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Beware of Jesting Vegetables

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In retrospect, I should have known so knock-knock jokes

Leafy greens rarely had a sense of hu kitchen of etables on the prep table perform their own vaudeville act

When confronted by the coredients, ht, taken a sick day A nor to admit that now, exiled from my kitchen and the city that I loved to the wilds of western Kentucky

My only excuse was sheer exhaustion The restaurant, Coda, had been overbooked since it opened four years before, far beyond even the wildest expectations of the owners Six months in, the executive chef quit in a very loud, very public snit over farrown oysters, which I still didn’t understand, so I’d been proes I’d ht the attention of soh the door The owners offeredeighteen-hour days for nearly three years and hadn’t yet called the labor board Even when I did ht off, some crisis would call me back into the kitchen, and before I knew it, I’d worked twenty-one days without a break

I startedsea bass with turbot andpasta It was all fixable, but in my head, thewreck And yet I still kept up the schedule, only coain to scour the supplier redients Chefs who slept in missed the freshest produce and the choicest cuts of meat

I ignored the signs that I was overworked every ti in a limp cloud around my face It had no luster, no life My skin was pale, pasty, and drawn While I had a passably pert nose, e for my face, which was emphasized as my cheekbones became more prominent and the dark undereye circles spread

I lost weight that I couldn’t really afford to lose I was short and sly referred to as “stacked like hell” As if I needed another reason for men not to take me seriously in the kitchen, the distraction of an above-average rack meant I had to work that much harder, which led to etables

On top of the sleep deprivation, my vacation to London had been canceled because the restaurant’s business h-profile vintner’s dinner for that week, deciding that I “wouldn’t er, who also happened to be my ex-boyfriend, had asked ed to the woirlfriend, soe And because I worked such insane hours, the chances ofa new man I was attracted to and didn’t ith—trust me, I’d learned ain, just as I was getting close to saving enough for a down payment on a townhouse So if I wanted to buyto have to work more hours

More Hours

I was conte how to bend the space-tiula shouted, “Knock knock!” When I answered, “Who’s there?” that seeies in a full-on George Burns soft-shoe ensured Tess Maitland’s place in the chronicles of “chefs who publicly flipped their shit”

The roo me seasick and dizzy I heard the dise elatinous swill not fit to dress a McMuffin, which eird, because I hadn’t ue that I had people to do that for me, but then I collapsed on the floor in a heap

And that’s when the paramedics showed up

Phillip, the ex-slash-ed” me to take some time off I said, fine, I would take the weekend And then he made a noise in his throat that made it clear that two days was not what he had in mind And then he used the word “sabbatical,” which was international culinary code for “lost her fricking mind”