Cooking Big

      Since Joyce has been home from the hospital I have done a lot of cooking and I have found it to be pretty good for me. It has reminded me of times before when I found myself in a cooking role during my navy tour.

      The first was in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I had missed my flight from Barbers Point to Guam. Despite the fact that the flight left an hour early, I was sent to Pearl to wait for the next available flight. I spent a week or so living in the transit barracks there. I had the choice of being put on report and going to Captain’s mast or volunteer for working parties. I made the obvious choice. The barracks was like a prison where the inmates basically ran the place. We had a spot on the grinder outside where we were inventoried every morning, just like a prisoner headcount. My working party was in the galley as a messcook and helping the cooks. The days were long, but it was a welcome relief from hanging out in the transit barracks with what I found to be the worst characters I ever met in my 11 years in the navy. Imagine having total strangers coming up and asking to borrow money to go into town and promising to repay it when they were leaving for their ships the next day. I liked cooking the huge containers of soups, chilli and stews. Those things had to be 60 gallons or more and I used a boat paddle to stir them. It was funny that after a year of electronic training I was stirring giant pots of soup in Pearl Harbor.
      I finally got to Guam, ready to use my training, but because I was unrated at the time, I ended up working as a messcook in the galley there for 94 days. At first I was scrubbing metal mess trays from 5 am until 7 pm, but later I was put on night shift and scrubbing pots and pans until midnight, then making sandwiches for outgoing flights until 4 am and finishing with cooking bacon, eggs to order and sausages on a huge gas fired grill for the breakfast shift. I was pretty good at that. I could crack two eggs at a time and put them on the grill without breaking the yokes unless the customer wanted them broken. The food supplies for Guam were sent on ships from San Francisco and traveling that 5,798 miles at a speed of 10 mph, sometimes those eggs spoiled on the way there. I would crack and drop the egg on the grill and it would be all green or black and dance across the grill. I would take my steel spatula and using all the finesse and flair I could muster, scrape it away and crack another. I enjoyed that breakfast cooking. I still like to cook breakfast.