Mise en Place for Writers

Yes. This is yet another craft essay from me. But this one is different. It’s about a topic I’ve never publicly written about before, my four years working as a cook at the Rotary Flames House, a Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Service in Calgary. My father, who has been a chef for years, got me the weekend job there right out of high school. I felt the heft of the responsibility, of the environment.

*Mise en place* is a French culinary phrase which means “putting in place” or “gathering”. It refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchalls to refer to organizing and preparing your station before service begins.

## PART ONE: THE KITCHEN.

The kitchen was small. Intimate, really. Stainless steel refrigerators hummed against one wall, their surfaces marked with the ghosts of a thousand Post-it notes and menu changes. Plastic cereal dispensers lined the counter near the breakfast station, coloured labels fading from years of wiping down. My trusty blue ceramic knife lived in the drawer closest to the cutting board—that green-stained board that had absorbed the oils of a thousand onions, the juice of countless tomatoes. The dark-brown ceramic island countertops were always cool to the touch, even on the hottest summer days.

I would clean every plate and burnt pot by hand since I had a sanitizer instead of an actual dishwasher. A three-basin system where you learned the temperature of properly hot water by feel. The wooden floors creaked beneath my feet, announcing every trip from fridge to stove to plating area. You could tell by sound alone where someone was standing.

There are intimate details of the job that I still can’t put to paper. There are so many stories that aren’t mine to share. But I will tell you this, I learned how to fucking cook.

I learned to use fond as the base for a sauce, deglazing with stock or wine to unlock layers of flavour that couldn’t exist otherwise. I learned blooming ground spices in fat unlocks their oil-soluble flavors, how cumin and coriander need that moment of heat and oil and become more than dust. I learned how to use the right amount of heat. Sometimes violently high to achieve Maillard reactions on a protein, sometimes gently low to coax gelatin from bones into a silky stock.

I learned that when you cook, you are tasting everything, constantly, throughout the entire cooking process.

A sauce tasting balanced at the beginning will concentrate as it reduces and become over-salted or too acidic. You adjust. You taste again. You add a pinch of sugar to balance acid, a splash of cream to soften heat, a squeeze of lemon to brighten at the end.

Writing is no different.

**Say your work out loud to yourself.** Read it backwards, sentence by sentence, to catch rhythm p