In the holiday issue of Lucky Peach, out today, John Birdsall, a chef turned food writer, leaves his restaurant job to cook for monks for three weeks in a monastery 130 miles north of San Francisco. In the excerpt below, Birdsall re-unites with an old friend, Dan (now Brother Damian), and shops for past-prime produce to craft into dinner. For the full article, you can subscribe toLucky Peach*here, or buy it at newsstands, and then be sure to follow them on Twitter *here.

Brother Damian meets me, and hugs me as Father Michael unloads the truck.

He isn’t the troubled Dan I used to face across café tables in San Francisco—there’s a calm about him, composure in his eyes, above the patchy, pubic monk’s beard, under a fresh-buzzed skull. “I want to show you everything.”

The monks had fixed up a cell for me, the nicest, all the way at the end of the hall, the biggest and least dank, a thank you for coming to cook. They’d dragged an old Barcalounger in there and set it beneath the narrow plywood sleeping loft, with its mattress of dog-bed depth. On a shelf above the bed, an icon of the Virgin Mary with a stretched oval face and extremely dolorous eyes. Do monks put images like that above their beds so they won’t be tempted to rub one out after vespers? I resolved to make Mary face the wall, that night and every night.

Illustrations by Sam D'Orazio.

Each week, Father Michael drives the battered pickup down the mountain to the Safeway, where the clerks set aside the produce culls and the souring dairy. Heads of leaf lettuce bruised and blackened around their twist-tie cinches, irredeemably limp. Flaccid cucumbers, powdered white in parts with bacteria that looks like rime ice. Cartons of milk you shake and hear the solids thumping against the wax-board walls. Nothing is too far-gone to drag up the mountain and stuff into the kitchen’s old Traulsen cooler.

“How do you guys not get sick?” I ask Brother Macarius that first morning—he’s showing me how to start the oatmeal, and where all the serving pieces live. He flashes a little-kid smile through a scraggly reddish beard and shrugs. “It’s still good.”

It dawns on me that this gig isn’t so much about cooking as it is a painstaking daily process of produce redemption: trimming, cutting away to get at the still-moist hearts of things, reviving in cold water, restoring faded essences in broths.