On Family Meal.
9/19/20244 min read
Before I get into family meal, I decided the introduction of these posts would introduce my writing food: the snacks and drinks that write these words. My writing fuel, more precisely, because—let’s be honest—I’m never not writing without something to reach for. Whether it be a scone or matcha—my two recent fixations, I always have something a T-Rex-arms-length away.
~ Today’s Fuel ~
Bev. of choice: matcha, iced, oat, agave sweetened—inexplicably different from honey in the slightest way.
Snacky thing (this is much more than a small snacky, and was undoubtedly the main attraction): prosciutto, burrata, heirloom tomato sandwich on toasted sourdough with basil, olive oil, and honey—I typically don’t favor the meeting of sweet and savory, something I need to get over, but this sweetness was the star of the show. A deep honey mimicking the transition between Summer and Fall: the sweetness of long days drifting into crisp short suns.
Writing from Crema Coffee House: the best coffee shop kitchen in Denver, based on my biases. They have a full breakfast-until-sold-out—the second-best breakfast menu structure behind ‘all-day’—and lunch menu. These boast weekday and weekend breakfast specials, different veggie and meat quiches daily, a pastry case with both the tried and trues and some eclectic news, and side salads from the neighborhood’s aeroponic garden. My favorite—despite that I haven’t gotten it yet: a brûléed grapefruit half. On a coffee shop breakfast menu. They get it.
I hear a customer say, “Finally decided, I’ll do the pork belly.” “We’ll both do the prosciutto and burrata sandwich,” someone else says. What kind of coffee shop has prosciutto and pork belly!? The kind where I want to spend my days off.
I first got the idea to write about family meal about a week ago. The end of my shift timed perfectly with the “Family’s up!” call, resulting in me walking home eating fried rice out of a pint deli with a borrowed fork, made me want to let the rest of you in on this little thing we call family. ‘Family’ is the during service meal made by the kitchen for everyone in the restaurant, both front and back of houses. For the family, hence the name. It’s our version of a corporate lunch break. But instead of a walk to Sweetgreen, it’s whichever dish you first found with as much food as you could scavenge, eaten with impressive speed alongside your other cooks in any spare space in the kitchen.
It's not classy, but it always feels luxurious.
That’s evening family, actually. It’s different in the morning, and it hits appropriately different. Maybe because it’s a guarantee during the night shift and more of a bonus in the morning. Or because it’s typically the most uncharacteristic “breakfast” food out there. And the quietness, the sole fact that the only hot food in the kitchen was cooked for us. Picture this: 100lb me struggling to take up space in a large chef’s coat, leaning on the line beside three other cooks—three of whom hardly speak English, and three of whom I can communicate with very well, somehow—eating through a combination of silence and Spanish profanities.
Let me tell you about some of my favorite morning familys—while encouraging you to remember that much of the absurdity in these meals is that they were consumed before 11am. To begin with the most memorable: hot dogs! And no, that was—fortunately, I shyly admit—not a one-time occurrence. It’s a favorite. We do them up: toasted and dressed buns, cilantro onion slaw, pickles, pickled reds, papitas. It’s like when you were little in grade school: everybody loves hot dog day. On a similar plate was the turkey sandwich bar. I don’t know where we got Oscar Meyer slices or Wonder Bread, but I’m sure we had Diego to thank for that, and thank him we did. Lettuce, tomato, onion, avocado, and bacon and Lays. I didn’t know how hard a turkey sandwich could hit before 11am; I had 2. Another extreme, another family favorite: rigatoni with chicken alfredo. It’s greatly regrettable when you’ve consumed a bowl of the world’s heaviest pasta in four minutes by 10:47am.
Most commonly, we have sopita. Always made by Diego, or for best results rather. Chicken soup with whatever vegetables that are up for grabs in the walk-in, accompanied with freshly fried tortillas for chips and mouth-burning furthest thing from “sweet” salsa. It’s the kind of spicy that makes you choke on chili in the air as you walk by, but Diego—everyday—insists it’s made from “the sugar and a little honey.” The regularity of sopita in the morning has grown us all accustomed to soup as a breakfast food, and I’m not mad about it. That warm, salty bright red broth over a pile of Jaz rice first thing in the morning will always be gladly slurped, even on the 90 degree days. When the fate of breakfast is left to me, we’ll always have soup.
In the evening, a chef always makes family, with the only occasional help offered from extra hands. In the morning—aside from the days that Diego takes the reigns, it’s a group effort. There’s one morning I remember so clearly. It was a hot dog morning and Alejandra and I got down a swift assembly line of buttering, toasting, and mayonnaising buns. ¡Las chicas pueden!” Julian called over to us as he grilled, tonged, and turned like 30 dogs. Alejandra shot him a glance and said, “Picate el culo.”
These are my favorite moments. Not when I learn the meaning of beurre monte or the native climate of lemongrass, but when I realize these things don’t happen anywhere else. Sitting on an empty—still clean, still quiet—line beside your cooks eating a 10:30am hot dog will make your mind go two of two places. First, the one where you question it all, hope no one from college sees you, and doubt you’ll ever be as successful. And the second, the one where you realize the chicken slider aioli would go really good on a dog.