We’re happy to announce the arrival of two new diaries to the site; the first is “Soldier of Misfortune,” the story of Tish, a soldier we discovered—in the most meta, personal-media way possible, on MySpace. In her first entry for us, Tish writes about her experience thus far:

I guess you could think of the Army as a facet of that “fair shot,” though most people never even consider enlisting unless they already feel they have been failed by “the system” in one way or another. So, here I am, in Columbus, Georgia, a small town with very little to offer aside from drugs and proximity to Atlanta. I am stationed at Fort Benning, on Kelley Hill, in a mechanized infantry brigade. Don’t believe that shit they tell you about women never going into combat zones. It’s (mostly) untrue; support personnel may not technically be in an Infantry position, but we pull guard and do combat patrols and hide from mortar rounds all the same, in the same neighborhoods, against the same people. I’ve been here since sometime in June, though I am nearing my one-year mark being in my life in the Army so far.

My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) is 68W (”W” is “whiskey”, from the phonetic alphabet). My day-to-day consists almost entirely of “moving boxes” and “mowing lawns.” There is a reason we call ourselves “Landscaper Medics.”

The other is “Out of the Frying Pan,” a diary by my close friend (please don’t hold that against him) Tim Riley, a classically trained chef working through his first years out of the Culinary Institute of America, the country’s best cooking school. Tim’s diary promises a look into the life of a cook trying to set a career path that will take him into being a chef, plus plenty of “food crimes,” some of which will turn your stomach. (Two words: rotten duck. It’s coming in a future entry.)

A preview of Tim’s first entry after the jump.

In this first one, Tim introduces us to the first of the food crimes he’ll be discussing, and to his experience at a certain well-known hotel that will remain anonymous:

The executive chef who headed up our kitchens was the definition of a restaurant industry burnout. Content spending his days forwarding funny or pornographic emails, Chef avoided cooking at all costs. His resume positively gleamed; in past decades he’d headed up some of Europe’s best hotel kitchens, but by the time I first encountered him he was nothing but a shell of his former self.

The first time we met—I had actually been hired by one of Chef’s secretarial assistants—I found Chef in his office picking his nose and staring blankly at his computer. I knocked gently on the frame of the door. Chef turned around on his swivel chair and examining the dried mucus under his fingernail, shrugged, flicked it onto the ground, and reached out to shake my hand.

I set to work that morning on what was perhaps the most absurd, most out of place, most poorly thought out dish I have ever been a part of. In the middle of a cold winter in the depths of upstate New York I was putting all of the knowledge and skills that had been developed in me at the C.I.A. into making tomato tartare.

Tartare is a raw dish, a preparation most often associated with Steak Tartare, a classic French bistro item made with raw beef and flavored with Dijon mustard, capers and lemon juice. The dish is all about freshness, about bright and vibrant flavors. Tomato tartare would be a creative chef’s play on the classic steak version. In an ideal situation it would be a gazpacho like mix of late summer vegetables featuring the brightest, ripest tomatoes available. It is a dish you can imagine eating among grape vines and lavender fields in Provence or in a café on a hot summer day during the California summer.

It is not a dish that is appropriate to the chilly winters of New York State.

There’s more to come, believe me; check out all our diaries here.