus christ."

The fussy queen was fretting about toast. I swear to god. We're one hour out from pushing a party of 27 times four courses through our window, so who gives a fuck if the toaster isn't working? We're not serving BLT's and we have a goddamn griddle if you want your bread to bite so goddamn bad.

The owner, hunched over a cutting board fanning strawberries for the cheese plate, laughed out loud while the queen tried to justify what, exactly, he was doing.

"I don't care. Are you ready? Is your station prepared? What about the crab salad, do you have that plated up?"

Um... stammer... shuffle... toast and all... er...

Christ, what an asshole.

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630PM, our first covers in less than 90 minutes, and we finally get meat.

It wasn't the truck - that guy managed to show up looking to unload his shit just before eight. The manager watched him unload it, then promptly refused the delivery with an invitation to fellate him for good measure. No, we had sent a couple guys on a run to a warehouse to pick up steaks and duck, which they paraded triumphantly into the kitchen not a moment too soon.

SMACK - SMACK

I don't know what I was expecting to have dropped on my cutting board (alongside the haricots verts I was currently trimming - let's keep the cross-contamination to ourselves, shall we?), but it certainly wasn't two untrimmed and vacuum-sealed loins of beef.

It's called a "pismo," which is an unbutchered ("unclean," in kitchen parlance) loin with side muscle, fat and silverskin attached.

"Uh, what do you want me to do with this?" I asked the sous chef, already climbing out of his whites.

"Roll it over," he instructed, as I wrestled the bloody loin out of the bag and on to the board. "That line, right there. Make a cut, spread it apart. Do the same over here," he traced another line from the far corner, "then trim away the fat and silver skin, five ounces apiece. Happy new year guys."

Shit.

I'll be the first to admit that my butcher skills are damn near non-existent. I've never cleaned an animal (fish, poultry, etc), never used my knife to get one cut from another, and certainly had never tried to remove silver skin from the long end of a loin before. But Dave was running the shrimp bisque through cheesecloth and there was no one else who had any idea what to do...

...so I got to cutting. Laying out the side muscle through the first two cuts was easy. Most of the loin stayed intact underneath and I was able to easily tell where the meat stopped and tough rippling fat caps were underneath mainly by touch. The silver skin though, man that shit ain't easy. It's a ribbon of connective tissue about three inches wide at its worst, stretching twelve inches down each side of the loin. It won't peel away, so trimming it is kind of like removing the scales from a fish, but a fuck of a lot tougher.

I took the knife and laid it flat across the short end of the beef, digging into the flesh trying like hell to find the point of entry that could let me grab a tab of silver skin to trim and peel back at the same time.

Shit.

I got in about a half inch deep, and got about an inch and a half in before I pulled the butt of my hand off the top and yanked the silver skin back. Let's see... if beef tenderloin sells for $20 per half pound to a customer, I just trimmed away how much money now?

Ugh.

"Dave, I think I'm wasting good meat here. Do you want to take a look?"

"Fuck it dude, just cut it up."

You know those starving kids in China your mom always told you about? They wish they had my butcher scraps.

-----

The beef was trimmed, chicken and hangar steak skewered and grilled, my mise on place set as best I could figure and we had about fifteen minutes to our first cover.

For the first time since noon, I took a seat. Ahhh...

Dave looked past the queen trying to separate his twenty-somethingest yolk from white and saw me put my head between my knees to stretch out my back. He snorted in my general direction, perhaps out of jealousy, and went back to searing his duck. It was the first time in about three hours he didn't have a little bit of panic in his eyes.

We might actually pull this off.

As if on cue, the manager came up the stairs to ask us if we were ready to start serving the menu. I looked to Dave, he shrugged, I said okay.

"Both menus?"

Wait, what?!? What "both menus?" We were two guys prepping a kitchen for eight hours to serve one menu, what the motherfuckityfuck do you mean, "both menus?" Dave went pale, the owner got angry. I think I giggled a little at the sheer absurdity of it all.

"What's on the bar menu? Bring it up." The owner sent the manager back down the stairs and I went to work on Dave.

"Look, we're not using the fryer for anything. We can kick out wings and whatever the hell else they want to throw in there... cheese fries, onion rings, whatever."

"This is fucking bullshit," Dave hissed. "This kitchen isn't equipped for shit, I don't even have my setup done yet, and now there's more food we're not going to be ready to cook?"

The owner came back with the bar menu in hand. "This IS bullshit," he said. "I own the fucking place and I didn't know anything about this." He handed it to Dave, who summarily went down the list mentally negating the appetizers from salmon through sate. Can't do that, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that either... He looked defeated. Utterly exasperated and beyond the point of anger. It took the wind out of him, and with only a half an hour or so to go until showtime, we didn't need that.

I grabbed the menu and scanned it quickly. "We can do the chicken and beef satay, but it'll have to be the same stuff that's on the menu. I don't have a lot of it either. Can we just throw the shrimp bisque on there and the crab salad too? We're finished with all that anyway, so what's the difference?"

Dave agreed. "You want to run out of the skewers before the 27-top gets in, be my guest. I think we have enough soup, and I guess we can have [queenie] making cheese plates. The salmon has to go, and we're not shucking oysters because we don't have enough of those either."

"Whatever you guys want," the owner was in damage-control mode, knowing full fucking well who he had to keep happy to get through to midnight. "Salmon, gone. Oysters, gone. Soup, skewers, cheese plate only." He turned to the manager. "Tell the bar."

A minor victory? Gimme an hour and ask me again.

[>>]posted at 4:04 PM by BG - click to email
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Own a Poker Site or Earn Rakeback from Other Players' Rake

The best way of earning money from poker is by owning a poker site - there's no doubt about that. If that's the case, you can just sit back and watch people push virtual chips across the table and then take a percentage from each and every pot. Very few of us, however, are fortunate enough to own an online-poker room, so if we want to earn money, we are forced to grid it out.

Or...?

There are other ways of earning money from other players' game. You can refer players to different poker rooms and get money when they sign up. But an even better deal is to sign up with a rakeback affiliate, and then earn money continuously from the referrals' rake.

The esteemed rakeback affiliate RakeBrain has one of the best deals of this kind. Sign up with one of the poker rooms offered on the site, Cake Poker Rakeback or Paradise Rakeback for instance, and then invite everyone you know. As soon as they start playing, you'll be getting money into your poker account. There are of course other poker rooms to choose from, Carbon Poker rakeback and Absolute Rakeback being two of them (check out RakeBrain.com to find all poker sites.)

This might be the best way to earn money from online poker without actually playing, at least if you don't own a poker site.

[>>]posted at 1:27 PM by BG - click to email
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Hilariously

The Vice President in charge of my program just misspelled my name in an email as "Anatomy Nandi."

[>>]posted at 9:23 AM by BG - click to email
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