I used to be a chef, believe it or not. Good, you chose not to. I was never really a proper chef, apart from two brief excursions with a group to chef’s island, and I was only ever really a slightly disinterested tourist.
One job I had had the impressive (when you’re 17) job title of a Trainee Chef in a chain Italian Restaurant that I would advise no one ever eats in. I won’t mention names, but it has Pasta in the title, and Bella.
There’s nothing wrong with them hygiene wise or anything, it’s just that all of their nine pound pasta meals are frozen and the “trainee Chef” has to put it in a microwave. More a trainee student really.
The other cheffing job I had lasted slightly longer than that one week. It was in the O’Neill’s pub back in Cheltenham and my job was essentially to be befriended and shouted at by the chef. Again the food there (as with most pubs I’m afraid folks) had to be heated in the microwave. Even the fucking roast potatoes on a Sunday came from the microwave. In fact, I never did any cooking apart from maybe doing the fry ups… it’s quite tricky to effectively make a fry up in a microwave. So we still fried it.
It was frustrating for the pair of us, he was a proper chef, and I wanted to be.
And before you think that I was just jumping on the glamorous cheffing bandwagon let me remind you, this was back in 1997. Way before Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey or Nigella Lawson… cheffing wasn’t showbiz then, it was hard work, shutting a door, turning a dial and waiting for the ding. My chef heroes were Delia Smith and Keith Floyd.
The reason for this indulgent trip down memory lane is that something that the chef at O’Neill’s would say to me rang true last night.
In between bouts of throwing cold peas and carrots (were frozen, then cooked, then left in tubs to cool – I didn’t understand either) he’d often repeat the same well known phrase or saying…
“Terry, why move the mountain to Mohammed when you can move Mohammed to the mountain?”
He wasn’t talking literally, for one, when I was seventeen I didn’t know anyone called Mohammed, nor did I live near a mountain. But don’t ignore the advice form these two seemingly killer points.
He was often referring to my cheffing technique. I would often take a spoonful of the soggy carrot and peas and carry it across the kitchen to a plate. Whereas he would take this spoon off me (often throwing it at a wall), pick up the plate and take it across to the tub of peas and carrots whilst quoting the phrase.
It’s not to scale, because if Mohammed was the size of a plate, well, you can imagine how big the mound of peas and carrots would have to be to constitute a mountain. We never had that many, there wasn’t much of a call for it.
But I would hear that phrase at least once a day, and although I’ve not seen him for about seven years now, his voice will still ring in my head with that phrase.
Last night I spent far too much time trying to make my desk at home comfortable. I still regret buying the super duperchair that sorts out my back but hurts my shins. And it seems that the whole thing is too high or too low, I can never work out which. Consequentially I have had to put my monitor on a pile of videos about 5 high. And yet still I am stretched and drooped in the most uncomfortable way.
Seemingly the lowest setting on my chair leaves me sat too high for my desk. So yesterday I rested my keyboard on some videos to find that that works nicely. And then my mouse too.
It was as I was about to rest my cup of tea on another specially selected video that I heard the phrase ringing through my head.
And within seconds I’d worked out the best thing to do, instead of a layer of videos on top of my desk. Why not just prop each leg of the desk up with a video?
And goddamn, it works.
So in your day today, apply the phrase, especially if you know someone called Mohammed who is into mountaineering.