Ok, always good for a laugh, what is your most embarrasing moment. Me? I was a freshman in high school and we were saying the pledge of allegiance. My cousin was standing behind me and in front of the entire school pulled my shorts down to my ankles. My face was as red as a beet.
,so I will do it in dispersments. One time I spilt a whole bucket of bachemal sauce in the freezer. and another, I spilt a chafing full of meat sauce in a steam table in the middle of service.
Wellll I had forgotten this gem. Acouple of years ago I was cooking at a clients home, ovens full, stove simmering and outside grill going.....they had an interesting lock system on the door....it automatically locked, of course the key is in my coat pocket....I run to the neighbors who are doing yard work to procure a key or use the phone incase there is no additional hidden key.
As I'm using their kitchen phone I notice the photo on the wall of 7 folks....the guy in the middle is James Beard...
Their daughter is a famous chef in San Francisco (time and memory are fleeting but I think she has Zuni Cafe< Susan Rogers.)
Her mother was gracious and explained how her daughter wanted to be an atty....was in a high school exchange program and ended up staying with a French chef....I want to say 2**....cooking won over litigating.
Anyway it was a embarrassing moment to be locked out and have to call for a key.
****This kind of thing happens to me all the time< not the lock out but the meeting foodies in weird circumstances and places.
Shroomgirl - Judy Rogers, Zuni Cafe, yes famous here, what a trip
Well, I am going to avoid the childhood embarassments.
Once my boss offerd to get me a summer intern to 'help' me, and I thought it might be more trouble than it's worth, so I said "Oh, they'll just send me some idiot from xyz school", and he said "But I went to xyz!". I had to pretend I knew and was just trying to joke with him. Think he bought it?
OMG Shroomgirl, that is hilarious! I had quite an embarrassing moment when I placed a motion activated rat in a trap in our pantry at work. The house director had called a sudden meeting, so my assistant cook on discovering it screamed so loudly that the whole first floor came running. The original idea was to keep the kids from swiping food from the pantry, not to scare my assistant to death. It was funny, but it didn't beat the time I put 'rattlesnake eggs' in the refrigerator and a bunch of curious girls tried to run through cinderblock walls in getting away from them. Yup, I'm a prankster. The kids love it.
This is the most difficult question. There have been so many embarassing moments.
It was late August of 1974 and I was hunting quails on the rocky hills of the island of Myconos in Greece. It was a hot day, and I took a path by the coast to return to the main town. I did not realize until it was too late that I had to go through a nudist beach to get to my destination. Suddenly, I found myself being the only person wearing any kind of clothes in the middle of dozens of nude sunbathers. It was as embarassing to me as if I were walking nude in the middle of Manahattan. I am not a prude, but I found myself blushing and rushing through the beach. The most embarassing thing is that whenever I told the story, no one believed that this happened by accident and that I did not arrange it on purpose!
This one time at work I grabbed two buckets of spaghetti sauce out of the walk in cooler and put them in the steamer, and heated them for about an hour, and when I pulled them out, the first was spaghetti sauce, but the second one wasn't, it was pancake batter. And then this other time, I turned on the taps to fill the soup kettle (60L steam jacket) so that it could soak, as I had just emptied out the gravy. so the taps are running, the pot is filling up, and I went for coffee, and well 15 minutes later, the taps were still going, but my boss didn't yell at me, he just laughed his hiney off and so did everyone else on shift, and to make things worse that was the first time I flooded the kitchen, but it wasn't the last.
Swear to God, my maiden last name was Hamburger! It was 27 years of total embarrassment...way too many stories to tell!!!!
One favorite, was a bad day in algebra class (everyday there was bad...but)after whispering non-stop to a fellow class mate to re-interpet what the teacher thought he was teaching. The teacher turned around from writing on the chalk board and screamed at me "Catch-Up Hamburger!". He was more embarrassed than me, class with him was never the same...he always had a smile for me after that.
Playing field hockey in school, my dear best friend who was on the same team as me yelled at me "Hamburger Help-Her" ...she rolled on the ground laughing, it took me a while to even realize what she was laughing about.
Once she and I were underage at a restaurant bar and tried to order liquor. When we couldn't produce id to prove our age we ordered sodas. Later when the hostess came to bring us to our table she asked us if we "had a Tab" and my freind said "NO Coke". When she realized what the hostess meant we laughed soooo loud we made a scene in the dining room. That still makes me tear up laughing, one of our favorite old stories!
My boss and I have a great friendship. He was heading out to San Diego for a wedding and a romantic weekend with his wife, so we people at work were giving him flack about leaving us in the middle of a busy weekend. He had called us on his walkie talkie to check up on us and trade insults, and me, being the imp that I am wished him a "hope he gets laid over the weekend" not knowing his wife and in-laws were in the car listening to the whole conversation! He thought it was hilarious(and so did the family, thank god!!!) but I was really embarrased...
I guess if we can include high school stuff, I'll never forget the day on stage when I was to perform a well practiced tap dance, looked down into the face of a priest in the first row, and my feet totally froze!
I was in college and my fiance and I and his brother and wife went on a weekend canoe trip. My now sister-in-law and I decided that we would rinse off in the river after cooking the evening meal, leaving the guys to clean up. Like fools, we headed up stream first. Found a nice quiet bend in the river and proceeded to strip and jump in. We didn't stop to think that the people coming down the river had a much better view of the bend than our guys down stream did. We both came up from dunking under the water and were pushing our hair off of our faces when the TWO canoes full of guys asked us how the water was. What can you say except "fine." This wouldn't have been too overly bad, except they then floated down river and informed our guys that there were these two naked girls in the water up stream and they really should go check them out.............never did go back to that river.
Thinking back, and also observing children growing up all around me, Afra...we tend to see them as such innocent and sweet little angels.. For the most part they are. But they can also be very mean. Especially when being egged on by a teacher who should have recognized a problem. Now, let me make you laugh. I remember a time when I was about five. My grandma had sent me to the corner grocery store for a loaf of bread. I remember how proud I was when I went to pay for it, that I had had the ingenious idea of using my panties as a change purse! Of course the grocer looked very uncomfortable, poor guy.
LOL, OneSockChef! And have you ever had a problem with that 'one red sock' that somehow manages to sneak its way into your whites that you KNOW you have diligently seperated? I've had that happen to me a few times. Folks - don't buy red socks. They're possessed!
That's interesting, Afra. What kind of books do you write, and have you been published? I'd love to read some of your poetry. That was a mean prank your brother pulled on you, although I don't think he realized the ants would bite you.
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