When I first met Danny, I liked being in the kitchen. Cooking soothed me. I found, increasingly, that I would rather stir at the stove than put pen to papers to grade them. The first year I was gluten-free, I started to find my rhythm.

However, I still wasn’t confident in the kitchen. Each meal needed a big rev-up of energy before I could begin. And mostly, I turned on the stove and then started chopping. I burned quite a bit of garlic that year.

Danny tells me now that when he watched me cook, those first few months, I made him pretty nervous.

You see, chefs never cook that way. Chefs show up to dinner service prepared. They’ve been chopping and stirring and simmering and readying for hours. On the line, they simply cook.

Everything grew easier when Danny taught me how to set up my mise en place before cooking. We thought you might like to see the difference between a dish cooked in haste and frantic looking and one cooked with calm.

Mise en Place from Daniel Ahern on Vimeo.

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