Operation Chervil

Sometimes when you are playing the role of Faux Chef for A Very Impressive Catering Company operating from the bowels of a Big White Pointy Sydney Icon, you have to do repetitive and not necessarily glamorous things.

Like picking herbs for canape garnish.

Herbs like chervil.

Things is, although I like to kick into action and do big stuff, I also don't mind chilling out and doing mindless things like picking tiny little leaves from their stem in a delicate manner for the greater good of a kick arse canape. Or several canapes, because as you may or may not know (and I definitely now know), chervil makes an excellent accompaniment to... oooh... TOO MANY canapes.

I was given half a tonne of chervil and told pick that. Fine, I thought, one of those jobs but that's cool because I am not in the mood for thinking. I am quite in the mood for picking chervil.

"So it's about 700 tiny little leaves you need to pick."

"That's cool."

"But that's the single leaf chervil garnish, not the multi leaf garnish."

"Still cool."

"Hang on... okay, so that's 700 smalls, 700 bigs..."

"Still cool. Getting less cool. But cool."

"Okay... looking at the week's menu there's quite a lot of chervil to be picked. May as well do it all at once. So..."

Soon - and I'm not joking - I was staring at a chart. The Chart Of Chervil. Operation Chervil. Clearly I was starting to look confused so The Canape Queen decided to help me by adding asterisks next to the canapes requiring chervil (in either it's big or small form). I wanted to draw up my own chart but she insisted that it was all right because she had already drawn up a chart for me.

"Cool."

I forgot to mention there was a chervil-picking helper that had been assigned to me. There had been quite a lot of discussion about chervil and the various sizes and quantities required and at some point along the way, she proved to be a very... a very efficient chervil picker. She managed to pick an awesome amount of chervil and classify it according to size and box it and label it with its quantity, which left me to refer to the chart to try to determine which boxes of tiny little (or not so little) chervil went onto each job and each job fridge.

Yes. It's big catering and every job has a number and a job fridge and you really do not want to put a box of 120 small chervil leaves into the job fridge requiring 700 large chervil sprigs.

There was also this: "No not all asterisks refer to chervil! It's just the black ones! You should have ignored the red asterisks - that's baby coriander!"