Current: Food Network

Today marked my first day as an intern at the Food Network.

I graduated from culinary school on January 16. I walked away from our graduation dinner knowing I would miss seeing my classmates every day, but feeling ready to leave the comfort of the Natural Gourmet kitchens for a new challenge.

When I applied for the internship at the Food Network, I thought it was a long shot. The Natural Gourmet has connections with the test kitchens at Martha Stewart and Cook’s Illustrated (where I also applied) but none whatsoever at the Food Network. I emailed in my resume and recommendation to the address on the Food Network’s career website and waited to hear back. They got back to me quicker than expected and asked to set up a trail (a.k.a. interview). My trail, which happened the week after Christmas, was much tougher than I was expecting. I had been told to wear my chef whites and bring my knives, but knew nothing else. Once there, I was put through a series of tests, but it was all worth it when, after five hours in the kitchen, I was invited to intern in the test kitchen of Food Network Magazine.

I arrived this morning at 10am sharp, knife roll in hand, ready for the start of my six week internship. The magazine is relatively new, having only put out two issues to date. My main job is to prep ingredients for the recipe developers who then test out the recipes that are being developed for the magazine. Eventually, I too will be testing recipes. Everything was going along smoothly, I was given some orientation materials to read, issued a locker and a chef’s jacket with the Food Network logo, etc. The first few recipes I was given to prep were pretty straightforward, cut some pineapple, measure out some spices…I felt myself falling into a groove.

Then I was asked to prep the lobster.

One of the recipe developers, Amy, led me over to a sink filled with live lobsters and asked me kill and halve four of them. My heart began to race, reminded of that fateful day when, at 16, I became a vegetarian. My parents and I were out to dinner with a chef friend of theirs at an upscale Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. We ordered a lobster dish and our waiter made a point of bringing the live lobster to our table to show it to us before whisking it away to the kitchen. When the dish arrived several minutes later my mother and I couldn’t touch it. I stopped eating all animal flesh from that very day, until five years later when I started eating seafood again. I have yet to eat red meat since.

I asked Amy to demo one of the lobsters for me (not telling her that during shellfish class at the Natural Gourmet, I conveniently left the room to get something during the 5 minutes where the live lobster was being handled. By the time I returned, it was snug in the wok, steaming away). She deftly took my knife and thrust the tip straight down into the lobster’s head, slicing it in half. She then flipped it over and made a long cut down the middle of the animal from head to tail, explaining not to cut through the top of shell as the lobsters were to be stuffed and grilled.

I was feeling quite unsteady as I grabbed my first lobster and took it over to my cutting board. As I carried it, it thrust its claws out as though somehow trying to push against the air around it and stop me. I took a deep breath and did the deed, my first kill of an animal larger then a cockroach. As I flipped it over to slice it down the middle its legs were still moving and its tail began to curl into a tight letter J. As I scraped out its stomach and intestines, the little swimmers on the underside of the tail continued to twitch and move, making me again feel lightheaded. I don’t know how I made it through the three lobsters of which I dispensed, but I did.

(What I didn’t know at the time, that I now know from having looked it up on the Internet, is that I was in fact employing one of the most humane ways to kill a lobster – though I didn’t chill them first which would have been ideal – and that the twitching I witnessed was not because the animals were still alive but is a product of the fact that lobsters have a decentralized nervous system).

At the end of the day I got to make my first recipe from start to finish and it couldn’t have been a better one: oatmeal raisin cookies. They were not vegan, not at all “health supportive,” but boy did they taste good.