I was born and raised in a tiny town in the great blue mountains of northern California, where cattle outnumber people. My daddy was a ranch hand, as well as a mechanic for tractors and farm equipment, and most summer nights were spent staying up until two a.m. in a baler, watching him weigh the bales and scare coyote and rabbit out of the fields.
In the mornings, just before the break of dawn, my mom, my brother and I would take a quad out to the field by our house and mom would push the wheel lines back while my brother and I wrapped our arms and legs around the steel pipes and rolled with them. After school I’d sit on the hard floorboards of a swather while dad cut the alfalfa round the edge of the field.
Back then I wanted to be an artist, an old-fashioned one. One that would get commissioned to paint a portrait of some higher class subject, or spent hours sitting at a pottery wheel to create some sort of masterpiece.
I wanted to be a writer too. I wrote my first book on hexagonal-shaped pink and purple paper that my mom had bought for me, that I’d stapled together and illustrated myself.
Throughout my childhood I never stopped writing. I scribbled ideas in notebooks and finally progressed to using the old dinosaur computer we had to type out pages of fairytales.
When I was ten, my grandparents bought me a laptop to fuel more of my imagination. Then I started writing pages upon pages of failed novels.
By the time I was twelve, my parents separated to later divorce, and I stayed with my mom, who was struggling to both raise me and live under a single income.
Shortly after, my older brother graduated high school and left to Oregon to attend Culinary school, which left me to start and finish high school and do the majority of the cooking and cleaning round the house.
(In those days we ate a lot of pizza.)
In a sink or swim way, I learned how to cook eggs, mashed potatoes, rice, etc. I even made my own barbecue sauce once, although I never wrote down the recipe.
When I was 19, a college dropout and back to living with my mom, I started my first job at a Taco Bell, where I first truly dabbled in a cooking experience, of some sort. I stayed at that job for five months, until I had enough money to comfortably buy a used car and move back to the college town I abandoned months prior.
That time I couldn’t find a job or pay my rent, so I moved back home again, and got the first job I could get my hands on – the California Conservation Corps. Working there made an adult out of me; it made me gain muscle and sweat and ache, and it hurt me in more ways than just that. It slightly crippled my knee, and that’s what woke me up and scared me into quitting. I thought my knee would never be the same because that’s what I’d been told about those kind of injuries, and for months afterwards, it wasn’t.
In February, I started talking to a guy I’d talked to off and on since I was a Junior in high school, and it took me three years to realize he was perfect for me, and he was everything I wanted all along. On his birthday, the twenty-seventh, he told me his friends were all working and he was drinking by himself, so I got in my car at 7:30 at night and drove the two hour distance between us to say ‘happy birthday’ in person, and less than an hour after I got to his house, I became his girlfriend. I’d spend the next year and a few months driving the distance on my days off to see him.
After the Conservation Corps., it was my brother that got me my next job in a new restaurant and distillery (where he worked as a pizza chef), as a hostess and later a prep cook. There, I wore the chef coat and worked in a busy kitchen with constant yells of “sharp, coming through, sharp!” or “hot, hot, right behind you!”
In that kitchen, I learned what seasonings go best with calamari (Old Bay and lemon), how to properly hold a knife, that diced potatoes will turn black if they aren’t kept in water and bacon will hold beef patties together if they are too lean. I learned how to make buttermilk pie and lemon cake, how to prepare a traditional Caesar salad, and I watched the Head Chef (at the time) fillet an Alaskan Halibut.
Shortly after I started cooking (for real), the hostess that replaced me had to quit due to unforeseen circumstances, and I resumed my position at the front counter.
Then it was April, and the burger joint in town that had been remodeling all winter re-opened and needed people to work in the kitchen, and a former coworker contacted me to see if I wanted the job. Knowing it was my only opportunity to get back into it, I accepted, put in two weeks notice and started to memorize the menu, but then the time came for me to start, and I was never told what time I needed to come in, it was continuously stalled and put off until I told them I’d find something else.
My boyfriend’s dad came to the rescue with that one, landing me a job in a department store, because he had worked with the manager there before. Little did I know, that would be the worst job I’d ever have. The amount of stress I endured made my chest hurt and left me with a tension headache everyday, up until I decided I didn’t care. It wasn’t worth sixteen hours a week at minimum wage, so for months I looked for something else, anything else, but I’d reel in my line and find moss.
For ten months, June to March, I endured it and kept going in every morning with a cheerful attitude, insisting to myself that today would be better; I wouldn’t get stressed out, I’d get everything done before we opened, there would be no problems that would set me back, I wouldn’t get any rude comments from coworkers about not doing enough or not doing it good enough and somebody would actually help me get the job done. Every day my insistence of ‘today will be better’ was always crushed.
In March a few days after my twenty-first birthday, I snapped. I missed a prep day due to snow, and I knew I’d have to do twice the work in a 1/4 of the time it would take, plus train somebody to help me do my job and deal with rejection from upper management if I tried to ask for help. That put me into a restless sleep and made me get out of bed at one a.m., three and a half hours before I would have had to leave for work, and it was then that I decided to quit, so I texted my boss and went back to bed. When I woke up it felt like a weight had been lifted, and I never felt more at peace in my entire life.
By May, I moved in to my boyfriend’s house with his parents, his younger brother, his brother’s girlfriend, the five dogs, the four cats, the five (or so) snakes, the three (or so) lizards, two tarantulas, two fish, a snail, a gecko and a coop full of hens; and I’d started a new full-time job at a senior center as – you guessed it – a solo cook for a group of sixty.
It really surprised me, how much I didn’t know.
I didn’t know safe meat temperature, how to make tiramisu, meatloaf, mousse, what ‘braised’ or ‘Julienne’ meant, I still can’t find a happy medium when it comes to cooking rice, but here I am.
So thanks for reading my first post, I hope that you like it and will follow this amateur blog for updates on life and good food.
The Country Girl's Lifestyle Blog 