What it do

[synkr0nized]

[Phantomgrift]

Your chef knife is awesome.
I've got a drawer full of various blades I've picked up over the years. One of my favorite is this cheap-ass cleaver I bought at a Chinese resturaunt supply store.

I'm glad you're not quite killing yourself at the food job like you used to be.
Alas, the only "fancy" thing I've made recently was some good ol'fashioned chicken fried steak. (Pan fried in cast iron, of course.)

[Zengus]

Chicken fried steak is delicious. I haven't had it in years, but now that you've brought it into my mind I will eat one soon. Excellent.

Also, I love cast iron equipment. I could go on a long tangent about how great they are for any kind of searing or frying, haha. Thanks, Phant :)

Synk, I don't mind at all, I like talking about work stuff. Gloves are kind of a back and forth issue, and individual store policies vary. A typical sentiment I have encountered at most of my jobs has been that if you are touching food in front of a customer, however, you need gloves on (many people will find it gross no matter how obsessively you wash your hands, because they don't know that). You also tend to want to have gloves on while handling any highly spoilable foods (raw meat, fish and other seafood especially, raw eggs, dairy, etc.) as well, just because gloves do have less bacteria than your hands, and this practice helps increase the shelf life of the food (you are correct to think that clean equipment and surfaces are more important still, though). Another facet of the issue is that one is required by the health department to have gloves easily accessible at all times, and technically to be using them at any time food is touched (I have seen inspectors give people a pass for some infractions that were maybe literally illegal but practically sound, handling drygoods or when it concerned food that had not been cooked yet).

So, for example, at my shop I do most of my prep outside of the view of customers, in a large kitchen secluded from the dining room by a door. In there I only wear gloves when it's good practice to do so, but fuck the health code otherwise (I don't need to have gloves on to chop up potatoes that I'm about to drop in a pot of boiling water). But when I'm working service, in the very exposed open line (the name is misleading, it's smaller than most closets, just all the customers can see me), I wear gloves all the time. They're also very useful on a practical level, as changing gloves is essentially a free hand wash. I can do things like dip my hand into a container of olives marinating in an oil brine and grab an order's worth, then spend ten seconds replacing that glove with a new one instead of a minute and a half going to the hand sink and back, drying my hand afterward. Or I can handle some nuts (I handle nuts often on the line! We have a spiced mix that we make in the shop that people can buy a bowl of at the bar for pretty cheap) and then discard those gloves so that I don't contaminate the rest of my line with their residue, which would make my food unsafe for someone with a bad nut allergy (this is NOT a problem you want to face in the middle of a service rush). I probably burn through about 70-100 gloves in an average day, maybe upwards of 2-300 if service is really crazy (maybe only like 20 pairs if the night is totally dead). We use biodegradable non-latex ones, just so you know!

You don't see them a lot on TV because they make you look stupid, and also because people only get skeezed out when they see a cook raw-dogging it when it concerns food they will actually be eating, not what they see in images or videos. I theorize it's some weird instinct thing (people have all kinds of crazy automatic responses to food, their food especially)

[Phantomgrift]

Then why wait man. Whip some up.
People think steak and it's ilk is tricky, but chicken-fried is dirt simple.

Take a solid two dollar flank, skirt, chuck or otherwise mediocre piece of steak and wrap it in multiple layers of plastic wrap.
Lightly hit it with a hammer in small rapid strikes, covering every surface on the front and back. Remove the wrap and dust the steak in your basic flour/seasoning mix. Take an actual meat tendorizer (preferably with points) and lightly go over the steak again on both sides, mashing the mixture into the steak.

Dredge in egg wash, run through your flour to coat, repeat as you see fit. Fry up for about, I dunno, five to ten minutes on each side on high heat in about a half inch of oil. Mix in the leftover flour mix into the oil for your roux, stir, stir, stir, stir some more with increments of milk, flour as needed and whatever you put into your white-gravy.

Serve.

[Zengus]

I bought some watercolors today (also, chicken fried steak ingredients). I haven't done anything with them yet besides put some strokes on a sheet of paper to see how the brush feels, but maybe tomorrow I'll try to draw something

I finished this piece eventually




This was just a small doodle, but I like it




Whee spirals

[Samurai]

Good stuff. I think you'll enjoy watercolours, based on that sort of artwork.

[synkr0nized]

[Esunasoul]

You know what, Zeng? I think you'd do really well if you just bought a huge canvas and COVERED it in this bold abstract randomness. Do acrylics. Don't blend stuff, just do bold blocks of color. I think the parts of your marker artwork I dislike are the white spaces.

[Zengus]

Hmm. Do you mean the white negative space left on the page, or the little white blips that invariably get left inside the areas I color? The markers aren't so bad for the second one, it's the fine tip pens I use that cause those.

I have never worked with acrylics before. They are thick, very opaque paints, right? I bet I could make some awesome shapes with them using some of the spoons and stuff I use to plate food at work. That would be an interesting middle ground for my different creative efforts.

[Esunasoul]

The negative spaces.

Acrylics can behave like oils or like watercolors depending on how you use them. To get that kind of thick opacity you'd need to mix them with a medium that gives it that property. But you could do some thing very like what you're doing now on a canvas with paint from the tube: flat areas of bold color.