A Pillow of Milk

To make mushroom potatoes: first grab some good sized red bliss, look for ones that are more ball shaped than egg shaped. Hold the potato in your right hand and spear it with a metal tube about as a big around as nickel - such as a whisk handle missing the end cap. The tube should go in a little less than an inch. Next, take a dull paring knife and trace around the portion of the potato impaled on the tube. Pull the potato free from the tube carefully, revealing the lovely cream and crimson mushroom potato. Hold the potato in a non-reactive container filled with cold water. Save the cut away portions for staff meal; call them doughnut fries. To cook mushroom potatoes, preheat an oven to 375F, and place several empty sheetpans on the racks. Gently toss the potatoes in a bowl with chopped rosemary, garlic, olive oil, salt and white pepper to taste. Remove the preheated sheetpans from the oven and pour the oiled potatoes onto them. Return the sheetpans to the oven and cook for half an hour or until the potatoes are lightly browned. Serve two to three potatoes per plate.

The mushroom potatoes go with our chicken dishes, red meat dishes get tourne potatoes braised in veal stock. The filet and arctic char plate gets Dauphinoise potatoes and all seafood dishes get saffron lobster risotto, except lobster itself which always gets boiled potatoes and corn. I've cutting mushroom potatoes for what feels like hours. My fingers are wrinkly around the whisk and starch is caking my wrist. Behind me Tommy is marking off the Statler breasts, trying to keep the chicken fat flare ups under control so as not to impart a bad flavor. Fernando, our fearless leader, is over the steam kettle. He is reducing an unlikely combination of trimmings, stems and stock with generous pours from the box of Marsala Marsala. In the kettle next to him, neatly peeled baby carrots (stem on) are boiling in water laced with orange juice, soon I will fish them out and they will join the forest green haricot vert in a deep tub of ice water.

When I've finished my potatoes I leave the hot side of the kitchen to check up on Anthony, our intern from Job Corps. Anthony's NBA sized frame is bent at a right angle over a long table of gleaming white plates, each one sporting a tuft of mesclun. He carefully places a split teardrop tomato at each of the cardinal points. I tell him it looks good and he doesn't respond, once again white wires have mysteriously sprouted from his earlobes. This requires us to repeat our dialogue about why it's okay to listen to the radio but not okay to listen to an iPod and why even when you're working alone and everybody speaks Spanish anyways you still have to be able to hear - in case of a fire or something. Fernando appears in the doorway and reinforces my authority in a strange combination of English, Portuguese and Italian, he was raised in Lisbon and trained in Austria but if you ask him he is Italian, so it goes.

We did the same thing yesterday and afterwards I drank more than I should have but less than I needed. I've come up with a brute force hangover cure, not so much a cure really, more like a jumper cable. I go the pot sink and take off my chefs hat. I adjust the taps to cold and use the sprayer to rinse out my hair. I wrap my head in a dish towel and run off to the walk-in cooler where we store beverages and dairy products. I build myself a throne of milk crates and suck down a container of vanilla yogurt. I open a fresh gallon of orange juice and chug for dear life. Synapses in my brain come back like a slowly inflating air mattress, the sugary juice lubricates my joints. In one of the long crates that go into the milk dispenser (also known as the cow) there is a plump bag of perfect whiteness. I position the milk bladder behind my wet head and float away on a bucolic pond of 2%.