St. Bernard Parish : The Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Relief
Rich Weinroth
that gutted it. I still wanted a cool nickname, but I want no part of a wild boar. Where the hell am I that bow hunting for wild boar is normal?
I was exhausted and only felt a little bit guilty about watching the only television on site, let alone falling asleep with it still on. Between the diesel engine, the television and the bongo drums at the bonfire I’m amazed I fell asleep so quickly. I can’t wear a wristwatch to bed because of the noise and I fell asleep against all odds and with gum still in my mouth. I slept well and the gum came out of my hair surprisingly easily in the morning with a little peanut butter pilfered from the 55 gallon drum. I actually woke up early enough that morning to see breakfast coming out of the kitchen after Bob’s morning walk by the toxic canal, but there’s no way I was waking up at 5:30am to cook it. I was on vacation. Don’t judge. I’m not a morning person.
Running the breakfast show like she’d done it a hundred times was Jess, yet another beautiful woman with dreadlocks and Jess managed to keep the mayhem at bay always with calm under pressure. She actually had done it a hundred times. She was one of the Kitchen Goddesses and I’m sure one of the reasons the food was so good. I chopped more vegetables for that day’s lunch enjoying my new guy status but by the end of dinner I’d given several knife safety seminars to the incoming groups of big-hearted and utterly inept volunteers with hand-eye coordination issues. Although nobody in the kitchen had ever really worked in restaurants, the food was truly great and those Kitchen Goddesses could run any restaurant in any town if they had some poor bastard following close behind them with a calculator, a clipboard and maybe a joint as they whirled through the kitchen.
Kiki had worked in an organic bakery and was a helluva pastry chef, Jess had no training as far as I can recall and neither had Lali, who was one hell of a cook and a benevolent dictator in that kitchen. These women were fantastic cooks, I’m sure they still are, and they brought so much fun to that tent where we cooked so many meals. I’ve never been in a kitchen where people were literally dancing, and I loved that energy unless we were at crunch time. Of course my restaurant background wanted to whip them into focus and get the show on the road but that’d have seemed just wrong to interrupt the fun. As if they’d have listened to me anyway. Listen to the New Guy? They’d have laughed, rightly so, or perhaps thrown food at me. More commercial kitchens should have the occasional foodfight and spontaneous hoe-downs. I’ve since decided that although a hazard, dancing in the kitchen is a beautiful thing. We were an extremely productive kitchen when we were cranking it out, and I can only imagine what a staff of professionals could have done in a similar situation. Probably not much better. But these people were all volunteers working for free, and having more fun than I thought possible with pants on. Feeding nearly two thousand hungry people daily from a tent in a parking lot is hard work, but not that hard
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