Prep Race

A little friendly competition in the kitchen can turn work into a game. At Feenie’ we used to have to slice 2, 16 L buckets of onions for french onion soup, or “fronion” as we called it. Sometimes it would be one lonely cook chopping for an hour, staring at the wall dreaming of better things. Other times, the two entremat cooks would set up boards across the prep table from each other and have a race. They would each have a bucket of onions and someone would time them. On “GO!” they would start chopping madly. It was fun to watch and the prep would get done in 10 minutes and then next time they would try and beat that time. Nothing would get the kitchen going more than a fronion race.
“GO!”
“I got 5 bucks on Skippy!”
“Don’t cut yourself!”
“Oh Skippy, Gorgeous is killing you!”
And then the inevitable, “Well you won but your onions look like shit, his onions look thin as glass, so he wins by default.”

Next thing you know the cooks are all lining up to do fronion prep, and going home every night and sharpening their knives so that they can challenge someone across the table, and have onions thin as glass. It was beautiful, and no put us up to it, we thought of that one all on our own.