Word: mcculla
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...carry a gun, but her work did involve classified information—and she’s still not entirely sure what the consequences of her research really were. “We had two computers under the desk and just one screen,” McCulla says. “There was a little box with a switch on it and hundreds of times a day, we’d push the switch and it’d flip from one computer to the other. We’d have two separate email accounts and two separate Word documents...
...computer-and-cubicle limits of the CIA office left McCulla longing for a creative output, so she sent off a dozen letters to chefs whose work she admired. “I was asking for a week of unpaid kitchen experience,” she says. “‘Just let me come!’ I asked. I didn’t care if I washed lettuce...
...dozen rejections later, she went to dinner at a small steak restaurant in Arlington, Va., a “down and dirty 45-seat place with an open kitchen.” When the chef came to her table that night, McCulla explained her interest in cooking, one fostered by years of helping her family in the kitchen, a semester abroad in Paris, and other gastro-centric international travels. She asked if she could work there. The chef, thinking it over for a moment, replied, “You show up on Saturday and I’ll give...
...McCulla returned on Saturday and the chef put her on key lime pies and focaccia bread. Instead of leaving after 60 minutes, McCulla stuck around for the next seven months. Working the front station during the busy dinner rush once a week, McCulla became the de facto expeditor. She was in charge of realizing the chef’s exhausting goal of turning every ticket—restaurant-speak for completing every order—in twelve minutes...
...through her restaurant stint, McCulla picked up two other night jobs: working for a pastry chef and doing culinary research for the food writer Joan Nathan. For one, she scaled batter and dough, working the 35-pound mixer and experimenting with decorating. For the other, she dove into 14th century French cookbooks looking for the origins of foie gras. (Turns out it may be a descendent of Kosher meat preservation techniques...