Today is my two-month anniversary as a prep cook at the SSP Commissary. (SSP America is Select Service Professionals, “The Food Travel Experts,” one of two restaurant-management firms that run most of the restaurants, bars and food kiosks of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Our Commissary prepares foodstuffs for well over a dozen major restaurants at the airport.) The short version of my workday is that after walking to work, I diced and portioned eleven sheet trays of cooked chicken, and also procured for Chef Adam one gallon of mushroom gravy, prior to cleaning up my work area and heading for home. I worked almost exactly seven and a half hours today, for which I expect to net about a hundred dollars, after deductions for union dues, Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, and federal and state income taxes are taken.

Now for some detail to help me remember in my old(er) age. My alarm went off at 2:10am. I took some medication, flossed and brushed my teeth, shaved, made my bed and laid out my work clothing, showered, dressed, fiddled around on my phone a few minutes, put my cut glove in my left rear pocket, an inkpen in my right rear pocket, my SSP cap on my head, my wallet and keys in my left front pocket, my phone in my right front pocket, and opened my front door at precisely 3am. The walk to work was 5.15 miles today, taking 11,478 steps, which is about half the steps I’ve walked today so far:

In the break room at work I drank water and a Diet Pepsi and fiddled around on my phone prior to using the bathroom and clocking in at 4:59am. I washed my hands, put on some vinyl gloves, got an apron and two squares of cloth from the community pile, put on an apron, got a little red bucket of sani solution from the dish pit, and reported to Chef Adam, asking him what he’d like me to do today. He took me to walk-in cooler C-2 and showed me a rack filled with sheet trays (“cookie sheets” in layman’s terms) of cooked chicken. “Dice. Just two sheets at a time. Keep everything on ice.”

My Mize En Place (workspace preparation; it’s a French phrase common in restaurant kitchens, and means approximately “putting things in place”) included preparing ice beds for sheet trays and diced chicken, procuring a white cutting board and a sharp chef’s knife, putting my cut glove over my guiding hand (my right hand; I’m left-handed), and putting another vinyl glove over the cut glove. I got a loaded sheet tray from C-2 and placed it on its ice bed, then got a second tray, hand-picked the chicken from it and placed all of it atop the chicken on the first tray, and took the second tray to the dish pit for washing.

Then I diced. Some weeks ago, my first attempt at dicing chicken was regarded by my boss Chef Don with baffled disbelief and a blurted “What the ####??” It was a mess, owing partly to my clumsy nervousness and partly to the use of an extremely dull knife. Now, many hours of practice later, my chicken dicing is fast and good. I’ll usually use a sort of rolling pressdown for a lengthwise cut, cleaving the meat cleanly and following it in a split-second with the next cut. After the lengthwise cuts are made, I’ll either leave the meat in place and make widthwise cuts with the knife 90° to the lengthwise, or with bigger pieces, take four rows or so at a time and rotate them at right-angle relative. There are other things I do, depending on size and skin toughness, but let’s keep it brief.

When I’ve got the piece completely diced, I usually gather it into the knife flat with my right hand and give it a two-handed flip/toss into the iced mixing bowl. I don’t always get all the dice in one gather, though. My hands (and feet) are as squat as my body is. C’est la vie.

So it went, two trays at a time, filling a mixing bowl with dice, then covering it with plastic wrap, putting a label on the wrap, and conveying the filled bowl back to C-2. (In the interest of getting the bowl back in the cooler as quickly as possible, to await later portioning into five-pound bags, I used a template that correctly identified the chicken but incorrectly identified the restaurant for which it was intended; that restaurant had plenty of room on its bottom shelf for this temporary storage, and everything going into the cooler is supposed to be labeled. I knew I would do the portioning before the end of my shift.)

Ultimately I filled three large mixing bowls, and a super-large mixing bowl, with dice. About three hours in I told Chef Adam I wanted to take my Fifteen, meaning the fifteen-minute break specified in the Union’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, and after my assurances that all the chicken was on ice, he said OK. I used the time to use the bathroom, hydrate, check my phone for e-mails and other items of interest, and flex and relax my slightly arthritic hands. After my break and before lunch, all four bowls were ensconced in the cooler, and I told Chef I was done dicing. He then asked me to check the blast cooler (a super-duper deep freeze in the approximate center of the Commissary workspace, where hot items are quickly and safely reduced in temperature) for gravy, and to bring him a gallon of it. I found several trays in there, one with its temperature being taken, and reading out below 73 degrees, so after sani-cleaning the thermometer I took out two trays that I knew would together yield at least a gallon. I got a gallon container with lid and a large metal spoon from the utensils racks, used the spoon to stir the goopy gravy in the tray, and carefully-but-quickly ladled gravy into the container until it was full. Though I was careful, some gravy ended up sliding down the outside of the container, so I sani-wiped the container after securing the lid.

Chef thanked me, and when I said I’d like to go to lunch, smiled and said, “NOW you can go have your lunch.” Lunch is prepared and provided free to us, every shift. (I forgot to mention the 6am morning meeting, where we all gather and Chef has a few words with us. This morning he mostly thanked us, because our shelves were well stocked and we were keeping things cleaned and working hard. He also told us lunch would be chicken sandwiches, tenders or patties, and French fries. There was also an ice bed full of salad fixings and sauces.)

When I got back from lunch I retrieved, one at a time, the mixing bowls from C-2; did a new Mize En Place with a digital scale, plastic bags, and blue zip-ties; and portioned the dice into the bags, which we do a bit of quasi-origami with so that they retain an open-container shape on the scale while we fill them with product. In the case of chicken dice the best conveyance from bowl to bag is with gloved hands. When the readout is close to five pounds you’ll add a few dice at a time till it gets to 5.00 or a bit over. I like it exact.

Long story just a little longer: The dice filled 13 bags, and partially filled a 14th. The bags were properly labeled and put on the appropriate shelf of the restaurant for which they were designated. (Note: chicken and other poultry must be stored below every other type of meat; everyone with a Food Handler’s certification learns that.) The total chicken dice yield was therefore just shy of 70 pounds. After I’d finished portioning and conveying, I took all washables except the knife to the dish pit, sharpened and sani’d the knife and returned it to where I had originally found it; sani’d my work counter, swept the floor around my workspace, filled a mop bucket with floor-cleaning solution, mopped my area, took mop and bucket back to the back and dumped the mop water, and leaned the wrung-out mop upside down in the utility room to dry. With my workspace having no trace of my previous presence, I felt free to go, so I removed my apron and placed it in the to-be-washed bag. I clocked out at precisely 1:00pm.

For a guy who started two months ago, the work described above is a fairly decent shift’s worth of justified existence; but I intend to get much faster, more efficient–defter. Acquisition of Deftness is one of Life’s great joys.