First woman to run the White House Kitchen is ready to take the heat !!!
Hail to the Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford....!!!
After losing the chief chef of the White House last year 2005, Laura Bush combed the US looking for a new chef who can handle a big party. Let's say...a dinner for the UN guys!? So after 6 months search in last August, they found her. Lets see how she feels the White House culinary life.
" I had been a hotel chef in Washington before I joined the White House staff. In a way it's a hotel life [ the president's family ]. They stay here so I give them hot meals and make them cofortable here. But at the same time I get to know them more intimately like having your house guests...who just happen to be the world's greatest leading family of the free world, padding around your kitchen looking for a bite to eat?"
As soon as Chris (Christeta) joind the kitchen staff. She saw her new boss having a nice habit!
" Each morning after workout Mr.Bush would wander in to the 1st family's kitchen in the second floor residence for a 'Good morning' wearing his gym short and T-shirt. We would normally be finishing work on luch for his wife, Laura - typically a light entree like a salad. Seeing that, Bush would say with a wince ' No no not the salads...I'll have a BLT' or he'd choose those sandwiches : grilled cheese, yellow mustard, peanut butter and honey plus a burger. Ah ha! When Mrs.Bush leaves town the phone often rings down to the kitchen. Freed from wifely supervision, the president usually says something like this, ' Look, we've been havinh salads all week. Can I have a cheese burger now?'"
White House sounds fun sometimes...like when?
"Yeah, like when US Senator drop by for lunch and world leaders hang for dinner, ha? Not to mention, monthly feasts are often based around a theme, like Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday? At such instances we crash each other and collaps down wish all those metal dishes and pots as we run dozens of meters in the main kitchen from one corner to the other! As the kitchen is sound proof, luckly no one outside can hear all the big-bangs that happen inside. These circumstances can normally be found in a mid sized restaurant except that SWAT teams, with rifles on their back, wave at the cooks as they walk by or crash by! That's fun."
The christmas?
"Oh, the party time? Our regular kitchen can't cope and we draw on cooks from Wasington. Sometimes about 20. Last time we catered to 9500 guests. The pastry chef baked 30,000 Christmas cookies and 950Kgs of sweet potatoes. The planing of this huge parties starts so earlier like in June...speacially on the Christman fruit cake!
They invite like 'You-All-Can-Eat-Buffet and take some home'. But we are to cook! Once King Faisel came with a cook of his own to do cooking for him while we had been finishing the dressings of the Saudi party specially prepared for him! But his mysterious stomach condition made him to refuse our food and order his cook to cook for him!"
It was yet another reminder that, even working inside such a grand and historical residence, the White House kitchen is just trying to make one family feel comfortable at home!
