Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Lobster Trauma

I’ve spent the good majority of the last 5 days trying to get Friday night’s class out of my mind.

Up until this point, we’ve had to cut up a lot of animals – chicken, beef, pork, quail, rabbit and fish – just to name a few. I normally wear gloves to protect me from the slime, but other than that, I am un-phased.

You see, everything we’ve worked with until this point has been dead. Friday night changed all that. I arrive at class to the eerie sound of something live scraping on the sides of a Styrofoam cooler. Upon peering in, I see a mound of lobsters, slowly moving to escape contact with their fellow detainees.

When it comes time to cook them, Chef Instructor offers us two options – boiling or chopping. Of course, he demo’s both. He flippantly grabs a lobster with a pair of tongs and drops it into a pot of boiling water. I look away and plug up my ears to avoid hearing its scream.

Time for the second option. Chef Instructor sticks his tongs into the cooler and pulls out another lobster and places it on his cutting board. He picks up a 10 inch chef’s knife and plunges the tip into the head of the lobster and splits it right down the middle. 2 lobster halves lie on the board, both still twitching.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d read about it, but I didn’t realize how it would affect me upon seeing it.

I couldn’t do either method. I had to rely heavily on my partner to deal with our lobster slaughter.

Since Friday, I’ve been questioning my ability to be a chef. I can’t kill a lobster. What am I going to do – stand in the kitchen at my first job and refuse to cook it? Maybe. But then they will probably just show me to the door.

1 comment:

Toni said...

I've never had to deal with a live lobster, I'm not sure how I'd do.