I am glad that soups are finally over. I have had my fair share of taste testing the shit out of them, and it made my pallate dried out and full of soupy residue. There's that word again: soupy. Has the -y addition at the end of every noun been injected unwillingly into my veins and I have to take medication to rid myself of this tumultuous journey to end of normalcy? Has my vocabulary been dumbed down to kitchen jargon? This isn't even kitchen jargon to me. If I were to say something was "soupy" or "stretchy" to a fellow co-worker at a real restaurant, she would probably cut my balls off with a paring knife and use them as garnish for a steamed fish dish. Let me tell ya though, if she were to chop them for garnish, she would have a whole lot of garnish. Volume and weight both apply to my true ballsiness, so accurate readings of measurement would be difficult. Large masses tend to do that.

I have entered the world of sauces now, the same basic principle of soup making but with a different name. The idea behind sauces is texture, making sure it holds body throughout the process and makes it to the guest without separating or running off the side of the plate. I compared the consistency to loogies, and if you don't know what a loogie is, just wait until you get sick ,hock up some of that mucus that's built up in your esophagus and let it torpedo out of your mouth with great vengeance and furious anger. The flight should be long, like flying from Milwaukee to the Philippines rather than Milwaukee to Minnesota. It should turn heads, each droplet left along the way giving innocent bystanders an uninvited light shower of mosit boogers and plasma textured snot. The landing should be monumental, similar to if Mount Rushmore were to play leapfrog in the Grand Canyon with the Statue of Liberty. The impact should create a tidal wave of bacteria, killing any insect or bug that happened to be on the landing strip at the time of touchdown. Your mood will be improved, a sense of accomplishment and pride overwhelming your body and vigorously increasing the amount of loogies produced per minute to allow relaunching as soon as possible. You see, loogies work on their own time, and if you decide to work with them, they will aid in your road back to health with constant amusement of potentially hocking a giant loogie onto someone's person or shoe. They are mainly for moral support, and don't actually serve any purpose but that. So, now you know what they are. Now leave me alone.

The loogie texture for sauces is comparable to the end stages of sickness, being a little runny and can coat the back of a spoon. I would make the sauce to recipe, and add or subtract liquid to make it right. The good thing about everything is that all the textures turn out to be about the same, well at least for the ones that we were working with. Add veloute sauce. sweat veggies. stir occansionally. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. Repeat. BORING.

With more taste testing than soups, it is a runny situation of what's swimming around in my stomach. I try to solidify what's going around in the loogie pool party in my tum tum, eating whatever I can that has a solid texture to it. Bread, cheese, steel wool, and carrots is about all that is available. It could turn out to be a cannonball of mess later on, if you know what I'm saying. I, being the genius that I claim to be, dodge that imperviable diarrhea bullet and plan ahead. The chef always says, "Critical thinking. Just do it you idiots." Words of wisdom.

As soon as I was done with my first sauce, I asked the Chef to take a look at it. His eyes are always wandering, looking to see if there is someone inevitably fucking up somewhere in the corner and trying to dispose of the evidence before anyone sees. He makes it over to my station, breathing heavily from the 80th taste test he has done thus far. He has many more to go, so I can feel his pain. His motions were slow, easing into each taste test with a blank slate along with a poker stare. He must put himself in this state in order to not lose his sanity, a meditation practice of Chef professors everywhere in tasting obviously poor tasting materials from students with underdeveloped brains.

He tasted, looked up like cats do when you tell them to sit, tasted again, and nodded. There are never words muttered when the sauce is right on. They believe that words are wasted when something is good. Let's comment only when it is bad, so they know how horrible it is and that they have no self worth and any reason to live. This apporach I am all right with.

Later I heard the Chef making a comment to someone that the sauce should run off the spoon in a "drip drip" sort of manner. The brown sauce, coating the spoon, dripping off the spoon at a steady drip into another pool of brown sauce.

Watch that diarrhea, everyone. Watch it.