Humidity is a dish best served cold, preferably in an air conditioned dining room. Humility on the other hand can be served either hot or cold but damn its only May and already seems too hot to be preparing any kind of dish. Yea well if you can’t stand the heat don’t work in a kitchen. It’s that time of year again, when we forget about how much we bitched about the cold and couldn’t wait for it to warm up. But these days it warms up with an angry faced humidity snarling a chuckle at us now bitching that spring no longer springs eternal. Not one month ago everybody was offering to help me out working near the ovens to escape the deep freeze. Or perhaps to avoid shoveling the mounds of incessant snow. But now the chef’s clog is on the other foot as everyone springs out of the kitchen in search of air conditioning. Oh the Humanity, Oh the Humility. Oh, the Humidity!!

What happened to those days when young love and beautiful roses bloomed amid the even keeled gorgeous spring weather? Could it be global warming? Well let’s not open up that political can of worms or we will only bait each other over unrelated issues. The bottom line here is….Where the hell is spring? Not even one month of casual warmth? The four seasons are now nothing more than a fond memory and the name of Frankie Valley’s band.

The basic kitchen heat index equation is this, take the heat you feel outside, double it and add ten more degree’s and that’s what make a chef’s pores open up pouring sweat like a power shower headspray. On an extremely hot day there are nine circles of infernal hell around a stove and even Dante doesn’t want to be there cooking. Maybe a dip in the River Styx will cool things off.

Is it hot enough for ya? Too hot to handle? It’s a moot point because once you decide you want to be a chef heat is what you signed up for and heat is what you get. But who signed up for the humidity!? Actually the relative humidity itself seems relatively harmless. I mean its nothing more than the amount of water vapor in the air. But when the air is hot and the water is hot the vapor gets downright ornery. A hot and humid day can best be described as a sweltering steamy stifling sticky muggy oppressive heat that makes one all sweaty and clammy. Put that near an oven and that’s a chefs summer of love. No wonder so many of us chef’s consume so much beer.

As is often the case however I digress. Bottom line is I did choose to become a chef and it is a profession which requires a great deal of passion to take all the heat that both a kitchen and nature can throw at me. So I continue in my kitchen as always to bring the tastiest and best quality food I can create to the inhabitants of my universe. The main thing here is humility and as a humble chef to the universe I maintain my kitchen standards with passion, pride, and an iced cold IPA. Stay cool Y’all…