Once a year, the first week in August, football fans invade the area I live for the Football Hall Of Fame inductions. That week is this week. Thankfully we’re almost through it. Slowly getting there. Every night this week there has been some kind of event. Some of the events mean that the restaurants are busy at night, some mean the restaurants are busy during the night. Today was being busy during the day.
Today is the hall of fame game, which starts at 8pm. This means everyone will be at the stadium until the game is over, which will be late – after we’re closed.
Tuesday (my first day of work for the week) I started off by doing a few extra things. Yesterday (Wednesday), I think will be the worst day of the week. I made a large list of items to help get ahead – even though Thursday is usually used as the “build up” day. On top of the list I had for myself, I also had to clean the smoker – which didn’t take that long. Tomorrow is going to be another heavy day because I see the weekend being the heaviest for the restaurant to be busy.
So what I have to do in the morning is do my counts. I have a list of all the items we made in prep. I go through and check each one to see how much we have of each item. Once I’m finished with that I have to split the list. I make myself a list – which is normally all the items that would take someone else a long time to do, but since I’ve been there from day one I get things done a lot quicker than most. The remaining items on the list I have to write down, separate from mine, in order that they need to be done. That seems to help the person who works with me to get their job done quicker than just looking at a list and picking what to do. It’s in a list that’s in order, so it’s just working down through the list.
Tomorrow is Friday, which means it’s bacon party. This means I spend at least 2 hours slicing pork bellies, baking, and panning up the bacon. I try to get that done when I first get there because once I start putting the bacon in the oven, I can work on other things while it’s in there. It’s the easiest way to do it. I cooked bacon off Wednesday and did 4 pork bellies, which gave me around 5 pans of bacon. So tomorrow I’ll need to do at least 5 pork bellies.
Tonight we were putting pork butt in the smoker, for pulled pork. So when I get in, I’ll have to check those in the smoker timer goes off and if they’re not to the right point, I have to put them back in the smoker for a little bit. The person working with me will have to put 5 cases of wings in the smoker tomorrow too. Each case comes out as 2 pans of wings, that’s if it’s done right, so the 5 cases ends up being 10 pans. I smoked wings today and did 4 cases – so we were sitting good on wings when I left tonight.
Another smoker product that will have to be messed with tomorrow is smoked chicken thighs. I smoked two cases today and I’ll have to slice and portion them tomorrow. For the past 2 weeks I’ve felt like I haven’t been able to keep up with thighs, they sell like crazy for some reason.
The good thing is, I think all the hot Sauces & BBQ sauces are good, at least for tomorrow. The only thing that may have to be made will be blue cheese and ranch. We don’t really go through blue cheese, but ranch goes like crazy.
The major thing – aside from bacon – is finishing the dessert. I’m doing a dessert called strawberry pretzel salad. There’s a layer of crushed pretzels (coated with powdered sugar & butter, and baked), the middle layer is a cream cheese layer that tastes like cheesecake, and the top layer is strawberries in strawberry jello. I had everything to do the dessert today, but the strawberries didn’t come with produce like they were suppose to. So it’s really the first thing I’m doing in the morning so they can at least have dessert for dinner.
I know this is a boring post about work, but this is one of the most stressful weeks to work in a restaurant in this area. Don’t get me wrong, we’re thankful for the business because of how the past year and a half has been. It’s just hard when you’re understaffed and you have a couple new people who are new to the area and don’t understand what’s going on. And we already know it’s going to be crazier than normal because they’re doing last years class of inductees and this year together.
I just want my vacation, even if I stay home.
