Messed-up food rehabilitation.

So, my last big batch of home-fermented sauerkraut came out tasting fine but with a very unappealing mushy texture, which according to what I read online can happen if you don't put quite enough salt into it, although it's usually fine to eat, the bad sign with that is horrible taste or slimy texture.

Their suggestion was that you can always use sauerkraut like that for adding to soups, so I bought some potatoes and turnips, and I went and dumped the sauerkraut in a big pot and added more water, and then when that was boiling with some whole peppercorns in it, I remembered a sauerkraut-and-apples dish that I had once tried at a friend's house, and so I cut up some (poorer quality) gala apples that I had in the fridge alongside dicing one nice granny smith, and I put that in before I finally added in the cubed potatoes and turnips.

All in all, it turned out very, very fine.

In general, I need to learn how to cook more fall soups, like with squash and parsnips and pumpkin and stuff.

British humor.

The other week I was emailing my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he made this comment in an email going off of something that I had said –

I heard an artist on the radio saying something similar: the best music is produced in the early years.

-- to which I replied --

But what about Mozart and Beethoven?

-- to which he replied --

I don’t know enough about their musical biographies to comment. they did produce music in a different time (way back when) so maybe things were different then.

-- to which I replied--

Are you saying the world is getting worse?

-- to which he replied--

not qualitatively but quantitatively, yes.

-- which I interpreted to be not so much a continuation of the conversation or an actual response, but rather an opportunistic joke, meaning that people are just as good or just as bad as they’ve always been, but there’s just more of them, now.

. . .

British humor can be so odd.

Addendum.

That same afternoon on the Sunday lunch shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that the cook made a special spicy fish salad and there's some for me, too, and I say I'm not sure if I'll like it and what do I do if I don't like it, and she says try some, and she'll have the rest if I don't like it, and it's sitting out on the kitchen service counter in a dish with a plate on top of it, and there'll be two of them there, and one is for her and the other is for me.

So, I go and I find it and I try it, and it's absolutely fantastic.

It's cut-up onions and green onions and a few cherry tomatoes and cilantro, and this fish thing that's the texture and consistency of a Vietnamese pork meatball, that she says is called "fish-line" and is made up of super-finely ground fish that's shaped into like a log and breaded and then cooked somehow and sliced up, and anyhow it's that in the salad, with a light spicy dressing like with soy sauce or fish sauce in it or whatever, just all of that put together, and chilled.

And, the fish is super-light, and she's not sure what kind it is, but in those little like cutlet pieces, almost, it almost takes like chicken.

Just superb off-menu (Thai) food -- yet another perk of working where I do.

She says when she asked our one (newer) (older) (female) (Chinese-Thai) coworker, she said the name as something in (Chinese) and so she can't remember what that name is, but that she would call it Yum Pla Sen ("fish-line salad," or perhaps, better, "fish-log salad").

Day - Evening - Day...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like a month ago:

1) I come in to open up the restaurant for a Saturday lunch shift, and the door of the back alley is closed and locked, the first time that that's ever happened to me.

So, I knock, and after like ten secconds, it swings open, and it's my one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke about, and I can see the kitchen full of people behind him, getting food ready for the day.

"What?", I was like, "You don't want me to come inside?".

"No," he was like.

2) At the beginning of that dinner shift, there's **two** separate app delivery drivers up by our back counter waiting for their orders to come out, and **both** are loudly talking on speakerphone while they wait.

3) The next morning on the Sunday lunch shift, this (shorter) (tattooed) (white) woman and her (taller) (schlubby) (white) guy (boyfriend?) come in and order over a $100 of food to go, tipping nicely, too, and they also get some beers to drink while they wait -- "I'll have what he's having," she says -- and in the middle of all of this, the guy just stops and looks at me for some reason, and then he's like, "Well, you've been here a while."

Later, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker for some reason has two soft-boiled eggs sitting in a bowl with a plate on top, on top of the ice machine where we eat, and every time you walk by, you're looking them at eye-level, and they look like a pair of testicles.

So, I tell her that, and I tell that I support feminism, but not like that, and she just glares at me in a good-hearted way and says something in (Thai), and when I ask her what it means, she says it's, "[my first name], you're no good."

A local homeless person from this fall...

...who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, several times:

A (young) (pretty tall) (very skinny) (very dark-skinned black) guy with (dreads) and a (well-trimmed beard), who once came into the foyer and stood there looking at the rotating electronic menu board that's to your right immediately when you enter, and who spoke softly and almost inaudibly when we asked him if he needed any help, and he just said he needed to stand there a minute, and he was there staring at the wall for like 5-6 minutes before he finally turned back and went out the door and left, and who another time at late afternoon on a weekend came in with some big cardboard box and a white plastic bag, and put the box on a table just inside the entrance, and pulled some food out of the bag and sat there and ate the food that he brought in for a bit, until he finally got up and left.

(. . .)

A reflection on paths not taken:

Looking back, if I had pursued a union job (i.e. a job at a parent union), I might have been miserable...

All the locals where I had connections went "woke" and started trying to tie Palestine shit into everything, which would have been very miserable for me, to try to mouth those lines and force that line onto state and local politics and onto contract battles.

I mean, with every job you have to do that to some degree, but that's just a high degree of nonsense to be repeating for the sake of a job, especially when you really don't believe in the approach and it would just be making you miserable the entire time.

Who knows, maybe I would have ended up shifting places and getting into something a little more progressive and a little more commonsense like at some of the building trades, but that's not where I had my connections, and who knows if a lateral shift like that would have actually panned out, if I was still in that world.

So many leftist issues are to polarize and get people hyped, and it's funny to be on the other side of that, where it's like, "I agree with you to a point, but nah..." They really make you not fit in -- they're the ones doing it! -- and it's all on them, it's all coming from them where they suddenly want you to toe this shifting line 100%, and if you're 85% but not all there with them on anything, suddenly you're the problem.

Who needs that in their life.

Life with a coworker...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) While me and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker are by the plating station where food gathers to take out to customers, my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker grabs a tofu pad thai and finishes dressing it with raw carrots and beansprouts and a lime wedge and goes to hand it to me to take out, and then he suddenly stops and starts laughing at himself.

"Look what I did!", he's like.

As it turns out, the plate had already been dressed, but the side with all that stuff had somehow gotten turned away from where we all were, so him dressing the plate was actually the second time that that had happened, and there was a portion of raw carrots and bean sprouts and a lime wedge on each side of the plate.

(We took off the second lime wedge to return it to the lime-bin, since you could sanitarily salvage that, but otherwise we sent all that extra stuff out to the customer.)

2) When I ask my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker what he thinks of the health insurance CEO assassination, he just gets this big wide dopey-looking smile on his face like it's Christmas, and it's a busy night and right then we get interrupted, and like twice more in the night I start asking him about it, and each time he just gets that big wide dopey-looking smile on his face.

. . .

(! - and he had been viscerally disturbed by the idea that people could come inside the restaurant and steal take-out orders.)

Addendum.

I've noticed every once in a while that some (South Asian from South Asia) customers round up the bill to the nearest dollar, whether it's a $17+ bill or a $53+ one, leaving less than a dollar in change for all of the service.

I wonder, where are they getting this from?

Is this from their own country, or is it from another country they've been in, or is this something they've come up with on their own?

The last seems improbable, since multiple people have done it -- that is, unless they all arrived at the same solution where they "tip" at minimum cost to themselves.

Sometimes, if it's a table with that kind of vibe and I don't recognize them -- you want to know how they tip if they're repeat, since you deprioritize them if they don't tip! -- I just don't even look at the bill.

Like, I just don't want to know.

Some recent restaurant customers...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) There's three (late 20s/early 30s) (South Asian) women who I get samples of a wine for so they can try it, with one ultimately getting a glass, and who order their fried rice and curry with the larger mixed vegetable mix, and who want more rice and more sauce and less vegetables in each, since that's the way they prefer it, and please ask the kitchen to make it that way for them, and maybe there's something else at the table that happens that they want, I forget, and anyhow, I'm going to clear plates from the table while they're still sitting there and the receipt has $0.00 tip, and so I do the thing that the (Thai) (husband) owner suggested and I act surprised and I'm all like, "Oh! Was everything okay with the food and the service, because we got you the samples like you wanted and we tried to do the food like you wanted!", and when they said yes, I point to the tip and say the line, that the owner would see this at the end of the night and would want to know what was wrong with the food and the service, and they all begin looking me in the eye and laughing delightedly (nervously?), sometimes casting a glance back and forth to each other, and then one takes a pen and goes to revisit the receipt, and they all start bending over it, and I go away, and when I come back later to fetch it, the tip is now $5.00 (more than 10% but not quite 15%, but as my one [chubby] [Thai} coworker would say, "Not bad for Indian").

And, I guess my coworkers all saw that, because after the receipt gets filed, they're all like, "Good job, good job!"

2) Like the very next shift when I'm working, when a(n undergraduate-age) (South Asian from South Asia) guy on a (date?) comes up to the register to pay with ApplePay and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones takes care of him, he leaves a $0.00 tip, and she tries doing the spiel like I did.

And, on the $22.74 bill, he leaves a $0.26 tip, to round it up to $23.00.

3) During a very very busy Friday night dinner shift, this table of three (young) (white) (blonde) co-eds comes in as part of a rush of like five tables all at once where they also all keep sitting on the menus and no-one at any of the tables is ordering although we stop by each of them several times to see if they're ready yet, and finally all of the tables all order at once and there's a log-jam in the kitchen, and then this one (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed sitting by the wall asks us if we can check where their food is, and so I say it's a busy night and also people weren't putting orders in and then all the orders came in at once, so I could guarantee that their food was in the roster and was going to be coming out as quickly as possible, and then it finally does come out, and a few minutes after I stop by their table and ask how their food is, and it's good, but then that (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed is like, "Where are the vegetables in my pad thai?", and I tell her that we wait tables as a team and I didn't place their order but I can check on it, and I go and look in the system, and it's a simple chicken pad thai order, there's no mention of any additional larger mixed vegetable mix, and so I scurry back and tell her that it wasn't entered in that way and we can do two things, she can take it as-is or we can bring out the portion of vegetables for her, which costs the extra two dollars that it costs, and she's like, "I come in here a lot, and I've never been charged for the vegetables before," which sounds strange to me since that's not true and also that's a really weird thing to have happen with the pad thai, and so I'm like, "The vegetables cost two dollars, ma'am, would you like the vegetables for your pad thai, or would you like the pad thai as it is?", and she starts saying something about how she's never had to pay for it before, and I say that maybe she's thinking of another restaurant where she gets pad thai, and then she says something about how another table got served before them, and then I say that I don't know what has happened in the past, but in the future if she comes in to order pad thai, she should specify both chicken and mixed vegetables at the time of ordering, and to do that costs two extra dollars, and I'd go get the person who took their order, and my one (tall) (thin) (Chinese from China) coworker who took their order says he doesn't care, just get her the vegetables, and I say it's weird, she's trying to pull something over on us, since that's not a mistake that would happen in the past where suddenly there's just the mixed vegetables in the pad thai and it doesn't cost anything, and also I don't recognize her and neither does anyone else, and plus she changed subjects to how they weren't getting their food on time -- "It's busy, no-one is getting their food," observes at that point my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones -- and anyhow I don't like the vibe from the co-ed, I get the sense that she's on the sociopath spectrum and she's pushing boundaries to get the better of us through lies and sheer force of will, and anyhow I don't like any of this one bit at all, like, not at all.

And, my one (tall) (thin) (Chinese from China) coworker says he doesn't care, and he gets the vegetables, and suddenly the (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed seems happy, like a switch switched off in her and her personality is bubbly again, she came out on top, hahahahaha, dumb restaurant people, she got the better of them.

"That's weird," the (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner said a bit later, when she overheard us discussing that customer's behavior.

"Yeah," I was like, "And I think she went into the bathroom, too. I'd go check if she stripped the copper from the fixtures."

More Katy Perry release streaming.

A bit ago when I was going at the end of the night to go stream the new Katy Perry album over Spotify at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, to help Katy with her streaming numbers, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, "People don't do that for Lisa" (i.e. Lisa from the K-Pop group BlackPink, who now has a solo career).

"But Lisa doesn't need help," I was like, to her.

. . .

On another note, she told me that a lot of (Koreans) don't like Lisa, since she's so big and she's not (Korean) (Lisa is like Thai descent, and got tapped to go through the K-Pop training machine).

"How many followers does she have on Instagram?", I was like, and she told me, and then I asked about BTS, and it turns out that Lisa has double the numbers of BTS.

"It sounds like they're jealous," I was like.

"You said it, not me," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, very seriously and very tempestuously, in a manner that gave a suggestion of nothing so much as a very high level of personal involvement.

A very full day of restaurant life...

...a few weeks ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, when I end up working a double on a weekday:

1) When I open the door for the day, there's some peeled-plastic decal above the door in (Chinese) seeming to be something about some new payment app, and I am not sure if the owners agreed to have that put there, or this was some random advertising event that happened without anyone's permission being involved at all.

2) When three (cleancut) (young enough) (white) guys in (business attire) beat down the door right as we open, right when I go to interrupt their discussion of finance and take their order, I find that my pen doesn't work, and I realize that there's a little plastic cap on the tip of the pen since I had just gotten a new pen at the local bank that I go to, so as I start to fiddle with it and try to pick off the plastic with my fingernail, I'm all like, "I'm sorry, if you don't mind, I need to wait one second, my pen isn't working right now since I just got a new one at the bank...", at which point one of the guys asks me which bank I use, and I tell him, and he's immediately like "Ahhhhhh, that's the problem, you should come bank at [name of the other bank two blocks away from my bank], our pens work."

3) As I undertake my "daily battle with the leaves" and sweep the sidewalk out in front of the restaurant and then the leaves that have blown in the front door, there's actually so many leaves that have blown in since they're really coming off the trees and since it's really windy, too, that I actually have to once go and empty out my caddy dust-bin that I was sweeping everything into, and then when I start up again with the sweeping, I fill the caddy dust-bin halfway again, that's how many leaves there were that day.

4) Since I was taking over the lunch shift for my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker -- she had texted me late the night before, saying her daughter was feeling sick and she should probably stay home from school and she should stay with her, can I work for her tomorrow -- I told my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, "Hi, I am [the name of my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker], it was a busy morning, I forgot to put on makeup, this is what I look like without makeup." Then, later I was saying that I should go home on break and put my makeup on so that I can make better tips, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, "And your wig, you forgot your long black wig, remember to put on your long black wig."

5) My (newer) (pretty monolingual) (older lady) (Chinese-Thai) coworker is working the curry station, and her shirt that day is black, with a few big embossed gold starts along her shoulders and shirt-front.

So, when there's a moment, I point to those, and I slowly say, "You are my star," at which point she laughs, and forces out (English) words with bad pronunciation that take me a minute to get, that "I am superstar of the kitchen."

6) At a table of two (jumpy) (middle-aged) (white woman), one with a dour and angry face and (dyed) black hair, and the other a (frizzy redhead), they're talking something about some firing somewhere, and the redhead is like, "Welcome to our drama," and I'm like, "Oh no, nope nope nope nope nope, no thank you, no drama for me, please!", and I theatrically hold up my hands and back away from the table, and a bit later when I go to take their order, the (frizzy redhead) orders a curry with "no meat because I'm vegan and no mushrooms," which order can be done but doesn't really correspond to the way that the item is listed in our menu and it's not even clear that she's even looked at the menu, so I point out the vegetable mix and verbally list the ingredients in that, and then I show her the other ingredients listed for that particular curry, and that's all fine, "but no mushrooms and please say I'm vegan," and then I take the other lady's order, and then the (frizzy redhead) jumps in again and says she need a big plate to mix her curry on, and "a butter knife," and I say "of course" and then I finish taking the rest of the other lady's order, and then the (frizzy redhead) jumps in again, and as I'm writing the other lady's order down, she says she wants a Thai iced tea.

Only, after I bring it, two minutes later, she's calling me back, and asking if that's milk in it, and I say oh yes, it is, I'm sorry, and she was like, "But I said I'm vegan," and I was like, "I'm sorry ma'am, but we were talking about a lot of different things and jumping around a lot with the order, and people have different definitions of what vegan and vegetarian mean, and that's not usually a substitution we do and we didn't specifically talk about that particular substitution, so I just took the order as-is and I just did it the usual way without thinking," at which she started to bristle -- had the milk already touched her lips and tongue and contaminated them, or worse still, had it reached her stomach, and through digestion had it begun to be part of her? -- so I was like, "In the future, please specify a request for coconut milk at the time of ordering, to make sure it comes out right," and she started to bristle again, and I was like, "Oh no, we'll replace that, but please specify a request for coconut milk at the time of ordering in the future, please, so that it comes out right the first time."

Later, too, her dining companion with the dour and angry face was still in the middle of lunch and said she wanted a to-go box, and I said we could size that up and take care of that at the time of the bill, and later when I came up to start taking care of their bill, she was like, "And where is my to-go box?".

7) A Costco giftbox with cheese, sausage, and crackers arrived at the restaurant by UPS for me -- my parents had really helped out some neighbors and they got that for them as a thank-you, and as soon as my parents opened the thank-you package, they thought, "We are never going to eat this much food," and so my mom thought to send it to me so I could take it into the restaurant for everyone and we could all eat it together -- and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker picked out the smoked gouda to open first, and so I did that, and I made up little sausage plates to keep up front and to put in the back for everyone, including with this sweet-hot mustard that also came in the giftbox.

So, when I was pointing out the food items to my (Guatemalan) coworkers, I was like, "Hay mostaza, es dolce y piquante" ("There's mustard, it's sweet and spicy") -- at which point I paused and intoned again the words "dolce y piquante" ("sweet and spicy"), and then suddenly I cocked my shoulders a bit back in an unconventional but highly dramatic posture and I also put on a dramatic face and I further intoned, "Como yo" ("Like me"), all with highly dramatic pausing, throughout.

8) A (very thin) (ungroomed-haired) (knitwear-wearing) (HAPA) lady who once references living in San Francisco comes in with her (older) (slow-moving) (vaguely HAPA-looking) mother, and after double-parking and walking her in from the curb and I go to get a firmer chair with arms for the mom to sit in, she goes outside to get the car and go park somewhere, and while that's happening I go to check if the mom who's sitting alone is taken care of, and she seems a little scattered but she also insists that she wants a cup of soup right then with chicken but not so big pieces, and I say that we can do that, and she wants tom yum soup, and since people always confuse tom yum soup and tom kha soup, I make sure she knows what tom yum soup is by leading her through the description on the menu, and that's what she wants, and they start the order in the back, and she decides on a fried rice entree but wants to wait to order that until her daughter comes in, and then the daughter finally comes back in, and she finds out that the mom ordered tom yum soup and says she should have tom kha soup since it's not as spicy, and I say that she ordered the tom yum soup not that spicy although there's a little spice automatically in the broth, and the daughter says some stuff to the mom and then turns to me and was like "she only picked the other soup since the tom kha had big pieces of chicken in it before," and I start explaining that the cooks have cut up the chicken into smaller pieces this time and at that point the bell in the kitchen goes off, and I'm like, "Oooh, you know, the soup is already ready," and the daughter doesn't seem too happy, though it seems like the soup turns out to be fine, and anyhow they order and the mom is confused if she ordered her fried rice already, so we get that straightened out, and then half-way through the meal the daughter says she wants a tofu curry but only if we have "non-GMO tofu," and she says that she has asked about that before but she forgets if we have it or not, it should be listed on the original tofu package wherever we keep that, and so I go in back and check, and it's non-GMO, and she says she wants some for here and the rest to go, and so I say that we can order it for here and then we can bring out to-go boxes for the rest, and that's cool, and then like five minutes later she runs up to the front counter and says that we can bring a little out and box the rest, and I say we really don't do that, it has to be all one way or all the other, so it's best to have it brought out and then they can pack up the rest, and anyhow at the end of the meal, then, the mom wants some tea and asks for some sugar with it, too, and the daughter starts asking her why she needs sugar with her tea, and when I bring out the tea I decide to bring the little plastic open-top box with sugar and sweetener packets to the table since that's what the mom requested and she's the one ordering, and when I set it down and the mom reaches out to get one, the daughter immediately puts her hand on top of it to block it and she shoves the box back towards me as she cries out, "No!! That's poison for your brain," and then she turns to me and is all calmly like, "She won't be needing this."

9) Since it's a slower lunch shift and the owners aren't there, I have more leeway to order a staff meal, and so I get a more-elaborate soup that's hard to transport, and so I dine in with the others while we're closed for the afternoon lull, and I can hear from a few tables over a few of my (Guatemalan) coworkers talking in their indigenous language, and later my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker explains to me in (Spanish) about the folklore dances in her area which is a different area than where the others are from, and they all show me some videos from TikTok and Instagram including some logoed influencer channel called "Guategram," and later she tells me about the (Guatemala)-particular celebrations of Day of the Dead, complete with online videos about this special dish that they make only there in the Yucatan, and also later she comes up to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker with something she'd translated on her phone from (Spanish) to (English) and it said that she'd talked that day with our one previous (young) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker who had moved away to a different state for a job nearer family, and anyway, she said to say hi to me and to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker.

10) During quiet moments of the nightshift, I am using my flashcards to review writing and vocab for the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for quite few years now, and my coworkers notice, and so I explain some cultural stuff with that ancient culture to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, as they try to guess what some of the images are.