The past couple of weeks we suffered a lot of heat here in Berlin, with fourty-year record highs in temperature. Ending yesterday with cooling thunderstorms and long awaited rainfall over night. As a cool breeze hopefully will take out the remaining warmth in the flat, I sit here this morning, feeling all refreshed.

The season is taking it’s toll already. Working in this heat doesn’t make it any easier. But now, more than half of the season is done with and most of the nerve-wracking, big events  we managed to run successfully.

Including Saturday’s Shareholder Cup, a tournament, where I traditionally cook personally at the halfway break after the ninth hole. This year, I made potato fritters, cooked a la minute on site, served with smoked salmon and horseradish cream or fresh cheese with herbs, followed by a sweet made of lemon-curd, topped with Amarettini-crumble and morelli cherries.

It’s not so much the cooking itself, but buying and organizing everything beforehand, finding space and time and room, to have everything ready on time for up to one hundred and twenty participants. On top of handling my daytime job. This usually means a full day of buying and toting ingredients, a night’s work getting prepared, a morning in the office and then the cooking process proper, followed by an hour of cleaning up, before I am back after a shower and change for the evening reception, dinner and price-giving.

But people love it, as usually at half way through even high class tournaments, they just get some take away snack like sandwiches, maybe some fruit and a cool drink. Out on a golf course, there is usually just a little wooden hut, if at all, where players can take a rest in the shade. No kitchen or some such thing. We at least have a hut with electricity, a fridge and a tap.

Still, setting up a stove and  handling food and drink for – this time only eighty people, due to the heat – is some logistical challenge. But by now, we are a great team at this event. My CEO is in charge of the drinks, his wife serves at the table for eight as the players come off green nine and eighteen (as this is a double tee start) and my bookkeeper helps with the sides and the washing up. The Caddy Master helps with transportation and I cook, so everything runs smoothly. Everybody had a great time and people were all happy. Mission accomplished.

Slowly, the presssure comes off my shoulders, so much so, that I feel almost physical relief. Now, two and a half more months of regular craze, and then the days will get shorter and my spare time thus much longer, yipeee! Hail to winter…