Adventures in Dessert

12 books/9 months

2009-11-10T20:31:00.002-08:00

Everyone who knows me in real life understands that, while I may be a reader, I'm not much of a reader-of-classic-books. An old college professor once said I had an impressive breadth of knowledge of contemporary fiction and it's true - at the expense of the classics.

And that's always been fine with me. I could recite Baudelaire in French at 18, tell you the important American literary contributions of the 1930s and I once studied a blackboard in a classroom for 5 minutes then said "huh, I wonder whose class is reading Owen Meany..." And I'd kinda had enough of other people telling me what to read, so I went to college somewhere where I could pretty much do what I wanted and avoid reading the classics. A class in Victorian lit here, a little Romantic poetry there but pretty much unscathed.

I'm taking a break from all that now. I've set an ambitious reading project of 12 books to read by my next birthday, which is a big one. They're 12 great books, or 12 books by great authors and while it's certainly not an all inclusive list it does address some of the larger gaps in my education. I can't help but think of David Denby's book project, taking lit 101 classes at Columbia in his adulthood and feeling filled with the ideas of Machiavelli, Locket, Socrates, etc. etc. Will I feel anything differently reading these great texts? Will I come to understand our present time (writingwise or livingwise) in a different fashion? Will I still be the type of person who dislikes reading great books? Am I a type?

The list, in no particular order:
1. the canterbury tales/geoffrey chaucer
2. something by vladimir nabokov
3. middlemarch/ george eliot
4. walden/henry thoreau
5. a room of one's one/virginia woolf
6. don quixote /cervantes
7. ulysses/james joyce
8. anna karenina/leo tolstoy
9. something by william faulkner
10. something by charles dickens
11. moby dick/herman melville
12. robinson crusoe/daniel defoe

Farewell to a food mag

2009-10-13T07:20:00.001-07:00

Last week magazine published Conde Nast abruptly announced that it would be closing Gourmet Magazine with the November 2009 issue, marking an an end to the 69-year old magazine that has stunned many in the food world.

Speculation of such a move has abounded in the food industry for the last few months, with readers noticing slimming monthly issues of both Gourmet and Conde Nast's sister publication Bon Appetit. Fewer pages, fewer ads and less content to attract readers.

Conde Nast made the decision to kill Gourmet (along with yuppie parenting mag Cookie and Modern Bride) rather than Bon Appetit because the latter has approximately 250,000 more subscribers and has lost less advertising revenue.

The move has caused even the likes of Anthony Bourdain to offer solemn, heartfelt words on what the shuttering means to those truly passionate about food and eating.

I will be posting some thoughts on what Gourmet meant to be as a cook and reader and welcome anyone reading this to submit their impressions for publication here.

food mag report 1: Sauteed Kale with Kohlrabi

2009-09-27T07:05:00.003-07:00

I always love it when my new issue of Gourmet arrives each month wrapped in its protective plastic. Sure, the issues have gotten thinner lately but the photography is absolutely stunning. The magazine has started focusing on close-ups of the food, pointing out those little things that most people don't even realize unless they're paying attention. The September issue features a close-up of a quince on the cover, so tightly shot it looks like cheese, or mold, or a fresh-baked boule or artisan bread, except it's not.

So, anyway, Gourmet. I purged all my magazines except for the odd New Yorker and my good mags, which left me with a pile of Gourmets, Saveur, Edible San Francisco, the odd Food and Wine and Edible Brooklyn or Edible Boston that I'd picked up along the way. After I pore through the magazine I've so eagerly awaited it goes in a drawer, where they've apparently multiplied a la dust bunnies. Because they deserve a little better than that, I decided a couple of weeks ago to cook one recipe per month from my stash (minimum).

First up to bat was a vegetable dish from the September Gourmet, Sauteed Kale with Kohlrabi, chosen because I've actually never eaten a kohlrabi and had been seeing them at the market lately. Taken entirely from the pages of epicurious:

Sauteed Kale with Kohlrabi, serves 8

1 1/4 pound kohlrabi, bulbs peeled
1/2 teaspoon grated lime zest
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
2 pounds kale (2 bunches), stems and center ribs discarded
5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1/3 cup salted roasted pistachios, chopped

Whisk together lime juice, lime zest and most of the olive oil, plus a pinch of salt and black pepper. Finely grate the kohlrabi using a mandoline and place in a bowl with the lime dressing. Remove the center rib from the kale and chop finely. Sautee the garlic in remaining olive oil until aromatic, then add kale and sautee 3-5 minutes or until tender. If you're not sure how tender it is, fish one tendril out and taste it. When properly cooked, transfer to the bowl with the kohlrabi and top with pistachios. The original recipe asks for the kale to be cooled to room temp before being combined, but we were eating it hot and it was refreshing and hearty.

giant kale by bhamsandwich

good times for chocolate

2009-09-11T19:53:00.003-07:00

So, not only is there this cutesy place in the East Bay but there's another new choco shop opening up in the old Joseph Schmidt building. San Francisco, you outdo yourself.

I'm exhausted. Wrote novel synopsis, had too many crazy conversations today plus a deadline dropped on me. Have ripe pears for pie, must make this weekend.

Some thoughts on chapter one

2009-09-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

Chapter one, chapter one, it's such a weighty word. Not like, say, chapter 17 where hopefully you'll know what you're doing or, if not, your readers won't care. Chapter one needs to be good, it needs to set the tone for the rest of the story, it needs to communicate who your characters are and what, pray tell, might happen to them. All of that and more, and still be entertaining, well written and unusual yet not gimmicky.

Enough to make you wonder why anyone would want to write a novel, right?

In preparation for my upcoming novel workshop, which I'm kinda terrified of due to a bad experience in grad school, I did a little meditating this afternoon on my on chapter one, which I don't love, but nor do I hate. I'd always thought it was kinda of necessary for the book - it had a setting that was important, it introduced the two biggest characters, it set out a quiet conflict that was in the same vein as a later, larger conflict. But it was kinda boring. And I didn't think that I'd done a good enough job with my details really. And I figured other people would not love it, because in comparison to chapter 2 and 3, and so on, not much exciting happens. It's pretty quiet.

That's all true, still. I haven't raced back into the chapter determined to give it shiny new wheels. I'm okay with it being somewhat boring for now. I do think that the events of chapter one need to be told in some fashion...if the crisis in chapter one changes, that's fine, but there'll be another crisis of the same sort, just a better one. The characters' differences are clear, the setting is clear, the stakes such as they are on the face of things are laid out. The chapter could be much more directly ominous, and hopefully it will be, but I think more of the stuff that needs to be said at the outset is being said at the outset than isn't. Only, of course, in a nondirect way.

About my being so nervous about this workshop, I shouldn't be. I should remember that grad school was frustrating at very many times and this class in particular was a waste of my time and effort, and think that also I could have done a better job in my work and been more professional myself about working with a bad teacher. My professor did not like my work and she made it clear, and she also didn't like me and she made that clear. That was unprofessional of her, but I didn't take my out to drop the class when I could have (why, I don't remember).
I found an old workshop draft of one of those chapters that I'd given a prior writing workshop and the comments on those papers were much more supportive than in Waste of My Time's class. Sometimes your work doesn't reach its intended audience. Sometimes you need to be humble in order to make your work better. we all have different tastes. I remember being horrified in workshop in college when one of my peers HATED, but hated James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

{That was the first Baldwin book I read, and he's still a favorite author to this day. So rich. If you haven't read him, do.}

I was lucky and/or spoiled in college to work with wonderful writing professors, people who I still keep in touch with.

too much writing!

2009-09-02T18:59:00.003-07:00

I have too much writing to do.

I'm taking a novel-writing workshop that begins in a couple weeks, but before (and during) I have this blog, two other blogs and three freelance clients needing regular work. Oh, and my novel.

I get up in the morning, brew some get-me-awake coffee and dash of a couple articles for client #1 while I'm doing this. Then if I'm lucky I'll throw something together for one of the blogs, post that, move on to something else in my day, toss a draft of something for client #2 together in a late afternoon coffee break, cook dinner, play some lexulous online, research something for another blog, remember I've got to start work for freelance client #3, spend a few minutes reading a friend's blog, work on some other things, think guiltily about the novel, spend ten minutes writing my book, decide to read a bit and go to bed, wake up and do it again.

It sounds so concise in paragraph form, but it isn't. There is so much research that goes along with writing--and blogging--and so much thinking and trying and procrastinating about writing that goes on when writing a book. So - basically - I live most of the time stressed out writing or thinking about writing or avoiding writing and it's hard to justify writing something I don't get paid for rather than something I do.

Oy vey.

I'm glad there are people who pay me to write. It's nifty. I just had a flash fiction piece accepted for publication in a journal earlier this week, and that only fuels my desire to work on my writing and submit to journals and so on....and if my dog chased his tail I'd feel like him, instead I just feel like organization is necessary, or something.

permission/aimee bender and selected shorts

2009-08-27T07:07:00.003-07:00

This intro to a beguiling episode of Selected Shorts featuring work by Aimee Bender and Etgar Keret, written and read by Aimee Bender, struck me as one of those things that's both honest and inspirational and, of course, like most things writers write about writing, a little confessional. I found it so on the mark that I transcribed it and am putting it here, for you.

If for any reason you are either unfamiliar with Aimee Bender or Selected Shorts, both are well worth your time.

I wrote my story Drunken Mimi while working on my 1st book of stories, and largely it was coming from a feeling of grand freedom and permission. Finally I'd been encouraged enough to try using the words and structures of fairy tales for my own purposes, and even the idea of using a mermaid as a character, even to put the word mermaid on the page in a serious story, felt to me like running free in scarves thru the streets.

I had previously thought of stories as objects that had to conform to many rules. As rigid as jam jars. But I'd been thinking then that maybe the form was a little more flexible than I had realized, for example, I had not thought a story could be considered a real story unless the people in it were all people.

As with Etgar I think both of our stories tend to be about the playing out of consequences. You set up a skewed world and then you see what's in it. You mess with the logic, and then you follow the logical consequences of the change. It's both out there and also not. Everything doesn't go. There are rules always beneath the story structure. For me, by bending the usual rules I'm trying to access a feeling I can't quite get to otherwise. Often I'll feel inhibited trying to get to reality on the page. The page isn't reality anyway, it's a bunch of words, so a writer's job, I believe, is to try to be honest and pinpoint a genuine feeling or idea, to put on the page something we can look and and discuss. The reader can feel this.

Realism or not isn't what's important, what's important is what the captured or what the writer's trying to capture. The sincerity of the butterfly net. So in that way I see both Etgar and myself as trying to grab onto something ineffable, to frame a feeling with words, to hold it inside the inner working of a story and to tell it in the only was we know how, which is often thru a very strange lens.

You know that feeling when you're walking around in your day and you're maybe going to get a coffee and there's a faint remembrance of last night's dream that floats thru your mind? Sometimes it's so faint and wispy you can't quite catch it. That territory interests me quite a bit and Etgar's not here, he wanted to be but he couldn't be, but I bet it interests him as well. Trying to slow down the speed of thinking, to catch that butterfly of a memory or thought or image and to turn it around and look at it. This wisp of a thought is as much a part of who we are as the coffee we drink and the to-do lists we make, even once it has drifted back down into the darkness and the recesses.

staff meal hits and misses

2009-08-21T20:03:00.005-07:00

Staff meal, family meal, family, comida. No matter what you call it the food is usually the same. A salad, if you're lucky, something to get some sort of vegetables in your diet. Especially if you're a pastry cook. Some kind of meat since, as someone I used to know put it to me, most of the restaurant prep and line cooks are Mexican and if you don't feed them meat they will go somewhere else to get it since many are working two jobs anyway.

If you work normal-people hours of nine to five you'll likely hit two staff meals of the day. If you come in the early afternoon, depending on the restrictions at the restaurant and your familiarity with the line cooks you may be able to sneak a snack or a free lunch meal. If you plan on doing this and you are a pastry cook it really helps to give out free dessert at the end of the night. Those cookies that sat out for ten hours of service and won't keep? Give em to the line cook you ask for chicken sandwiches.

I had one job where half the pastry staff all day long would ask the line cooks for flatbread and fava bean dip. Food cost pretty minimal for favas, and since we were making the flatbread dough half or all of the time anyway we felt kinda entitled.

For those outside the restaurant industry reading this, family meal is what you feed your cooks and servers before they spend normal dinner/lunch hours on their feet hard at work. From an owner's perspective family meal is also where you use up your scraps. Fish on its last day or tomatoes slighlty gonig rotten on one side. Feed it to the family. There are plenty of restaurants that supplement their cupboard with goods just for staff meal--cheap pasta instead of expensive stuff, rice, ketchup, hot dogs. While staff meal is rarely expected to be great, an inspired staff meal can lift the cooks, servers and busboys to all work just a little harder to make everyone's night great.

You can turn to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential for a number of truly awful staff meals, or you can call out any restaurant that segregates family meal by day - Wednesday pizza, Thursday sausages, Sunday eggs.

I expected there to be more standouts but in the end the meals that stick out are surprisingly few and far between. Staff meal successes that I can recall include, over various years and cities, from the hands of sous chefs and line cooks and caterers:
Fried rice with vegetables and eggs. While most people loved this one cause we worked at an Italian restaurant and it wasn't pasta, it also had a super low food cost and got rid of any leftovers.

Fish tacos. Same resto. The Mexican prep guys would make hot sauce and pico de gallo and bring in tortillas. You had to get there right on time for this one or you'd get nothing.

Make yr own burrito bar. This actually before my time in Cali. Guac, pico de gallo, cheese, refried beans, salad and meat. Fun, cheap, not too much work.

Thanksgiving leftovers. Multiple places, same agenda - turkey, potatoes, all the sides. A little hard to work after this one.

Sweet-hot chicken wings. A line cook made these super good one day kinda by accident, which unfortunately meant we never got to have them again.

staff meal c noii

Shawangunk Mountain Wild Blueberry & Huckleberry Festival

2009-08-19T21:25:00.002-07:00

If you find yourself in the vicinity of the Gunks this coming weekend {which is to say, somewhere between the Catskills and Westchester, or, say, at the CIA or if you even changed to be in Binghamton, you could get there too, yessir}

then please go to the huckleberry festival. go in my stead.

gunks photo c i eated a cookie
On the west coast they would have you believe that the only true foraged huckleberries come from the pacific northwest. This is simply incorrect as I found out last week while passing thru sleepy Ulster County. What little literature there is on this rad event says

"A celebration of the Shawangunk Mountains: music, BBQ, all-blueberry bake sale and pie judging contest, crafts and cultural area and art center, 9:00AM-4:00PM." Held somewhere in the town of Ellenville NY.

Huckleberries have been a foraged crop for hundreds of years, possibly dating back to 400 AD if you believe geologists.

If you're lucky you'll catch the eyes of an old-timey huckleberry picker who used to pick crops when the only roads between sleepy Hudson Valley towns were dirt carriage roads.

If you miss the festival you can still pick some huckleberries {now, not so much later} on the Minnewaska trails and elsewhere, though you might have to find a friendly local to share her berry spot.

Huckleberries are challenging to find commercially and expensive when you do find there because you're most often paying for a forager to traipse after them. Hunkleberries are smaller than blueberries and give a more complex flavor, though there are plenty of other differences too.

why servers should pay attention at line-up and in tastings

2009-07-30T11:08:00.003-07:00

true conversation from dinner last night...

me: we'd like to get dessert but we can't decide between the corn crepes with blueberries an the pink peppercorn vacherin with strawberry ice cream
server: well i'd really recommend the vacherin. it's a meringue cookie topped with strawberry ice cream and pistachios and there's strawberries too, and we make the ice cream in-house
me: oh...so you don't make the corn ice cream in house?
him: no, we do, we make all our ice cream in house
me: well how do you prepare the blueberries for the crepes?
him: we render them down in the pan
{at this point i shoot my friend a worried look. i don't believe the word "render" should be used in connection to food unless it's meat. it sounds kinda gross otherwise}
me: how's the lime caramel
him: zesty and delicious

It went on like that for a bit longer before we ordered the vacherin. The server did send us the crepes on the house, which was a nice touch especially since we hadn't complained about any aspect of the meal. Seems like he was just being nice.

Servers don't seem to realize that the restaurant actually makes a lot of money on dessert. Compared to that dungeness crab or rabbit meat the cost to the house of preparing a plate of dessert is very, very minimal whereas the cost of the meat, vegetables and other ingredients going into a main course is vastly pricier. The server, likely, is thinking that $8 on a dessert won't make a lot of money on his tip whereas that $12 app would be a bigger upsell.

What the average server does not realize is that most people get happier when they eat dessert. They relax, they linger and they're in a more generous mood when they're putting that tip out. Plus, the dessert money does add to the bill. It's the role of the server in this course more so than others to really sell the food. Whereas you might sit down in a restaurant and "be in a fish mood" and have two choices, you'll not likely be "in a pie mood" or "in a bread pudding mood" when it comes time for dessert {chocolate mood, maybe? but there'll always be warn choco cake for you}

Patrons are often more indecisive when it comes to desserts and they'll look to you, lil server. Do them, do your tip, do your boss and do the kitchen a favor and steer them toward something that'll taste really good. Do you need some tips on how to do this? Ok, well for starters:
1. Don't tell them to get the last thing the kitchen put up for you at line-up because it's the only thing you remember the taste of. This is silly. If you tried something new and it was awesome, that's fine, but if you can only remember the one thing then you're not doing your job because there's likely 4-5 other menu options.
2. Learn a new vocabulary. Words like "render" and "zesty" and (yes, even) "housemade" don't actually communicate anything at all. They don't tell me what it's going to taste like. Tastes like homemade? Great! For these prices I'd hope you actually make it. Seriously...
3. Learn how to describe something unique about the option. I should get the vacherin because you make the ice cream in house and it's got strawberries in it? Would you urge me to get the heirloom tomato salad because it contains purple tomatoes? Would you have me eat the scallops because they're pan-seared?

What you can do is say "our crepes are made fresh to order" {which they're probably not} or "the blueberries have an awesome flavor right now" or "the vacherin is coming off the menu soon so you might want to try it." Do you see how these phrases are different? They communicate something to me. A freshness, a quality, even a sense or urgency {try it NOW, it's going AWAY}. If nothing like this comes to mind and someone asks you to help them choose between two options, tell them why you like A and why you like B. Here's an example: "I love how crispy the meringue is, but the corn ice cream is unbelievable and you should really try it."

desert oatmeal raisin cookies

2009-07-22T15:34:00.003-07:00

I had a craving for cookies a couple nights ago and had most of the ingredients at home. Problem was, there wasn't anything to put in them except for my roommate's oatmeal and some old raisins I had. So I improvised a little and can up with these Middlde Eastern-inflected oatmeals, which are slightly sweeter and more sophisticated than the American classic. I'm not sure how many cookies it actually makes, cause I'm keeping the dough in the fridge and baking off a tray at a time, and cause my roommate keeps eating spoonfuls of dough. She's declared it the best.cookie.dough.ever

Desert Oatmeal Raisin Cookies {makes a standard batch of drop cookies}

soft butter 4 oz/1 stick
brown sugar .75 cup
white sugar .5 cup
salt 1 large pinch
egg 1
vanilla x splash
AP flour 1.25 cup + 3T
baking soda .5 t
baking powder .25 t
walnuts .5 cup to .75 cup
dates .75 cup
golden raisins .5 cup
brown raisins .5 cup
regular oats 1.5 cup
orange flower water splash

Rehydrates raisins in hot water, adding your splash of orange flower water. remove pits from dates and break up into pieces with your fingers. Cream butter, salt and both sugars together. Add egg and vanilla x. Add flour and leavening. Next add oats and dates, and drain your raisins and add them too. Chill dough for half an hour before baking. Bake at 350 until golden brown and crispy-edged.

monday canning dates

2009-07-20T17:16:00.006-07:00

For the last couple of weeks I've been having Monday canning dates with Ace. We fell into canning together sometime at the end of last summer when I was trying to preserve some peaches and made an excellent plum rose jam, and then we gained a windfall of apples and pears from the Apple Farm last September. Last week we made a nice plum chutney that came out okay -- not to my tastes but Ace was pleased with it.

Today she made a dapple dandy pluot jam and kept the skin on all her pluots. The flavor was nicely apricot-y and not too sweet.

I bought a bunch of white nectarines for a white nectarine-cardamom preserve. I don't love the flavor of white stone fruit (because usually, it has NO flavor, just sweetness) but I'd made something last season with white fruit and cardamom and remembered really liking it. I added half a lemon juice and peel with the idea of having to add more because the fruit was really sweet. It took one and a half lemons but I'm quite pleased with the results. The flavor is complex, though in a far different way than the pluots. The first taste you get is lemon juice, bleeding into cardamom. The peaches and sugar come through at the end. And the color is just beautiful! I left them at Ace's house to finish sealing but I'll try to get them and post a picture later.

I'm trying to find recipes for low-sugar no pectin jam that features stone fruits, but so far I'm not having much luck. Most of the low-sugar recipes call for lots of pectin and the standard recipes of equal parts sugar and fruit. This one is pretty good and does manage to taste sweet without tasting exclusively of sugar. I used about 10 ounces of sugar for 4 lbs of whole fruit. The pluots by contrast had a little less than three cups of sugar and tasted less sweet...but then, they're totally different than nectarines.

white nectarine-cardamom preserves
nectarines, whole 4 lbs.
cardamom pods 10-12, lightly crushed
sugar 1-1.5 cups
lemon 1.5, juiced and rinds thrown in pot
makes 4 8 ounce jars

peel and chop white nectarines. combine all ingredients in pot and let sit 30 minutes. bring to boil and let cook 30-40 minutes or until jam-like. this will be a loose mixture. taste as it gets thick for acidity, sweetness and spice. when the preserves are thick enough, you should can them (you can do a freezer test if you wish. i did.) or you can store them in the fridge for a good month or two.

effing amazing strawberry jam

2009-07-16T23:35:00.004-07:00

I made this last week with Ace because my roomie brought home a flat of strawberries. I love this jam because it brings out the exact flavor you associate with a perfect, intense summer strawberry.

It's like eating sunshine. It brings out the very best red juicy splash of sweetness without any of that acid (though I'm sure you could kick it up with a couple lemons if you felt like you wanted acid).

Also, it's really easy! All you need are four cups of sugar, three pints of berries, one vanilla bean and one pot! De-stem the berries and cut them in half. Toss berries, vanilla bean and sugar in pot and let macerate for half an hour, then start cooking over medium-high heat. To reduce the foam, skim some of the syrup off the top once the sugar has melted and the berries are releasing juice. Save this stuff for a rad strawberry syrup for italian sodas, fancy martinis or an ice cream topping. Continue to cook the jam until the berries are cooked down and you've got a syrupy consistency.

Want more specific instructions than that? I understand. But I'm not an exact person when it comes to compotes, jams and the like. If you prefer your preserves with larger chunks of fruit then you can do something like this

Currently I'm listening to You Tube Magnetic Fields videos from love shows and working on ch 5 (five!) of the manuscript while drinking this stuff after a night at sfmoma seeing the awesome Avedon exhibit. Can't imagine a collection of things more appealing.

haagen daaz five, and other notes on ice cream

2009-07-09T13:49:00.001-07:00

Do you know why Haazen Daaz new Five campaign is such a brilliant idea? Five ingredients are all you really need to make most flavors of ice cream. Five simple ingredients:

egg yolks
sugar
milk
cream
real flavoring: see vanilla beans, zest, coffee beans, cardamom pods

Oh and, sure, a pinch of salt will amp up the flavor balance on most ice creams. For chocolate ice cream you'll need some combination of cocoa and chocolate (or butter and chocolate) so that is more than five but you get the point.

Ice cream relies on a certain amount of fat for its creamy taste. The fat can be composed of egg yolks, cream, milk or half and half and every chef has a recipe they prefer. For a long time I was stuck on Claudia Fleming's ratio of one cup cream, three cups milk and twelve yolks, but the amount of sugar she calls for was too high for some flavors.

Gritty or icy tasting ice creams may not have a high enough percentage of fat, they may contain shards of fruit that attracts ice molecules when freezing, or they may have melted and refrozen to give it a strange texture. Companies like Ben and Jerry's add emulsifiers to the ice cream so that you'll have a fairly scoopable product the minute you take it out of the freezer. If you've ever wondered why Haagen Daaz is always rock hard, it's because there are no emulsifiers in the product. Emulsifiers for the most part aren't creepy or bad or gross like other additives to processed food. Some are made of seaweed.

Some people add things like milk powder or gelatin to ice creams or sorbets to improve the texture. Gelatin affects the sorbet or ice cream base while spinning and prevents the formation of ice crystals. You can "cheat" the natural formula by reducing the fat content and adding gelatin to ice creams to prevent the crystallization that happens when not enough fat is present in a base. You can also cheat by adding a couple tablespoons of alcohol, which will keep the ice cream softer.

I like to keep my ice cream pretty simple and only booze it up if I'm going for a boozy flavor. Ice cream can be deceptive with all those additives. You can't taste gelatin in a product, though you can sometimes taste milk powder if the ice cream is a pretty weak flavor.

soup-making: the true test of a cook

2009-07-07T23:49:00.001-07:00

If you want to see how good a cook's skills are, have her make you some soup. It's industry wisdom that it takes a savvy cook to layer the depth of flavor and seasoning that will meld the ingredients of a soup into something you can get excited about. And it's true. Try it.

Me, I like making simple vegetarian soups. I make them mostly with water-based stocks, as you'll see Michael Ruhlman suggest many a time (and if you haven't read Ruhlman on soups and stocks, why not?) though I do have a pile of turkey stock cubes in the freezer from last Thanksgiving's carcass. (I tend to forget they're there).

Today's soup was a yellow split pea, inspired by Heidi's recipe at 101cookbooks. I found the peas took a lot longer to cook, maybe almost an hour but I wasn't keeping track of time. That's another soup lesson: time is kinda irrelevant. When the peas were halfway done, I sauteed an onion until lightly browned, then slid the onion into the soup to let the flavors meld. I added salt, the juice of half a lemon, and rooted through my cupboard for the sumac because I knew I'd want a little touch of acid.

I did not have any olives on hand--they're too expensive for my budget--but I did whip up a nice tsatziki with some leftover yogurt.

The soup came out great, once I got the peas properly cooked. I actually didn't puree it at all, just kept adding liquid to get the peas cooked and then a little more to thin it out. I made some cheesy toast and had a full meal and felt refreshed and full as only soup can make you.

I love how the raw garlic in the tsatziki contributed its own flavor, much more pungent than cooked garlic. I think I put a little more sauce then I would have wanted, because too much yogurt cut the delicate flavor of the soup, but then that's the beauty of soup. It is what you make of it altogether. I could spread my tsatziki on something else entirely and roast some heirloom tomatoes tomorrow and pop them into my soup.

Pizzaiolo: beautiful dining room, beautiful people, but the pizza part?

2009-07-05T10:37:00.003-07:00

I went to Oakland's Pizzaiolo for dinner recently with old FH friends. We got there around six and the room was hopping, but there were still a couple of tables left so we didn't have to wait.

I absolutely loved the space. The adorable retro touches, like the vintage lights above the line that probably don't offer much in the way of light. The buttery yellow tiles on the wall, the red oval tiles on the pizza oven, the hardy wooden tables. It was clear that the chef, Charlie Hallowell, had put a lot of his time and his self in that room and it was clear watching the cooks on the line that it was a place people--not just customers, but cooks too--wanted to be.

I started with a glass of the housemade vin d'orange, a fortified wine with vanilla, vodka, seville orange and warm spices. The wine was indeed strong, and the seville orange and vanilla dominated the promised black pepper flavor, but overall I was happy with it.

We split two "antipasti" and a pizza:

Star Route lettuces, burrata with olive oil and Acme bread toast, pizza with stinging nettles and pecorino

The lettuces were sweet baby leaves lightly tossed with oil, salt and pepper, simple and refreshing although a couple of whole or nearly-whole peppercorns snuck past the garde manger cook and onto our place.

The burrata was actually my favorite course. Maybe it's almost time to revise that oft-used phrase I utter (you know, the I don't like cheese one). Perfect slices of lightly charred Acme levain and a chunk of burrata drizzled with olive oil. The consistency was strange, sort of like the first spoonfulls of cream-topped yogurt, slighlty resistant but then all creaminess. It was great to have the lettuce and the burrata at the same time for the textural and flavor contrast.
this is the burrata. photo by inuyaki.com

Our pizza came streaming hot with a blistering crust. Given that, I would not have expected the center crust to be soggy and slightly wet, which made it impossible to eat out of hand without resulting to all kinds of New Yorker folding strategies. There was something sweet--distracting because I couldn't place it--and there were (unmentioned in the menu listing) slightly crunchy red onions on the pizza. The nettles were wilted nicely and well cooked, except the long stems had ben left on and those were stringy.

I really wanted to like the pizza. I have the feeling if we'd ordered a different (read: nettle-less) pizza, it would have been better (no stringiness). But we were dining with a vegetarian and that was the one that leaped out at all of us. What we ordered was enough food to feed three people comfortably, which was nice. We walked out of there happy and not too full.

We actually didn't get dessert. Fairly full on what we ate. It was clear from the menu items, the menu language, the presentation and the dessert that Pizzaiolo is one of those ex-Chez Panissey places. The servers assemble the desserts themselves, on the restaurant floor side of the line. Drizzle of verbena anglaise, puff square, sauce with apricot compote, dust with 10x. Interestingly, most tables did seem to order dessert and the ice cream was a popular choice.

Bay Area pastry chefs just can't catch a break?

2009-06-29T09:39:00.004-07:00

Tough times to be a pastry chef. Not only are patrons tightening their belt (and their budget) when it comes to fine dining and desserts, but this morning Michael Bauer kinda called you boring.

Part of the reason is that my expectations are low writes MB after admitting that he routinely gives restaurants with poor dessert choices 3 stars, giving GMs, head chefs and owners the impression that it doesn't matter who's making their pot de cremes and seasonal fruit galettes.

It's also challenging to review desserts, claims MB, because those darn restaurants could be bothered to send him a menu. Do they even give him the PC's name? From the blog:

When we call for menus each week for restaurants I'm reviewing, we have to specifically ask for a dessert menu, otherwise there's a 50-50 chance we won't get one. Even now we sometimes have to call again, which suggests that many restaurants aren't invested in the sweet course. That's probably the reason I see many unbalanced offerings: too many creamy puddings or too much chocolate, for example. I can't even estimate how many restaurants I've been to that have an ice cream component in every dessert.

This isn't the first time MB's complained about the sweet fare out here.

My suggestions for the Bauer? Well, I'd love to see him champion the desserts we DO have. Imagine if he were using his powers of suggestions to offer up examples of success rather than lambaste the options? Also, it seems like Bauer's talking to chefs about desserts but no one's talking to the diners. Chefs are picky. Chefs want to play with toys. Chefs have been making creme brulee for their entire damned career and probably want something new. True. I support all of that.

But let's flesh out the idea that Bay Area people aren't some bizarro boring-dessert lovers, shall we? I mean, Creme Brulee Cart man seems to be doing pretty well.

And let's take a second to think about the many fine bakeries in this city who do offer something a little more interesting. The continued success of places like Kara's Cupcakes proves that people will go out of their way to pay a little more money for an item that's organic and tasty (though they could use some new flavors!)

sweet life bakery, eugene, or

2009-06-26T10:09:00.003-07:00

It was a craving for diner food that made my friend and I pull off the I-5 in Eugene OR. First the iPhone sent us to a creepy town across the river from Eugene, the kind of town that can only be the setting for that old fiction topic The Stranger Comes To Town. Well, we were the strangers and we rode out.

In Eugene we found a newfangled diner and purchased elaborate burger sandwiches and fried goods. Tempted by the sign on the door that read Pie Happy Hour 3:30-5 we asked out server to explain, which is how we found out about the Sweet Life Patisserie, who supplied Happy Hour pies.

thanks gina pina
It would be open till ten or eleven. We would fine a line outside the door, she assured us. And it was not to be missed! So we paid, crossed town to the bakery, and waited in a very long line. Maybe you've never been to Oregon or maybe you are one of those people who only goes to Portland, so it bears explaining here: the majority of rural Oregon has a problem with the gays. Sure, Eugene is a college town, but we'd seen neither hide nor hair of queer culture and a whole lot of fundamentalist bigot radiom and the only gay bar in Eugene had closed down 2-3 years earlier.

Once we made it into the Sweet Life we tried to decide between the gelato, chocolates, cookies, cakes, creme brulee, pies and other items. When bakeries have a lot of items I tend to get nervous, because you can't reasonably expect one chef to excel in all those areas.

I went with the mixed berry pie (blueberry, blackberry, ollalie and marion, which prompted a discussion on Marion Berry...my friend thought it was a joke) and he got the chocolate strawberry cake, basically a chocolate version of strawberry shortcake (whipped cream frosting, ganache, strawberry compote). Coffee drinks to go.

My pie was great. They heated it up for me and gave me a generous slab (for $4, I'd hope so), although they didn't offer whipped cream or anything I guess you could buy ice cream to get it a la mode. The cake was moist, the berries flavorful.

Here's what was so exciting about the Sweet Life: it offered a place for the smart kids, the geeky kids, the gay kids to go and hang out in a town that didn't seem like it had much cultural escape to offer. The cashier at the sweet life was totes gay. And the day before our visit, the Sweet Life bakery had participated in Bites for Rights, a fundraising program that donated 15% of the day's sales to Basic Rights Oregon, an equality organization.

As if being progressive on the issue of equality isn't enough of a reason to love Sweet Life, here's another:

the bakery is super conscientious of those with food allergies and dietary restrictions. Vegans and gluten-free girls, little signs in the case will tell you which products you can eat, so you don't have to hold up the line asking.

amazing apricots 1

2009-06-23T21:39:00.003-07:00

I remember the first time I ate an apricot. It was my first time in California, I was visiting family in Woodside, and I bought an apricot at the local market because it felt so California to me. And also because I'd never seen a fresh apricot.

I experienced what many people experience when they bite into a fresh apricot. The flesh was mealy, the flavor underwhelming, the skin spongy. I did not eat another fresh apricot for about six years and I gave them another try only grudgingly.

If you've ever thought these apricot things are so mealy and yucky...i contemplate eating them because i really want a fresh peach and the peaches aren't ready, well then, this post is for you. see, apricots deepen in flavor when cooked, and the mushy complaint of their texture turns soft. How, exactly, you say?

image by max xx

Close your eyes and think of a peach pie. You know how the peaches are bright, how they taste like you think yellow would if yellow had a taste? How they're probably one-dimensionally sweet from all the sugar added in the pie? When you cook apricots like this, don't be surprised if you turn down the next piece of peach pie someone offers you.

Pit and halve a bunch of apricots. Put them in a pot with some sugar and a splash of water. If you have a vanilla bean, you can throw one in. Apricots and vanilla really sing. If you've got a good honey, you can use some honey. What else could you use? Chamomile, dark brown sugar, brandy, lemon. This is not a list of ANDs, however. It's a list of ORs. Any item on this list will complement the apricots, but so that you understand the beauty and complexity of an apricot once it's cooked, choose sugar plus one, or even a rich type of sugar like muscovado or maple or demerara. Something special.

Cook the apricots plus sugar plus water (plus extra) over medium heat. Let's say you have six to eight apricots. I would add 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar. You can always add more sugar but you can't take it out. The fruit will start to break down and release its juices. Continue cooking until the juices thicken. I'm not going to give you a more exact recipe than that, but I will answer questions. You will be left with a delicious compote that I like to serve warmed over vanilla ice cream.

Learning how to cook apricots will change your life. If you're lactose intolerant, spoon them over soy yogurt with granola for breakfast, and if you hate sweets grab a nice cheese and good bread because this compote is versatile, easy, cheap and delicious. Promise. If you get inspired to try this and make a new, fun combo, let me know.

stuff that's keeping me happy lately

2009-06-23T11:03:00.004-07:00

I've been so busy traveling. There's a lot that I want to tell you about but it's going to take a while. In the meantime here's a teaser of stuff that I've been into lately:

pilot books, seattle
amazing apricots
breaking news: harvard lays off 275 employees --> THIS IS NOT SOMETHING I LIKE
molly moon's, seattle
finding a gay friendly bakery in eugene or
inner sunset farmers market, sf
modesto jr. college egg farmers
being so close to the end of chapter 3, phew!

photo by James Callahan

Andre Dubis-isms

2009-06-14T19:55:00.005-07:00

While searching my hotmail inbox for a recipe for rosemary-soy chicken wings, I unearthed an email from a grad school professor that contained a list of anecdotes about the esteemed writer Andre Dubus Sr.

Known among writers as "Andre Dubus the father," so as to distinguish the subject from his son, the Andre Dubus who authored The House of Sand and Fog, the elder Andre Dubus is known primarily for his rich and haunting short stories. Dubus is one of those people described frequently as a "writer's writer."

What does this mean? Certainly it ranks up there with the haughty-yet-cliched terms bandied about by teachers and students of writing in MFA classes and advanced-level college workshops. Both curse and blessing, being a writer's writer is like being crowned prom king AND valedictorian. Your writing is layered, rich, resonant (oh, cliche!), your endings are earned, your characters' dialogue is never petty nor trite.

Joking aside, what this means primarily is that you are someone aspiring writers need to have in their toolbox. You have something to teach writers--how to tell a good story--as well as readers. If you are a writer's writer, you might not be well-known by the general reading public.* You might not have a bestseller, or financial success. You are a rocks glass of smoky scotch beside a fireplace while soft snow settles onto the eaves of an old house. You are special.

Another of my professors was an old family friend of Andre D's, and had the pleasure of sitting through many a Red Sox game with the old man. He used to tell us stories of Andre's adoration for the gummy New England accent, and the hardworking-hard-drinking working class baseball fans you can encounter at Fenway.

While his Andre stories were more character-driven, the list of Dubus-ism I found portray not the man himself, but the quirks of a writer and the instructions in a practice.

Andre Dubus (father) wrote 100 pages to "find" the seven pages of his story "Waiting." It took him fourteen months.

Andre Dubus always recorded how many words he wrote each day. And everytime he said "thank you." -- "28 words, thank you." OR "1200 words, thank you."

Andre D was at a party once where there was a fistfight over whether something falls to "earth" or to "the ground." Carver was for "ground."

Rick Russo said of Andre D's prose style "Once you are a Catholic you will be using that language the rest of your life, even if you don't believe in the dogma anymore."

Russo said that reading Andre Dubus and Richard Yates when he was in an MFA program at the Univ. of Arizona saved him--because at the time everyone was reading Gass, Coover, Hawkes, Vonnegut, etc.

Rick Russo quoting a friend: "Just becasue it didn't happen doesn't mean I can't remember it."

*Dubus the father's short story Killings was adapted into the movie "In the Bedroom."

the three strikes bakery rule

2009-06-12T08:39:00.003-07:00

When trying out a new bakery, I almost always follow the three strikes rule: no matter how I feel about something on the first visit, I'm not allowed to rule it out until I've made two more visits. There are so many variables that could affect the initial impression, ranging from my mood or the weather to an overly salty batch of dough the kitchen made or a slightly stale cookie.* I might visit with a friend and try a few items; in that case, I'll relax the rule a bit.

Last night in the Castro, I told my friend something vaguely upsetting as we were walking back from dinner. Surprising, no. Upsetting, yes. He clutched my arm and, rather than respond to what I'd been saying, demanded cake at that very moment. Let's Go Into Cafe Flore, he said, pointing at the Castro landmark.

image from aweigend.

I've been to Cafe Flore many times, and quite enjoy it for a lingering coffee with friends on a rare sunny-AND-warm San Francisco day, or for late-morning brunches. The eggs are always good, and I respect a tiny postage-stamp of a kitchen that can stay on top of their game. Over the years I've had a couple of their desserts and been lukewarm, most notably for the chocolate violet souffle cake that tastes nothing like violets. Chocolate cake does not need violets, no, not at all. So if you are going to create a violet-chocolate cake, please make sure it actually tastes like something? ok?

We skipped the cheesecake, considered the chocolate cake, and decided to share a slice of the banana foster pie.

What looked like a simple custardy confection ended up being a four-layer pie that, if slightly too sweet, was rich and creamy and perfect for sharing. Deep cookie-crumb crust got a layer of caramel, and another one of rum-vanilla custard. The pie finished with a banana cream and a caramel drizzle. The pie was one of those occasions something tastes better than it looks, the flavors rising above the ho-hum prissy bakery presentation that we all groan over. Lucky for Cafe Flore, this was my third visit.

I'm often considered a snob about food and other things, and I am, sure. That said, there's a place for the ok, the humble, the merely good. The pie was as good as some items I've had from places like Tartine and Citizen Cake. Sometimes we don't want to think that way. It helps, when paying Tartine prices, to believe you are getting the absolute best there can be. There are days when all you want is a sweet and uncomplicated piece of pie, a little sunshine, an outdoor table, and a dose of queers.

*Note to cooks and kitchenworkers: it's actually really important to taste everything you sell every day (sauces and such, maybe every 2 days, unless they're fruit-based). I've seen anglaise go bad in the squeeze bottle during a service. I've also worked at restaurants that serve, day in and out, horribly stale versions of Claudia Fleming's brownie cookies, which is not only gross but completely disrespectful.

heading out of town

2009-05-28T08:42:00.003-07:00

see you in a while, cali! it's cold and foggy here and i'm in need of some time to relax. i've got a new stack of library books. i'll pack my prepster shorts, charge the ipod and fly out tonight.

see you soon, herrell's, jp licks, hi rise, sofra? doughnut plant, i'll catch you on my travels too, and il lab, and maybe momofuku?

what we talk about when we talk about food

2009-05-24T20:43:00.002-07:00

Lately I've been thinking that I wouldn't have this blog if I were starting it today. Right now the market seems saturated for this sort of thing, and while that wasn't any less true (probably) three years ago, I had fresher eyes for the genre back then.

When Francis Lam wrote about his quest to make a perfect omelet, he's writing about the sense and muscle memories, and the intuition that make a good cook. When Michael Ruhlman wrote about driving down Route 9 in a blizzard for his culinary exams, it certainly wasn't the test that was on his mind, but the necessary sacrifices of time and will that you are required to make if you play the game. He understood it was a test of character. When Molly O'Neill wrote about learning to butcher and cook fish in a Provincetown kitchen, she was really talking about grit and integrity, about the differences in a kitchen between insider and outsider, and how we permeate those boundaries. As well as the need for the flavor of the fish to dictate the cooking method, and the importance of seasonal and local ingredients back before our country really had a culinary movement. Carol Blymire's posts at Alinea at Home are about the fear of failure and the comfort and courage that food offers us, as much as they are about xantham gum or agar. And when Ruth Reichl portrays Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters in the early days of California cooking, it isn't the food, though it's evocatively described, so much as the passion and vision of these young cooks before they were culinary figureheads.

What we talk about when we talk about food isn't food. This is a balancing act that is difficult to execute consistently. Oh, it's tempting to get caught up in describing the flavor of a rare ingredient or fresh heirloom produce gently coddled in the hands of some culinary idol. It's exciting to talk about the atmosphere of anticipation that surrounds the diners-slash-audience embarking upon a tasting menu. It's easy to write about food--and to write something interesting--only on the level of the food itself. But it's not satisfying. And it's not transcendent.

It's good to remind myself of these things, because I've been struggling to write about food, and I've been slightly checked out of the food debate, catching only faint whispers of SF rumors and trends, rumbles about Bruni's replacement and so on. In my own writing I've been stalling, researching, and committing that crime of writing about food only on the surface.

I've become so tired of the way we talk about food, either in the present media moment of here in SF. Recently Robert Beringela (pseudonym) serialized a "food noir" tale in San Francisco magazine that, while at first glance amusing and pointedly thumbing its nose at this tiny-city-of-food-cliche, eventually revealed itself to contain no more substance than the ubiquitous beet/goat cheese/mixed green salad that's grown so offensive round here.

I've had the dubious fortune to be at two restaurants during opening review process, so experienced the MB hype, stressful service, and inflated prose {for the record, when a critic's in house, we most often know it, at least by dessert!}, plus the anticipation of waiting for review. But parsing the sentences of a Bauer review isn't wholly satisfying, in parts because MB can play favorites with his chefs, and to a lesser extent with styles and trends.

More than ever it's important to support the places where real, honest conversations about food are taking place. I'm talking about your local farm markets and your organic bakeries, and Gourmet and Saveur, but not the other food magazines, your specialty stores and restaurants, and your own kitchen, your own cooking. Make it count for something.

The food scenes in my writing are actually the more difficult ones to write, because while my writing brain wants to put something down and go ahead, the cook in me begins to parse the dish. Is it good enough? What cooking techniques are necessary? What's the mise look like, and whose station's it coming off of, what's the fire time? Why would the chef choose these things? What am I really trying to say?

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit

2009-05-20T21:55:00.003-07:00

I used to be a little snot (used to be, you say?). One day during the course of my stage at Oleana, I told the pastry chef, Maura, that I wasn't a fan of bread pudding. I hadn't yet learned that you don't tell this to cooks; that claiming not to like something ends with you being prodded or strong-armed into trying their adaptation of it. Sometimes, when we say "don't like," what we mean is don't understand or aren't impressed by or, as my french chef used to say, "it is not very interesting."

I worked at the time at a bistro in Boston that served chocolate bread pudding with whipped cream (side note: it really irks me when people call it chantilly on menus...it's whipped cream people). We made four hotel pans of the stuff, using leftover house bread (baked by me & my boss) plus the supplementary bread we got on the weekends. The night guys usually cut the bread for us, two large fishtubs, but occasionally we'd have to top it off, then make the custard. I'd be up to my elbows in the stuff, tossing the bread, letting it soak. Then I'd have to portion it into the four hotel pans, bake them in barely-there hot water baths consisting of the 1/2-1 inch of water I could pour on the full sheet pan and, when baked, pull these same suckers out of the oven without spalashing hot water all over myself and burning the mitts. So I was usually pretty clumsy and usually made a mess (big surprise, right?). Suffice to say I'd had it with bread pudding and I felt that I was pretty well informed on the topic.

Well it only took a couple bites of Maura's bread pudding to change my mind. Hers was made with homemade brioche, pretty standard, and I had excellent results baking it with Acme pain de mie as well. Maura soaked her bread in a mixture of custard plus simple syrup; her theory was that the simple syrup prevented the bread from getting too heavy and resulted in a lighter final product. I'm not sure whether that's true but I know the results are certainly delicious.

This version below features stone fruits, with cherries just coming into season! We don't have peaches yet but we do have apricots, which are delicious baked or roasted. As promised a long time ago, here is the bread pudding recipe adapted from Maura's supremely wonderful brown butter bread pudding with mulberries and milk jam at Oleana.

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit:
{makes 1 lg. deep dish pan (9x13) +/- a few extra ramekins}

custard base:
eggs 9
sugar 2.5c
cream 4c
milk 2.5c
vanilla bean 2, split and seeded

for soaking:
simple syrup: 1c
cubed bread: 8c
custard base above

fruit, to add:
pitted cherries: 2c
peeled, sliced peaches: 2c

Warm dairy with vanilla beans and infuse 30 minutes. Whisk eggs and sugar together. Add cream and milk. Place bread in large bowl, coat with simple syrup and then with custard base. Let soak 1 hr or until most of liquid is absorbed, tossing bread every so often. Add cut fruit to soaked bread and mix. Pour into baking pan, using ramekins for any overflow. Cover with foil and bake at 325 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and bake 15 more minutes or until top is lightly browned. Center should be set. If not, keep baking.*

*I worked somewhere where we baked bread pudding FOR THREE HOURS once.

in other notes:
*huge burn blister on my finger with goo bubble the diameter of a caper. it needs to go away.
*valrhona cocoa powder, how i have missed you.
*i should do a post on ways to infuse vanilla beans, maybe i will.
*i ate the second half of my burrito for dinner and now i have nothing to look forward to at work tomorrow.
*claudia fleming is still awesome.
*i've been reading a book a day, about.
*my car is not dead and gone forever. hell yeah! road trip seattle anyone?
*i'm contemplating a series of podcast essays. main problem: i'm not interested in the sound of my own voice, unless i'm pretending to be claudia gonson. second main problem: that just sounds gimmicky and slightly pretentious.
*i need to learn to say no, sometimes, and stop doing everyone a favor all the time.
*i chopped orange peel for a long time today and it was really theraputic and zenlike. i recommend it.

flaky lemon shortbread

2009-05-11T11:00:00.003-07:00

Shortbread is a taken-for-granted kind of cookie. It's usually ho-hum, buttery, sweet, nothing too special. It's versatile. You can add spices, citrus zest, vanilla bean, cocoa nibs. Some people really enjoy buttery, flaky cookies and my mother is one of them, so this is what she got for Mother's day. For the record, it shipped well and did not break. Always useful information.

This particular shortbread is flaky, tall, and soft. (There are other chewy shortbreads that are delicious too and this is not one of them). It's adapted from the Tartine cookbook. I've tried it out a couple of times and it's critical to do it by hand, with the butter at a supersoft consistency. As if you've left it out on a humid July day while you went to the corner store for some eggs, ran into your neighbor, chatted for fifteen minutes, and came back home to find squeezable, malleable butter.

If you'd rather make this shortbread, orange, vanilla, (orange-vanilla), fennel, baharat, or anything else, you go right ahead. How do you do this? Add some flavoring (seeds from 1 van. bean, 1 t spices, etc), and then taste the dough. Start small...for obvious reasons.

Lemony shortbread:
(makes one 9-inch round, to be cut into 8-10 wedges)

soft butter: 9 oz.
salt: 1/2 tsp. + pinch (reserved)
lemon zest: 1-2 large lemons*
rice flour: 1/2 c. + 2T**
granulated sugar: 1/3 c. + more for topping

Paddle softened butter with a spatula by hand until creamy. Work in sugar and lemon zest. Add rice flour and mix until dough comes together. Pat dough into baking tin and smooth to level grade. Top dough with granulated sugar and reserved pinch of salt. Bake in 325 degree oven 30-40 minutes. Should be just slightly golden but cooked through in center. Let cool before cutting.

*I used Eureka lemons.
**Cornstach can be substituted for rice flour.

so sorry

2009-05-07T23:39:00.003-07:00

About two years ago, I received a comment on a short story I wrote that was published online. Apparently.

I just noticed this comment tonight.

Someone named Tricia begged me for the recipe for the brown butter bread pudding with milk jam from Oleana, the beloved Cambridge restaurant. How Tricia knew I'd spent time in the Oleana kitchen is a mystery...maybe she read the story, googled me, found the blog? Or the other way around?

Anyway, Tricia--who I'm sure will never read these words, not unless she's still out there googling toward Oleana's decadent yet homey brown butter bread pudding, I'm sorry. I do have that recipe tucked in a tiny pink notebook. I used to make that bread puding at Frog Hollow all the time, a brown butter version with pears and dried fruit, and a vanilla custard version with stone fruit. It was pretty universally loved.

I've got the recipe for milk jam also, a Middle Eastern confection similar to dulce de leche, made on an all-day slow simmering stove. I haven't made milk jam since those days, but I know that I will one day.

Three weeks and counting til I get to go to Sofra myself and maybe, if I'm very lucky, they'll have a version of that bread pudding for sale. In the meantime, two years too late, sorry.

thought stream of revision

2009-05-05T20:53:00.003-07:00

{or, some of the junk that goes through my mind}

One of the things I try to do each time I'm working on revisions is give myself the time to re-read the current draft before diving in, especially if it's been a while. It's always great to have writing work that *feels* like writing, but the main reason for this is so that I can spend some time (re)remembering what I wanted to write about in the first place. Usually I'll try to get all the way through without listening to the editor in my head, but when I do let the editor's voice shine, it tends to go something like this:

1. weak beginning...OMG, takes two pages to get to the meat of the story! no bueno!
2. do we have a pretty good sense of who the protagonist is and what he wants by page 2, at the latest? why not?
3. what is the particular problem in this story? is that clear to readers? {usually, in an early draft, the answer is NO}
4. is the landscape clear? {not only the physical landscape/geography, but the other characters that help my MC define himself}
5. insert time-honored/exhausted workshop tropes. pick your favorite, which may include what's at stake? there's not enough tension in this piece. the dialogue/characters is/are flat. and you haven't earned the ending.
6. remember the things that are your weakness. for me, it's an overuse of exposition. which sucks, because I like a lot of exposition, and I'm willing to put up with a lot of it if the writing is good. however, exposition for its own sake is no longer popular in today's literary fiction...and who am I, just another writer, right? right.
7. remember that you are standing in your own way: that your pride, or your adoration for minor character #7 (the one with the harelip and the broken umbrella), or your determination that you know exactly what the piece is about, or your brilliant wit in paragraphs 3-5...if you are going to have a finished, polished piece, most of the things you love will die or mutate.
8. get real quiet and listen.

last night i learned that i totally forgot to convert one page from first to third person, so, sorry brooke, don't be confused when you read the excerpt i sent you. i learned that there's not as much exposition (yes!) as i remembered and nearly no backstory (double yes!), that my characters are still sickly thin, that the madcap caper tone of the chapter isn't being read through the agonizing level of detail i invested trying to make the plot believable, and that what will make the plot more believable is rounded characters stuck in a conflict.

who, what, where, when, why? and why now? i try to be kind on a first raft. i don't have high expectations. and when i'm going through this process, i'm certainly not doing it with a little checklist beside me. to date i've spent, oh, 6-8 years workshopping pieces? i know how to ask these questions, whether it's about your piece or mine. to know what to change, you need to make a series of quick, frequently subconscious decisions. it's wrong because it is. the dialogue reads awkwardly, and when you say it aloud you'll hear. we know when something doesn't sound right because most of us have been reading for what feels like forever.

that, when you think about it, is pretty significant. what else have we been doing all our conscious lives, other than eating, sleeping, losing our tempers, and discovering things to love and find beautiful? ok, and watching television. play kitchens turned into real ones, stuffed animals became pets, and the other games of childhood fell away unless we play them with our children or other people's. i'll stop now before this gets too fever pitch {the movie, not the novel...i actually can't stand nick hornby. sox win, btw!} but consider the implications...what sort of people still care about the same things they did when they were 7?

how to use a pastry bag, and other things they don't teach you on food media

2009-05-03T22:38:00.006-07:00

piping shot by lens envy
Cooks make pastry bags look awfully easy to use, don't they? Cupping giant bags in rounded palms, slapping used bags on the countertop, squeezing miniscule quantities of sauce down the skinny tube...it can't be that hard, right?

It's a lot harder than it looks. Sure, anyone can use a pastry bag. There are lots of little tips you can learn to avoid mistakes...and if you're wondering what could possibly go wrong you've certainly never cut a hole too large, causing the tip of your bag to shoot off across the room, and your sauce/frosting/etc to spill all over the table. Or squeezed a bag too hard, causing it to burst (see above). Or tried to warm an emulsion on top of the oven and broken it (thereby ruining your product).

First off: why use a pastry bag at all? They're impossible to clean if you use cloth ones, and if you're using plastic, you're wasteful.

Any delicate, ethereal macaron you've ever eaten? Piped with a piping bag, and almost always filled with one as well. The prettiest cupcakes and wedding cakes? Ditto. Meringue for lemon meringue pie, or baked alaska? Sometimes. Likewise for hors d'oevres, canapes, and other party snacks.
macaron by acme
If finesse is required, a pastry bag comes in handy. It's classy. Though it sometimes looks retro-chic, yes.

So, should you find yourself in need of a pastry bag, here are some tips:

1. Don't buy a Wilton's one, or whatever brand you find in your supermarket cake-decorating aisle, especially if it's got some sort of plastic screw tip. This will almost certainly fall apart.

2. Less is sometimes more: when you're filling your pastry bag you have a choice between a less-full bag that's easier to handle, and a chock-full bag that you won't have to refill often (if ever). I'm partial to a less-full bag because not only is it easier to control your piping, it's less likely to make your hands cramp up/give you repetitive stress injuries.

3. If you do go for a bag bag, keep your non-dominant hand at the top of the bag, twisting the bag shut. Squeeze the bag 3-4 inches above the tip with your dominant hand. You're turning the unwieldy cone into something manageable; by only working with a small amount of product, you are allowing yourself to have control over how much you release and where. If you've got something that's stiff, like cream cheese frosting or not-quite-tempered ganache, this is almost a necessity. When you run out of product in your zone, squeeze it down. If you've got a big bag of whipped cream, sure, top-down is fine...there's no resistance.

4. Remember, your hands are warm. The heat of your hands will warm up whatever product is in the bag. If it's ganache, be careful it doesn't overheat and separate. If it's ice cream, work fast and make sure you are piping into frozen molds. If you're finished with a product but might need it again, chill/freeze it if necessary.

5. For best piping, even pressure is key. Slow, even movements will get you the best results. If you're nervous, practice on parchment, the counter, or whatever's nearby.

6. In a pinch, you can make a pastry bag out of a ziplock. Fill the bag, pinch shut, turn 45 degrees so bottom edge is pointing directly at floor, then cut a hole.

7. Re: cutting holes: err on the side of smaller rather than larger, and hold the bag upright with one hand and cut with the other to avoid a mess. You can lay it on the table, but it might squirt out.

I personally think my tips are way better than these tips. If you need guidance on filling the pastry bag, go here.

If you need a really small amount of something (chocolate or frosting for writing on a cake) you can make a cornet...also known as "a small cone of parchment paper." But that's a lesson for another day.

busy (all the time)

2009-04-27T23:52:00.003-07:00

hi, lil foodies.

i am very much aware of my neglect of food in this-here space lately. i'm kicking around a couple of ideas but to be honest, i have not felt very inspired on the food-front lately. could be because i've been writing so much, but hey...that one took a sputtering back burner for the last THREE YEARS, alright already? I'm trying to re-negotiate my relationship with food, which is linked directly to my satisfaction with work/living spaces. In the last year I've baked a lot less...because I've had no freezer space, a very unreliable oven, and now a toaster oven.

(yes...I do decide what to bake, if I'm baking at home, by what pan will fit in the toaster oven. yes...i am aware this is ridiculous)

so I'm just gonna leave you with two things:

1. new category in the overcrowded sidebar of other pieces I've written. currently this just contains other blogs I contribute to, but as I get new fictions published they'll make their way over there. I'm not going to put the old ones up, but you can find them if you want to without too much trouble.

2. I've got all my seeds started and I'm scoping out a couple more plants, but here's this year's sunset garden lineup:
early girl tomatoes
yellow pear tomatoes
some kind of determinate cherry tomato whose name escapes me
romano beans
parsnip
red beets
mesclun mix
rainbow swiss chard
chantenay carrots
french breakfast radishes
arugula
nasturtium
lemon verbena
lemon basil

The apple tree and blackberry bushes are flowering. I'm contemplating letting my third shade bed get overrun with spearmint.

mallows

2009-04-25T21:54:00.004-07:00

marshmallows in the fridge! they're setting tonight, to be folded into brownie batter tomorrow...

because i am a good big sister.

homemade marshmallows are a luxury, if you haven't tried them. pillowy, playful, and not at all like those supermarket puffs.

{has anyone out there tried to make agar marshmallows? or xantham gum (so fun, but so creepy if you touch it)?}

oh please

2009-04-21T08:08:00.002-07:00

from the craigslist "writing gigs" section: famous poet seeks intern

"famous poet/sculptress {insert URL here}. She has read with Charles, Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg. She also dated Charles Bukowski for five years. This your chance to learn from someone who learned for the greats. She have rare books from the 70's that need to be complied in a 'complete works' book. Please email me your resume and I'll be in-touch."

so many things to say but let's start with these:

1. Charles, Bukowski? no...alphabetizing goes last name first
2. Do we want to know your sex life to get a job with you? Do we need to?
3. "learned for the greats"
4. sounds like someone's books are out of print and she wants a vanity pressing, eh?

Happy Poetry Month. At least we know why it's unpaid....

one more

2009-04-18T19:49:00.006-07:00

oops...i forgot to tell you the best story in that last post! in a way it's about hustling, too, and in a way it's strange and sad, but i find i keep turning it over in my mind.

i have never been the sort of person to look outward for inspiration for stories, but this one, there's something about the mystery in it that i might just borrow it one day.

so, a while back i ran into someone i used to cook with. we chatted about workplaces and he gave me the rundown on who was still working at the restaurant {turnover. always} and who had moved on.

a skinny slip of a cook with intense eyes and a quietly cocky manner simply disappeared. he was married {i thought he was gay...eh...} and he left. left work. gave no notice. skipped town or not. changed the phone number or not. vanished.

i wonder if he took his possessions, his knives, his bicycle, his chefwear. i wonder if he's returned. in my mind he's on the line in some distant city, but what thoughts are possibly going through his head as he flicks the saute pan?

on a different note: i worked 32 hours in the last 3 days. give or take.

on a related note...i'm kinda totally in love with editing my manuscript. it's so scary and so wonderful. part of me wants to tell everyone i know and part of me wants to keep it all to myself. i know it's a very, very long process and i know there will be so many moments when i hate it and am discouraged and think i am not so good at this and want to go out into the world and do something else. but for right now it's such a rush...familiar yet totally not. i'm trying to trust it--the process, the voice, my skill, something. it makes me want to call up writer friends and have long intense conversations. it's somehow made writing feel new again.

it ain't where i been/but where i'm bout to go

2009-04-15T20:57:00.005-07:00

cooks are all hustlers. if you work in a kitchen long enough, you become one. {i'm not implying we all start out that way}

maybe it's because kitchens are such transient places, and we meet at the intersections between revolving doors, the borders of stations, in the walk-in.

i've been running into cooks and other restaurant i used to work with over the last few days. the questions are always the same:

where are you working now? or me? how's that going for you?

they tell me about the jobs they want/need/left/think i should get, or vice versa. they tell me about the other people that have moved on, ask who i am still in touch with.

cooking is a tiny community in this town, and a cook worth his salt usually has his ear to the pipeline. maybe he's pulling doubles working for his friend's new place, or he knows they're hiring, and hey, you need a coupla shifts? he'll hook you up. maybe he's afraid his gig is gonna go south, and he needs the hookup.

hey, you know this place? oh i saw their ad on craigslist. you should apply.

hey, i need a good pastry person, did that girl you used to work with find something?

it's the hustle. in an unlevel playing field, information is currency--especially in this economy--and so we trade it in whispers on street corners, sliding back from the group to catch up before moving on separately.

i'll call you we say. or i'll stop by. in through the back door.

i get phone calls, occasionally. people trying to pass on information or pick up information, people trying to hustle me into something that suits us both. there's no meanness about it. it's just the game. in this town.

bacon n eggs by orin optiglot

revisions, revisions

2009-04-11T20:16:00.002-07:00

I got stuck on a chapter last night. I can usually tell when I'm stuck because I'm avoiding writing, or when I try to write I get nothing done (but sometimes I get so little done even when I'm not stuck). Last night I was trying to revamp a scene in a chapter that needs lots of work.

Group scenes are really hard for me. Parties. Crowded rooms. That stuff is a touch easier in first person because it's all being streamed through one voice. Third person, though...even if it's fairly limited, it's still something I have a hard time working with. All those bodies, what are they doing? I wrote a scant paragraph but no more.

Then I took a walk. Getting up and leaving the room is dangerous. When you're struggling to write, sometimes it works best to push through it, whether by giving yourself an arbitrary word count (500 more, = 2 pages) or by giving yourself an arbitrary time you must write until. I tend to try to stay in the room, even if it's not doing me any good. Even when I give into the urge to google this or that information that I really need to know, really before going any further. Getting up and leaving the room brings the danger that I won't sit back down at all. And leaving writing dissatisfied doesn't make me want to sit back down the next day.

Sometimes it also works to close the computer and let everything marinate overnight. If I've taken my characters up to the edge of a cliff, but not over the cliff, if I've started a new scene, gotten everyone into the next room, then I've got something to mull over and I've got a jumping-off point for the next day. This wasn't going to work because I knew the room they were entering, and they were all bottled up in the hallway.

So I took a walk with my dog, down to the public garden. I thought about the scene I was struggling with. I thought it through enough that when we got home, half an hour or so later, I made a few notes on a post-it and got back to work, and finished the scene.

By and large, characters make rational decisions. They might not be rational to you, the reader; if so, the writer didn't do her job well enough. Stylistically, sure, sometimes we choose altogether unreliable, irrational characters. Logic will always play a role. If I choose an unreliable narrator, I've got to use my logic to demonstrate her total unreliability at some point in the story. If my narrator is confused, heartbroken, manic, earnest, what-have-you, but otherwise trustworthy, he or she will make a rational decision. Additional characters will react in time. Raymond Carver is so skilled at showing these decisions with such sparse language. Writers who clutter their pages (Dave Eggers comes to mind) likewise have to justify their decisions. I walked through the garden at night, took away my fear and frustration and anxiety, and laid everything out straight. What did my character want? Who was going in that room with him? What other characters would hover on the periphery? How could I introduce tension, foreshadowing, doubt, anything for his to react against? How could I introduce information about minor characters that could be useful in future chapters?

Sometimes, but very rarely, we need to leave the room and walk about. That scene is finished, almost. Tonight on my drive home I realized I need to spend a little more time on something. Always writers have to think about how we can raise the stakes, introduce more tension, cut closer to the bone.

That is, if we're writing about something honest and true that we care deeply about. It is infinitely easier to put words on a page if our hearts are not behind them. They lose a degree of power. Choices get abstracted.

schmidt happens

2009-04-01T22:02:00.003-07:00

Hershey’s may not have spelled out their reasons for closing the plant to the employees, but the employee guessed that making artisan chocolates was too expensive and labor intensive for a such a large corporation.

“That’s why not one truffle looks like the next, even the special boxes are hand made and decorated,” she said. The truffle boxes are hand dyed on paper maché and individually decorated using the batik technique. “That’s what Joseph Schmidt is known for. A lot of people hold on to their boxes.”

Production costs for artisan chocolates may be high, but Hershey’s had a good 2008. Net sales in 2008 were $5.13 billion dollars, up from $4.9 billion in 2007. Hershey’s 2008 net profit was $311.4 million dollars, a significant increase from 2007’s $214.2 million.

“Working here was a good experience. I’m so sad. It feels like a death in the family,” the employee said.

The above comes from an interesting article on the last few days of the Joseph Schmidt factory in SF. Joseph Schmidt, along with the Berkeley ScharffenBerger plant, is being closed by parent company Hersheys.

People, don't sell your boutique chocolate shops to Hersheys.

random thoughts, tuesday afternoon

2009-03-31T19:51:00.006-07:00

exhausted in mind, not body.
delicious candied cocoa nibs for afternoon snack.
not feeling the tea cinnamon thing. plus it was weirdly gummy. humph.
LROD hasn't been appearing in my rss feed...that makes me sad.
my dog is a champion at unmaking the bed.
i'm really not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that my boss didn't get back to me today...but i know i'll find out later in the week.
i'm reading this e-book on my computer (really, it's a pdf file, so am i supposed to call it an e-book or a pdf?) and it's in two columns per page, which annoys me immensely.
i feel like a lot of the publishing blogs lately (cause of the kindle?) are having the same conversation that i was having eight to ten years ago (ebooks, the death of print publishing, the flicker of the screen versus the turn of the page)...which makes me wonder if so many voices are just now joining the dialogue, or if we've been having the same conversation for ten years now.
i'm supposed to be checking out a new writers group on thursday but so far haven't received anything to read for it.
my dog has the cutest smile on his face right now.
i need to cook my bergamot.
michael ruhlman has a great post on lemon squares and you should read it.
there are 59 comments on this post, which makes me think i'm not the only one who likes lemon squares.
i'm really very possible about to train my fourth coworker in 2 months...3 months...can't remember.
i'm nervous i won't like the new brand of coffee i bought at the andronicos.
i've been getting a bunch of rejection letter on this piece of flash, but none of the letters have been interesting.
i feel like apricots are right around the corner and that is very satisfying.

last night a fellow grad student came up...she's had some books out, appeared on npr recently. she was a pub kid and not an mfa-er, so i didn't know her very well, but someone who was out with us said that she thought this woman wrote books she thought would sell, as opposed to books she wanted to write. it took me a microsecond to acknowledge that i'd rather have a book that meant something to me, that i wanted/needed to write, than a book that i produced from a more flippant place.

but i do wonder, does it make it easier to write a book if you're not attached to the story you're telling? by attached i mean with your whole heart? if i were writing a book like this blog post where it didn't matter what sentence followed the next, per se, where i was writing it for someone to read it...or my name to be known...

and who do you write for? (or cook for?)

yourself? who you'd like to be? who you were?

what is the most satisfying audience you can imagine? do you know when you have a good audience? do you recognize apt criticism? does it still sting?

i wrote, when i was a kid, out of some vague hope for fame. then i wrote cause it was smart. i read always, without thinking about why i read.

boredom in the kitchen

2009-03-27T22:30:00.005-07:00

I was talking to a fellow cook today about boredom. I kept checking facebook every five minutes. and twitter. I was so bored.

I'd had a pretty busy today at work before heading over to sweat a few more hours in someone else's kitchen, and a lot of orders to fill. Logically, there wasn't cause to be bored. Monday things are pretty slow, I can expect to have a short day, and since it's the end of my work week, I should expect that most things that need to happen that week have happened. I expect Mondays to be boring. But Friday...Friday would be my busiest day even if I didn't have somewhere else to be after work.

Part of it is being alone. No one to talk to. Part of it is the nature of the job.

A former line cook friend told me some time ago that if I was going to continue cooking, I needed to get used to boredom. I am sure this was in response to my complaints about having to work service during a slow night/month/season. I never liked working service (but that's another post), not least because--especially in an open kitchen, where you are constantly being watched--there is not a lot that you can do. Sure, you can start infusing that spice for an anglaise, but who is going to stand there and cook it for you if you get a ticket? Working service is, literally, waiting for the printer to spit out your tickets. Working in pastry, you are the wallflower of service, the last asked to dance.

I wanted to be busy all the time. Cakes in the oven, dough to sheet, chocolate melting over a double boiler and an infusion going. The kind of busy where you leave at the end of the day and realize that every single person eating dessert that night will be eating something that you made. You're exhausted and energized.

There'll be times when you're just chopping stuff for two hours, my friend said. Hulling strawberries. Because it needs to be done. You're going to be bored and that's part of the job.

pans by cseanburns

I shouldn't be surprised at boredom, but somehow I constantly am. Another cook once said to me that it's only after you pass through that phase {actually, in her words, it was only after you'd spent a year somewhere, but some places have steeper learning curves than others} that you begin to see under that layer to everything else going on, and you learn so much more. Take your pick of advice; get back
to me on it.

kumquats by orphanjones

&you are?; an ingredient list

2009-03-23T21:47:00.005-07:00

shamelessly stolen from chef, though I did him the courtesy of letting him know.

butter is from litlnemo

a list of ingredients, techniques, methods that are meaningful to me:

black peppercorns
pink peppercorns
apples {esp. northern spy, stayman winesap, pink pearl}
butter
sugar {white, brown, demerara, muscovado}
cream
milk
eggs
middleton gardens fraises des bois + mara des bois + raspberries
lemon verbena
nectarines
plums {italian + french prune plums, mirabelle, and the small plums i used to sell here}
vanilla bean
coffee
doughnuts
chicory
malt powder
whiskey
lavender
new england blueberries
caramel
custards
ice cream
mulberries
zaatar
citrus {meyer, eureka, yuzu, bergamot, kumquat, tangerine, grapefruit}
apricots
rosewater and orange blossom
salted almond
walnut + black walnut
honey
phyllo
mastic
sb 70%
valrhona equtoriale + jivara lactee
rosemary
jam
semolina/polenta/cornmeal
brown sugar
butter cake
roasted banana
huckleberry
black tea {lapsang souchong, darjeeling, earl grey}
korean mint
molasses
gingerbread
coconut
passionfruit
root vegetables {parsnips, baby beets}
arugula
eggplant
marshmallows
brown butter
cardamom
cherries
quince.

training: how to pick them and how to break them in

2009-03-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

What do you look for when you're hiring a new cook? Do you keep the same job description in a file on your folder, to be posted over and over again on craigslist? Does your restaurant/bakeshop/kitchen have a high rate of turnover? If so, do you know why?

Do you seek input from your fellow cooks or front of house managers, those above you? Do you ask them what is so important about what you do? or how can I best communicate the particulars of this job? Do you have cooks come in first for a face-to-face, do you make a point of knowing something about the places listed on their resume, do you ask them why they want to work for you? Do you ask them why they want to work with you? Do you set up a trail and if so, how long do you plan to keep the cook and what do you have them make? {item I've been asked to make most frequently while trailing: pastry cream}

Do you hire them on the spot? If so why? At what point do you know that you will hire someone? Do you ever hire someone before seeing them work? How long do you keep that stack of extra resumes around? Are you honest with the cooks you see about the realities of the position, the things you value, the numbers on the books, the hours they should expect to work?

If you are not honest about these things, please, please, be honest. If you knowingly under-represent the conditions of the job by inflating your covers by over 100 or by telling the cook you'll give her three full days when you expect to send her home after five hours (to keep the costs down) or you tell her she's plating only but can do some production when you know she'll only be baking endless silpats of tuile cookies, then you are lying. You are lying to the cook and lying to yourself. There is a very slim chance that you will hire someone you are happy with, and who is happy with you--and in a town as small as this one, your reputation most often precedes you.

When you are training a hired cook, do you hold his hand? Do you tell him it's sink or swim time? Do you think it? Do you tell the cook what and why and how of everything you ask him to do, or do you keep it simple, do this over and over and over. exactly like that. until you know that the cook begins to see, at which point you tack on another piece of information?

What do you do if you don't like someone? If you feel you made a bad decision the first time around? Do you ever dislike someone for a reason you can't quite articulate? Can you tell if they don't like you? Can you tell when a cook swears she wants to work for you that she's truly desperate for a job, any job, could give a shit about your job in fact, just needs a paycheck? What do you do when the one thing a cook promises you {I'm fast, I'm punctual, I'm neat} is so far from the truth that you'd laugh if it were funny?

Do you learn lessons for the next time around?

fiction exercise: 5 things

2009-03-19T21:36:00.003-07:00

When I'm writing a lot, and stuck in a piece, I keep this book close to me. It's from the only really good class I took in grad school. Inside the book, there's a green publix shopping list on which I've written Liddie is the sort of person who: followed by ten answers to that question.

Avoid all of the minute character descriptions {is short. is allergic to tomatoes. hates to drive at night.} The point of this exercise is to let your mind wander, using the things you know about your character to dig you in a couple of steps deeper. When I do this exercise, the first three are usually throwaway. Uninteresting. If you're lucky you'll end up with five good ones on a list of ten:

2. is unashamed about the gap in her front teeth, the width of a dime laid on end, because her family didn't have dental care when she was young.

3. tucks scraps of food into her bag for the compost bin, then forgets to take them out until they've started to rot.

5. likes to buy lingerie from the Salvation Army.

7. tried to train parakeets in the backyard to work as messenger pigeons.

9. cleans the apartment every three months, using an old gym shirt of mine without first asking if I still wear it.

The story this character is from is dear to my heart, if difficult. I haven't looked at the story in three years, but I still carry her around and sometimes I think of that piece. From those five things, you might see her as thrifty, whimsical, a little self righteous, somewhat entitled, somehow a romantic, probably idealistic. Maybe you'd like to have coffee with her or maybe you'd get up and move if she sat next to you on MUNI.

I wrote 8 things for my character tonight in this chapter I'm desperately trying to get to the end of {not sure why, because the chapter after it will be even more of a headache to manage}. This guy goes to the opera alone, and keeps no photographs of family members in his house. Not as interesting, maybe, but his voice is frantic and dramatic and I think he needs ways to be quiet. I understood that he crosses the street to avoid people with babies and dogs, so I gave his best friend a cat. Just to make my character unhappy.

I've got to train a new cook on Saturday. I'm putting some thoughts together for a post on training. I think I'll only have two days with this girl and then she'll be on her own...and it's a lot harder to fix someone's mistakes when they're working independently and you're catching it days after the fact.

Art versus craft: michael laiskonis

2009-03-16T09:42:00.002-07:00

When we cook, are we telling a story in third person?

What, in the act of cooking, is the writing? What is the storytelling? What is the reading? Might these creative and consumptive acts trade places? What is the interplay between dialogue and monologue?

Michael Laiskonis has an excellent post up today about creativity in art and the way art influences cooking. Go read it. I have to do some cooking now.

sunday night.

2009-03-15T22:33:00.004-07:00

soup's on the stove. need to go put it away. white bean-potato-kale. hearty vegetable soups for a rainy day, and when the sun comes out tomorrow i'll wonder why i made it. i told the roommate she could cook up sausages and put them in some of the soup.

you need a writing area she says today. like, in your room. i always want you to have one

what? i say. "you mean, so i don't write on the sofa or in my bed?

yeah she says. like in the corner of your room

our house, you see, is very small, although we did have twenty people in the kitchen once.

writing nook, we'll see. right now i'm clearing out space because a clean room feels like a promise in the same way a clean kitchen feels like a possibility.

my coworker we just hired three weeks ago gave her notice last week, which means someone else to train, someone else to impart the particular minutae that only really comes with experience, and looking (no, you see, it's different, this is just right, this is too thin)...and in the meantime, the one who is leaving does a sloppy job of cleaning, which is to be expected.

i'm putting away the soup.

i'm going to bed early.

today i ate malted vanilla ice cream.

Sunset Bakery morning buns

2009-03-14T08:05:00.002-07:00

One of the good things about living in my little Asian neighborhood is stopping by the sunset bakery for cocktail buns and coffee.

While I've tried some of the muffins, palmiers and tarts, the buns are my favorite. Ethereal, fluffy, not too sweet, and served warm. I was given the cocktail bun one day when they were out of black bean buns, and this one contains a mixture if sesame and coconut.

Sesame paste? Seeds? Almond paste with sesame and coconut mixed in? I've had this bun several times and still can't decide how the filling is prepared.I know that it makes me happy in the morning, and I'm going to eat the one in my bag very soon.

january 18, 2009: per se lunch

2009-03-08T22:24:00.005-07:00

Celery Root Veloute/black truffle "pain perdu"

Oysters and Pearls/sabayon of pearl tapioca with island creek oysters anad sterling white sturgeon caviar

White Truffle Oil Infused Custard/ragout of black winter truffles (dcm)
Extra Virgin Olive Oil Infused Custard/blood orange + ginko nut (led)

Salad of Hawaiian Hearts of Peach Palm/red bunch radishes, compressed granny smith apples, watercress, violet mustard

Daurade Royale Cuite a L'Huile D'Olive/black trumpet mushrooms, salsify, petit lettuces with red wine syrup

Macaroni and Cheese/butter poached nova scotia lobster, parmesan crisp, creamy lobster broth and mascarpone orzo

Za'atar Scented Panisse/romaine lettuce hearts, raita, smoked eggplant puree

French Onion Soup/alp drackloch

Garden Thyme-infused Ice Cream/chocolate "tuile", fleur de sel, moulin des penitents extra virgin olive oil (led)

Sorbet a L'Huile D'Olive/chocolate pudding, nicoise olive oil (dcm)

Cranberry Sorbet/granny smith apple parisienne, candied apple

Per Se Float/compressed pineapple, vanilla custard, gingerbread "crouton" with pineapple-ginger soda

Coffee and Doughnuts/cinnamon sugared doughnuts with cappuccino semifreddo

Bombe au Pamplemousse/chocolate roulade, manjari chocolate moussee, grapefruit curd, pink grapefruit ice cream (dcm)

Mint Chocolate Chip/chocolate dacquoise, crystallized mint, chocolate tuile, mint chocolate chip ice cream (led)

assortment of migniardises including: nougat, caramels, pulled sugar candy, amadei+ valrhona filled chocolates

for the record:

1. Michael Ruhlman was totally right about the soups. The celery root veloute was the stuff of dreams.

2. We arrived to one of the best tables in the house, a letter from TK himself, and complimentary champagne.

3. Yes, I requested the zaatar panisse.

4. We ate FOR FOUR HOURS.

5. Jonathan came out to say hi.

6. The kitchen was immaculate in a way that I cannot possibly hope to describe.

the recession, thomas keller , and frank bruni

2009-03-05T21:00:00.004-08:00

I had it on word a couple weeks ago that the French Laundry had started calling concierges in the city to let them know that Laundry reservations were available for interested clientele. Today SF Eater posted a link to an opentable Laundry resy.

In the diners journal today as well, Frank Bruni mentioned that Per Se isn't doing two full turns these days.

Ominous times upon us all. Do go the the Laundry or Per Se, if you haven't. Absolutely incredible.

In a related NYT aside, Bruni has posted several articles recently about tipping in the service industry. Personally, I tend to tip 20%, minimum 18%, unless something is wrong. Bruni's point today is that restaurants don't pay their employees enough, so it's the customer's contractual obligation to tip so that the server earns a living wage. Californians aside--where servers and bartenders make minimum wage of not more (quite often, actually, they make the same as your local line cook)--that is true. Servers do not make a living wage. But you know what, Frank Bruni? Cooks don't make a living wage. Hosts don't make a living wage. Neither do bussers, dishwashers, barbacks, baristas, night porters or sous chefs. And while the servers do tip out the bussers and the bar staff and sometimes even the dishwasher, the entire back of the house is scraping by.

Twice that I can recall some generous patron at the fancy restaurant tipped out the kitchen. At the East Coast Grille, diners have the option of buying a 6 pack of PBR for the line. at the Bi-Rite Creamery, all tips are split with the kitchen.

While it's true that a server's hourly wage isn't enough to live on, at the end of the day any front of house employee is making more money (per hour, per week, per year) than most back of house employees. If restaurants were to start passing the cost of paying a livable wage onto the customer with higher entree costs (and if you're getting good meat, it's expensive. for the curious, dessert is a great food cost item because butter and sugar and, yes, even chocolate, are a lot cheaper to turn into a $9 dessert than a good cut of lamb is to turn into a $25 entree), a nation of diners would rise up in protest. I am sure of it.

What would your $25 entree really be worth if every person who contributed, from the farmer all the way to the server, were paid a livable wage, and benefits?

overturning prop 8, one step at a time

2009-03-03T22:21:00.002-08:00

Have you seen this video yet?

Tomorrow night I'm attending the Eve of Justice, in preparation for the opening of oral arguments on 3/5 in the case to overturn prop 8.

The most important thing we can be in this fight is visible.

eating: bad for you

2009-02-27T21:48:00.004-08:00

It's a dangerous world out there these days. After receiving a series of complaints from diners feeling "unwell" Heston Blumenthal has temporarily closed the Fat Duck (via diners journal).

And, last week, Payard failed health inspections and was shut down for a couple days.

For a bit of good restaurant news via SF Eater, my favorite local restaurant Aziza was re-reviewed by the Bauer and given a 3.5 star rating. Mourad's food is so special, and the cocktail menu is always an exercise in interesting pairings. I find it interesting that MB comments on the white plates because, for me (unless it's changed recently) it's the beautiful Heath plates that I recall.

While there are some things I'd love to see updated, like the pastry bag squeeze-piles of dips for the flatbread mezze, the flatbread itself is pillowy and perfect, and my main courses have always been interesting, flavorful and complex.

MB's review was less flowery than usual, but leaves such nuggets as the following: "a neat pile of berries and a smear of purple sauce resembling the tail of a comet. " Oy.

bklyn: believing the hype?

2009-02-26T20:06:00.006-08:00

There's a sign over the Kosciuszko Bridge that brings you to the Brooklyn part of the BQE, and since traffic is likely crawling, you have ample opportunity to read it.

Believe the Hype!

Exclamation point included.

Reading the recent New York Times article about artisan slow food production in Brooklyn, and the quasi-fallout in follow-up Q&A responses (all found on the excellent Diners Journal blog) made me think of that sign.

My neighborhood, northmost Brooklyn, was an enclave of Polish shops and restaurants, where old men filled quiet park benches and you could buy 99 cent bars of Milke chocolate at the Key Foods. Twenty blocks south, the main drag of Bedford was already littered with foodie nooks like the Bedford Cheese shop mentioned in the original
NYT article. Brooklyn Lager was on tap in every bar, and the brewery offered frequent tours and tastings. Hipsters nestled in an uneasy corridor of a southside Williamsburg home to latins and Orthodox Jews. Further south still, Spike Lee's neighborhood was once again a safe place to live and I skirted my bicycle across the oceans, down a slight stretch of Flatbush and around Prospect Park, sometimes grabbing a coffee from Gorilla Coffee and lingering in Park Slope before skirting home through Bed-Stuy.

In those days Brooklyn still had pockets of old-time, authentic cultural traditions, though in my own neighborhood I had the vague sense that it was all being edged out. Institutions like Peter Luger's sat hulking under the train tracks while entrepreneurs named their bars after the institutions formerly occupying the space (Pete's Candy Store, Union Pool). Even the "new" Brooklyn feels old, though maybe that's just all the brick buildings. I wasn't surprised by the Times article. It's been 8 years, if not more, in the making, for North Brooklyn. And I wasn't surprised by the response, a mix of people genuinely excited, and other pointing out, patiently and not-so-much, that the bklyn of hype need not forget its own histories.

a native's guide to boston

2009-02-24T20:57:00.005-08:00

having spent the vast majority of my life in the great state of massachusetts, I am not going to tell you to do the Freedom Trail, Faneuil Hall, or any other such historical-interest thing. I can advise on where to eat, what the locals do, and how to understand them. Above all, it's best to keep in mind that New Englanders tend to keep their business to themselves and expect you to do the same. First rule of New England: Connecticut doesn't count. Neither does anything south of New York.

Should you find yourself in Boston, you can and should do the following:

museums:
*the Museum of Science is a very fun place, as is the New England Aquarium. Singlehandedly either could beat the Cal Academy of Sciences to a bloody pulp, but among the many things to enjoy count an amazing three story tank with tortoises, large sharks, and awesome fish, a retro electricity show, chicks hatching live, snake handlers, tons o' taxidermy, an otter tank, and neat views.

* the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is most famous for having Rembrandts + a Vermeer stolen and never recovered. That said it's got an amazing courtyard, great wallpaper, unique furniture, and this incredibly intimate feeling that most other museums don't.

* the MFA...I've seen and re-seen their permanent collection, which is pretty heavy on Impressionist and early American works (Winslow Homer, etc.). I still love the MFA. Their special exhibits are usually awesome also. I've seen over the years art deco, Monet, John Singer Sargent, Herb Ritts, el Greco-->Velasquez, David Hockney, the quilts of Gee's Bend, and many other exhibits.

places to eat:
*Clio (Hynes Convention Center): ken oringer. boston's foray into molecular gastronomy
*The Butcher Shop + Stir (Back Bay): barbara lynch's charcuterie and cheese shop + cookbook bookstore.
*No. 9 Park (Park St.): Barbara Lynch's original restaurant
*Oleana (Central): Ana Sortun is amazing.
*Sofra: Ana and Maura's bakery. The cookies are just incredible, and I'm not a cookie person.
*Clearflour: one of the three good bakeries, this one specializing in bread and laminates doughs.
*Hi-Rise (Harvard): my favorite of the three good bakeries, with delicious sandwiches. Do get the toast basket for breakfast and use lots of maple butter. The corn bread is excellent. If in Harvard, sit upstairs with coffee and food and feel like you're in an old timey schoolhouse.
*Sibling Rivalry (Back Bay): the brothers Kincaid duel different riffs on a shared item (a protein or veg). Everything I've had there had been quite good, and they used to have a rockstar pastry chef.
*Tealuxe (Copley/Harvard): tea and crumpets.
*Pinocchio's (Harvard): zucchini sicilian pizza, i miss you so terribly much!
*East Coast Grille (Central): now that Green St. Grille has taken a turn for the worse, East Coast reigns supreme for Carribean food, plantain goodness and fish. It gets very crowded and takes no reservations.
*Ten Tables (Stonybrook): it has only ten tables. i've heard nothing but good things.
*Craigie Street (Harvard): snooty waiters, fine French food.
*Darwin's (Harvard): sandwiches + soups for the 02138 intellectual. The Hubbard Park remains my fave sandwich, and do get some cape cod potato chips on the side.
*Redbones (Davis): pulled chicken sandwich with sweet sauce + mild sauce, and corn fritters with the bar regulars, a pint of something from the thirty beer wheel...this place sustained me through grad school!
*Helmand (Lechmere): Afghan pumpkin, eggplant, breads and delicious sauces. Get the meat, if you want, but it really isn't necessary.

places to get ice cream, and coffee:
*Herrell's (Harvard): if they have bourbon vanilla or chocolate peppermint, do indulge. The others flavors are delicious also.
*Toscanini's (Central): more purist than Herrell's (the inspiration to Ben and Jerry), people quite like the hazelnut.
*Christina's (Central): They serve malted vanilla. What more can I say? Christina's supplies plenty of restaurants (including Harvest) with fine quality ice cream.
*Espresso Royale (Copley/Hynes): your best option on Newbury, imho.
*JP Licks (Hynes/Stonybrook/Davis): my favorite for a long time was the oatmeal cookie froyo with caramel sauce. delicious. One day I was lucky enough to sample noodle kugel ice cream.
*Diesel (Davis): grad school writing dates, bright colors, and sceney lesbians.
*Dunkies: an institution that must be honored.

etc:
*The Boston Public Library (Copley) has a beautiful courtyard, John Singer Sargent murals, and now you can eat there, too.
*The Public Gardens/Boston Common (Park/Boylston/Arlington): Make Way For Ducklings + The Trumpeter Swan = YA classics.
*Fenway Park (Fenway/Kenmore): needs no introduction or explanation. Believe.
*Mt. Auburn Cemetery/Forest Hills Cemetery: Frederic Law Olmstead's cities of the dead.
*Arnold Arboretum (Forest Hills): sometimes rambling, sometimes manicured, always lovely.
*the Longfellow House (Harvard): lovely colonial house, nice gardens, vintage poet.

There are entire cities left uncovered. Harvard as an Educational Institution/Necessary Evil, or any other place of education, is unmentioned. JFK library, ditto. I make no mention of Allston, Brighton, Brookline, Southie, Dot, Roxbury, Chinatown, the North End, the suburbs, the beaches, the shopping, or the nightlife, though Somerville, JP and the South End do receive scant mention.

A couple of final tips:
1. the drivers are crazy.
2. the pedestrians are crazy.
3. dunkies is frequently a navigational tool.
4. don't mock the accent.

i need something new to read

2009-02-19T10:14:00.003-08:00

...because I think I've worked my way through the following, not all of whom I completely love...or even like...but have indeed read.

Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Michelle Tea, Stacy D'Erasmo, Junot Diaz, Alison Bechdel, Adrian Tomine, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Carole Maso, Ali Liebegott, Scott Heim, TC Boyle, Charles Baxter, Michael Cunningham, AM Homes, Jeanette Winterson, David Sedaris, Amy Bloom, and most feted short story collections of the recent past.

I haven't read the new Jhumpa Lahiri. I haven't read much Steve Almond (somehow...I must never leave the house). I have decided on this long-awaited piece and this hole in my collection.

Currently reading some Dashiel Hammett. Probably not good for my general blend of cynicism and anxiety.

dee's mini organic doughnuts

2009-02-17T22:28:00.005-08:00

Has anyone tried Dee's minis?

I spotted them at Philz the other day and again today at the Andronico's. They're small cake doughnuts, about the size of a Dunkies munchkin. They have colorful glazes, and come in flavors like raspberry, maple and cinnamon sugar.

I will admit I haven't tried them yet, but I find them pretty curious. Mostly because

1. there's no vanilla flavor. or plain-glazed. nada.

2. they're 75 cents per mini doughnut. And I'm talkin Mini.

3. They only make vanilla(?)-flavored cake. No chocolate.

Is the overpriced mini item solely a San Francisco phenomenon? When I was in New York last I didn't see bite-sized anything, but out here it's mini doughnuts and mini cupcakes and tiny squares of poco dolce chocolate...

In other news, I was in Boulette's Larder today with a coffee in my hand and did not get kicked out! Lori Regis was right there schmoozing with someone, and the salesgirl listened cheerfully to my blathering about preserved lemons and agar...and they couldn't have been nicer. I guess some things do change.

overheard on the blogs

2009-02-11T23:36:00.004-08:00

Many writer types reacting to the news that HarperCollins is shutting its Collins divisions (mostly nonfiction/reference). Over here someone asked if publishing companies would approach congress for a bailout.

After hours editing widgets I'm not so amused by that notion as when I first found it, but...as much as I'm entirely over death-of-the-novel* conversations, it is the end of an era.

I wonder how many kids today grow up relating to the tactile scent of a book's pages or the smell of grimy newspaper ink on their hands. If they parse the weight of textbook paper versus cheap paperback.

*(see also death-of-fiction-in-general-and-the-short-story-in-particular)

If I believed that resistance was futile, I would stop.

snow falling on zebras

2009-02-06T19:37:00.004-08:00

I made these really fun doughnuts today.

Vanilla doughnut/ coconut glaze/ dark cocoa drizzle/ coconut flakes.

They did indeed look like snowy zebras.

The Internet is out again and I'm protesting by working on a story. Someone should unplug me more often.

I'm going to sausalito for the first time ever on Monday. I really should get out more

introducing SAVE Creative Writing

2009-02-03T22:01:00.001-08:00

How many people does it take to reach Anthony Bourdain?
One, if you're me and you know how to find him.

How many people does it take to reach America's writers? To be exact, the specific subset of writers that attended Vassar College?
I don't know. That's where you folk come in.
(FYI, Bourdain attended but did not graduate)

Currently, due to budget cuts, the creative writing program at Vassar is facing severe budget cuts. If passed they threaten to undermine the integrity of the creative writing program.

To follow the fight against these cuts and find out how you can help visit SAVE Creative Writing

sign of the times

2009-01-28T17:40:00.003-08:00

SFGate reports today that Hershey's is deciding to close the Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt plants and move all production to its PA factories. Having cooked with SB for over three years now I swear I can taste a difference in the stuff I was using when I first got out here and recent batches.

SB 70% is a very unique chocolate. I don't like chocolate desserts made exclusively with it, as it tends to be overwhelming, but it is very distinctive and very good. Or, I should say, Was.

for those interested in working with local chocolate, that cuts the option down to Guittard...which always tends to taste a little waxy to me, though can be quite fine in some things.

There are fine confectioners here...Recchiuti, Poco Dolce, Charles Chocolates to name a few. However, these companies do not focus on bar production but instead on treats, candies, truffles, etc.

Perhaps I should put on my SB t-shirt...yknow, the one that says Extra Bitter?

taza chocolate chip cookies

2009-01-27T22:07:00.003-08:00

Once, on a recent trip back east, I biked out through Cambridge, down by Lechmere, to just over the Somerville line. In a big brick warehouse, Taza chocolate was rumored to be some interesting, delicious local chocolate. I locked my bike up, went inside, and wandered around the warehouse unable to find my destination. Either Taza had stopped having an open factory where visitors could drop by, or I was missing something obvious. I could smell the chocolate, but I couldn't get there. With too many other things to do before leaving town, I got back on my bike and rode away.

So when I found a bar of Taza 70% organic stone ground at Zabar's the other week, I took it home. I was entirely surprised by the chocolate when I tried it. The 70% had a smoky, rich flavor. Whereas Valrhona Caraibe or Guanaja usually calls up fruity and smooth, and Scharffenberger an intense red wine note, this one reminded me more of a black tea. The flavor was delicious. The taste?

Grainy. Sugar crystals, I thought at first. Upon reading up on the company I found out they don't conche their chocolate for an intensity of flavor. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of this decision personally, mostly because it produces a chocolate that I don't really want to eat raw.

In order to get the most out of the Taza, I thought I'd make some basic chocolate chip cookies and melt the stubborn texture away. I made a simple chocolate pecan dough, chilled it, baked it, and was impressed at how the rich chocolate transformed a simple basic.

My main intent in writing this post was to meditate on what happens when you end up with something you don't quite love. Those perfect pears too mushy, too grainy? Did you try to buy out of season berries? Need to use something up before it goes bad? There are a lot, but a lot, of things that a good cook can make from one ingredient. I could have made a silky chocolate pudding, a rich hot cocoa with homemade marshmallows, or seriously special brownies. Pears can be poached or made into cobbler, and old poached pears can be cooked down to pear butter or pureed for a sorbet base. If you aren't quite happy with something take a minute to think what else you can make with it that you might enjoy better, or that might highlight the potential goodness of the thing.

I knew all along that inside of that bar, there was a delicious chocolate that I would enjoy.

Secondly...and take this to heart. Nothing will give you a better product than buying better ingredients in the first place. From salt to butter to chocolate, if you want flavor, you have to start with something that will give it to you.

candied yuzu peel

2009-01-08T19:19:00.003-08:00

I candied some yuzu today. There are still about 6 left and I'd like to make a yuzu-lemon marmalade for some cookies. But I ran out of sugar. Oops.

I was lucky enough to score the last bag of yuzu at the Berkeley Bowl.

I was disappointed on my last Bowl trip to notice a lot of out of season produce and non-healthy products. There are enough places to get Chilean cherries in this winter. Should that really be one of them?

one down one to go

2008-12-26T21:39:00.002-08:00

one holiday down, one more to go. today was not that bad, at least for me. i was on the dessert station, so while i could get some huge batches of cafe items ready to go (and did), my main responsibility was to prep the station and plate desserts. I worked my ass of for two days straight to ensure I wouldn't be screwed this morning, so I had relatively little to do for service...bake some cakes and tart tatins, respin my sorbets, bake tuiles and other cookies, make a couple of easy sauces. The most popular item of the day, and I have no idea why...coconut sorbet. The meyer lemon was fairly popular, too, but most of my tickets included some kind of ice cream and usually it was that one.

we're running out of the major component of two desserts, so it's time to get creative about changing them...soon-ish.

i'm not working new year's eve or new year's day....luck of the schedule but i'll take it.

lists.

2008-12-23T09:42:00.000-08:00

1.
persimmon budino
chocolate torte
spiced espresso truffles
cocoa nib iced milk
brown butter-chestnut filling
chestnut crepe batter/make crepes
sage sable breton
huckleberry sauce
frozen white chocolate
chocolate sformato
migniardise: orange cardamom truffles, marmalade financier, orange-rosemary pdf, amaretto macarons, chocolate fleur de sel cookies

2.
am bake off
focaccia
vacherin almonds
coffee ice cream base
vacherin meringues
mango & coconut tapioca pudding
chocolate pot de creme
b/o anise biscotti

3.
blossom bluff hachiya & fuyu persimmon
fhf quince
foraged huckleberries
pears
pink lady apples
meyer lemons
buddha's hand
kishu tangerines
satsuma mandarins
navel oranges
pomegranates
first crop walnuts
chestnuts
///

i've been hearing rumors

2008-12-18T22:53:00.003-08:00

I came across some disturbing rumors that my old college is going to make significant cute to its creative writing department. My first reaction was to google it to see if there was any truth behind the rumors and it appears there is. like every other school, vassar is losing endowment money due to the economy. (i'm sure even harvard is having to cut back, but hey, i'd probably endorse that). My second reaction was to email an old favorite professor, now co-chair of the english department, to see if he could tell me a bit of what is going on. Most of all I'm shocked that the English Dept. did not notify alumnae...at least, I am pretty certain they did not, though I do sometimes miss an email.

Vassar is the place that formed me as a writer. Not the school where I received my masters. Not the countless days and hours writing in cafes or with fellow writers or alone at home. Sure, all of it helps. All of it forms the writer and all of it feeds the writer.

I chose to attend Vassar because I wanted to go to a school with a strong focus on English and writing. I was a high school geek. I worked on the lit mag. In college I built strong relationships with several faculty members, and I began to take my craft seriously. From there my life followed on its plan: spend a year or so working, go somewhere and get an MFA. That is what I did, and though there is nothing more invigorating than talking about writing in a room full of writers, it does not pay the bills or change the oil in the car, so I found myself having to get a career. Hence the cooking gig.

I'm researching the truth behind these rumors in the hopes I'll be proven wrong, but I doubt it. Times are tough everywhere. Academics is a luxury lifestyle, wherein each generation creates the next generation so the academy can be self sustaining. The trouble with writing, though, is that the classroom isn't our only classroom. Every face, every darkened door, every half-heard conversation is our classroom and in order to contribute to the growth of ourselves or of the next generation we have to go off alone and discover what we know, what we can say, and how we can share it.

I'll be blogging on here and at Fringe on what I discover.

i heart david chang

2008-12-04T19:01:00.003-08:00

scoping out places to go in new york, and i see chang now has a bakery in his momofuku empire. cakes, shakes, cookes, pretty normal things, but his list of ice cream toppings?

brown butter solids

he's also got a cookie called compost cookie and a pie called crack pie...

anyone out there been to his bakery?

also, aside from old favorites doughnut plant (which is so close to il laboratorio del gelato i might as well show my mom), dean and deluca, broadway panhandler, and birdbath, where to go?

2008-12-03T11:34:00.004-08:00

i have a reservation at per se for my trip to nyc in january! there is a slight chance my mom will say she's not paying THAT much money to eat lunch, and we won't go after all, but i hope not because she basically said if i could get us a resy, we could go.

they were actually the sweetest, nicest people to talk to on the phone. the reservationist i got was so happy i lived in sf, which led to to confess, "yeah i work in the industry, actually at {the restaurant} and all you guys have been coming in lately, jonathan was in a while back, hollingsworth was just in, etc, etc"

they asked up front about any dietary restrictions, etc. i said we might get the vegetables menu, because we're both picky about meat, and that was it. it's great that they ask. i don't think they ask at my restaurant. some people overprepare and tell the reservationist, but then we get lactose-intolerant vegetarians who claim to be vegan and then ask to have the chocolate dessert with ice cream (dairy + eggs).

the big question, though...what am i gonna wear?

UPDATE: the mom says yes. i'm going to per se! ::does little dance around kitchen while banging out another round of marshmallows::

walking sleep

2008-12-01T22:35:00.000-08:00

so michael laiskonis just wrote

I've often said that the day you don't feel that pit in your stomach as you walk into work, that's the day to start looking for a new job.

and it seems that several of us are taking such stock lately.

where am i? what am i doing here? is this the right time? how exactly did i get here anyway? what can i do next? how could i have made this better? how can i make [this person] do [this necessary thing]? these are the questions that plague us while we dice, saute, roast, bake, hunt for the chinois.

is it best to cook wholly focused on that one thing. or five things, should you be capable of managing cookies and custards in the oven, a pot of dairy infusing and a caramel at the same time. {this of course implies that you have oven space and working burners for multiple projects, nevermind pots} when you are not focused you make mistakes. your pot of milk boils over and while cleaning up the spill you burn your tuiles in the oven. i find myself working with some people who can only do one thing at a time and it reminds me of when i used to work that way.

and i am so glad that i do not work that way any longer.
and i am so glad that i have the presence of mind to multitask and still hold it down (not only the what/where but the what/now).
and, yes, i still do stupid things but i admit them freely. today my pot of cream boiled over while I was organizing my jars for pot de cremes, and i was pissed that it boiled over, because i had been keeping my eye on it, but i had the presence of mind to taste the cream (was it scalded? did it taste burned in any way? no, so continue) and then measure it (7.5 cups is no longer 8 cups, so correct and proceed).

in a way i'm glad my cream boiled over a bit. i'm somehow in the position currently of trying to teach several people lots of things. it's challenging enough to be mindful of what their backgrounds all are and their skill sets, and then temper my tone or advice accordingly (like, please don't ruin that dessert for service, k thx). if i can see where i came from (yes and sometimes we need a reminder) then i can hopefully be compassionate with these people i am guiding.

because i want to be compassionate. underneath the crusty exterior. and it's hard when service is coming on or when someone commits to making a mistake and fesses up afterward (because there's that moment when you're looking your your mise, and you're thinking something isn't right, and you can decide to go ahead or you can decide to ask a question, and you don't wanna ask a question cause you made this yesterday and you've asked 20 questions today already, and so what are you sposed to do?).

it's hard when you want someone to tell you your impulse is right. it's hard when you have to tell someone their impulse is wrong, that you know they thought about it but they could have made a more informed choice. because you know they can't just think like you. because you know the reason they ask the 21st question is that they want to think like you. i've been the one so many times, saying but...but...but as if my logic, wrong though it be, is going to win me brownie points for having given a second's thought to the matter at hand.

i'm not saying i don't get it wrong any more. no, not at all. but i am glad to be where i am.

thanksgiving prep

2008-11-26T15:10:00.002-08:00

listening to selected shorts and spending the day off prepping for thanksgiving. What's on my list this year?

Cornbread for stuffing
Candied hazelnuts
Pumpkin clafouti
Homemade marshmallows
Sweet potato casserole
Tart do
Quince apple tart
Spiced cider zabaglione
Quince syrup redux
Mashed potatoes

Happy cooking to all

ganaches, may-november

2008-11-20T19:00:00.000-08:00

i remember the first time i was asked to make a ganache flavor for the handmolds we do at work. i perseverated over it. should i just make some basic ganache, a 1:1 part cream and chocolate emulsion? should i add some butter to enrich it and how much? what sorts of fillings did we do in culinary school? i dutifully looked through my notebooks, copied out a recipe for some earl grey ganache (we're not allowed to use in-house tea) and substituted chicory for a honey-chicory ganache. i keep track of what we do at work and developed the following list of ganaches for handmolds or for truffles that i have made over the last six months. of course i don't make all the ganache so this is merely a sample of what's been offered. i have always enjoyed the process--i usually like anything where i have an ounce of choice--but lately i've been getting tired of the process as i don't like to repeat something, though i do and have. we're pretty low on liquor options and don't necessarily get a lot of new spices, and certainly are not special ordering something only for this purpose. i was originally going to post this and ask for suggestions of new flavors. recently i found out we're cutting back on our chocolate migniardise selection (is it the economy? is it too time consuming? ). so i guess this is in remembrance of its frequency. unless otherwise noted, ganache was made with 62, 6 or 70% valrhona. jivara lactee or ivoire otherwise.

molasses-pecan
white chocolate nepotella
white chocolate lavender
espresso
salted almond
white chocolate cardamom rose
candied pistachio
milk chocolate rosemary
white chocolate pink peppercorn
rum
orange-lavender
hazelnut
malted milk chocolate
honey
honey-chicory
white chocolate vanilla-verbena
star anise
cinnamon
milk chocolate peanut butter
rum-ginger
cardamom
vanilla-coffee
vanilla-rum
amaretto
milk chocolate lavender
grapefruit lavender
chili orange
vanilla fleur de sel

mistakes

2008-11-09T22:19:00.003-08:00

i accidentally made granola bars today.

i accidentally made granola bars because i was mixing the granola dries with the melted butter/maple syrup in the hobart, because boss 2 prefers it that way rather than by hand. everything incorporated and then she told me to let it hang out, keep paddling. we were commiserating over the color of my meringues (still figuring out the new ovens at job 2,) when she all of a sudden yelled STOP. apparently we'd started creaming the melted butter and the brown sugar in the granola, in the process crushing the oat bits and making something too broken-down to be called granola.

i pouted. she laughed. they've actually been after us to make granola bars, she said. roll it out on sheet pans, we'll bake it. it'll be great, you'll see.

It Will Be Great Tonight When I'm Not Here Anymore, I said. Yeah I'll Laugh About It Then.

we didn't have oven space to bake them off till right before i left, so i'll see them in a couple days. it was that sort of a day. the sort of day when every diner decides to order the same dessert that you have, oh, eleven of, because you have thirteen ramekins all day. the sort of day when you're baking extra cookies in the middle of service, when you're peering at meringues that have spent all of ten minutes in the oven saying are they brown? do these looks brown to you? how could they, how could they possibly, the oven is BEYOND low it's basically OFF.

i ping pong between a restaurant with a weekly rotating menu and a new (like, bauer-spotting time) restaurant and so every day is a new calibration of what/where. it has been an interesting if thoroughly exhausting couple of weeks thus far.

things to look forward to:
doughnuts. soon-ish.
day off!
actually having time to go return my library books at the library
delicious banana bread for breakfast

peaceful protest to overturn prop 8

2008-11-07T21:40:00.003-08:00

it was not like this. there were certainly more than several hundred of us, and we were only blocking traffic insofar as we were continuing our legal protest down the street, from the civic center to the castro, and down to dolores park. see for yourself, if you'd like. along the way, people leaned out of houses to wave no on 8 signs, and of those stuck in traffic, several beeped in support or waved signs of their own.

we were of all ages, abilities, races, genders, identities. we were in drag and we were in work clothes. we texted, tweeted, snapped pictures, updated our facebook status, cheered, yelled, sang, marched, played brass instruments. you might have thought we were happy, oh yes, because we queers, we like to dance.

we weren't happy. having rights of yours stripped away is something we've all suffered through for the last eight years, and though our country voted for change, and our country said yes we can, we still bump up against others' discomfort at our lifestyle choice, or whatever they're calling it these days. i cried when obama was elected and i saw a democratic majority in congress, because i thought we finally were ready to take back our country and to finally end racial discrimination in all of its small, pervasive ways.

tonight we said it again, yes we can. yes we can, yes we will get there. we will get there because it is the right thing. we will get there through the hard work of changing people's minds. we will get there, one day. we will get there because we are not going away, and this is not going away, and even though we live in sf and can feel so snugly protected, we still have a lot of work to do.

start a conversation at work, if you're out at work. (if you're not out, why?) tell your friends, your roommates, your neighbors. tell them because they care about you. because you can't know who they'll tell in turn. tell them so that they can come along next time, because we can't do this alone. we need your support.

i am sure that everyone who voted yes on 8 knows a queer person, even if they're unaware that they actually do. how many votes could we have changed by letting them know their discrimination affects real people?

list

2008-11-01T20:10:00.003-07:00

financier batter
raspberry truffles
bake off custards
chocolate bread pudding
chocolate sformato
yogurt and pomegranate bombes
roasted pears
olive oil cake
cheesecakes
elderberry sorbet
orange-vanilla ice cream
banana ice cream
tart do
lemon verbena semifreddo

prop 8

2008-10-29T22:13:00.003-07:00

i'm nervous about prop 8. i think a lot of us are. there's a momentum in the air like the fog, with that same mysterious ebb and flow. i lull into not thinking about it, which is probably the worst, because those bigots out there are spending so much time and money thinking about it.

sure, i could say i don't ever envision myself getting married or that marriage doesn't mean the same thing to someone like me as it does to all those straight people undertaking that commitment, but who am i to presume to know what marriage means to any two people at any one point in time? maybe one day i'll wanna get married. maybe i'll decide instead i'd rather have some rad commitment ceremony in an exotic locale. maybe as we keep living our lives and acquiring kids and moving into your neighborhoods, they'll see we're not a threat.

it's easy to get comfortable with a lot of things (like compost, my fave) here in sf. it's easy to presume that everyone, but everyone, is comfortable with who you are. it's easy to think that the hard work is over. in a week i suppose we'll find out. how far we've come/how far we have yet to go. i hope for the best. really, i do.

2008-10-14T14:03:00.002-07:00

Making dinner tonight for some friends. I haven't cooked dinner in a couple of weeks and by that I mean something more elaborate than eggs and toast and more than a takeout meal eaten at an odd hour. I've been paging through the wonderful small mezze dishes in Claudia Roden's Arabesque and found a couple to try out...I'll be substituting squash for potato in the potato-tomato pancakes since we've got a squash st home. I'm also making up some goat cheese-black olive boreks, and if I've got the time am planning to make some apple-rosemary caramel ones with the extra phyllo, since we've still got a lot of apples. At the moment I'm in Peet's drinking Earl Grey Lavender tea and working on some writing, since my original plan to go writing in Hayes Valley got derailed by the bulge of library books in my bag. I'm in the middle of a lot of things right now, or at least it feels that way. I'd like to get back to blogging semi regularly, it's just that things have been hectic as usual. I believe we're also having bread pudding which I'm not making...for once I'm making dinner and not dessert. I'm finished procrastinatic. Back to writing.

review

2008-10-02T10:34:00.001-07:00

Review of Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse up here

canning sundays

2008-09-21T23:01:00.004-07:00

The last of the Apple Farm apples (and pears) made their way into a pear-apple chutney today after a lazy Sunday spent walking on Ocean Beach with the dogs.

Finally checked out my closest convenient local farmers market, on Divis near Alamo Square. It was tiny, but they did have some organic growers, a flower guy, some boutique olives and spreads, and a bread stand. I came home with some extremely aromatic basil, tomatoes, snapdragons and poblano peppers. The basil (and tomato) made their way into basil simple syrup and into bruschetta as part of an improptu dinner with chicken salad. As much as I adore the big markets, like Berkeley and the FPFM, lately there's a part of me that feels like I really need to get to know my community markets to the extent that my schedule allows. Sometimes I feel like certain growers get this huge rep around town cause their on everybody's menu and every time I automatically nab a peach from this guy or that guy, there's some newer farmer or equally worthy farmer getting ignored because his stuff isn't on the menu at Chez Panisse or wherever. And it's hard because there's so many great farmers, and I'm not about to trip over myself buying hard stone fruit from some random orchard just to go against the grain. There are always products not worth buying (and a particular example sticks heavy in my mind) from the most established and most obscure vendors. I am also ridiculously spoiled in getting my hands on excellent produce. I may not be able to make it to the FPFM Saturday market for some Knoll figs, but I'm eating the occasional fig at work...am I splitting hairs? Am I alone in this issue?

Anyway, after the market, and after the beach, and after a trillion loads of laundry, C convinced me we needed to make the chutney we'd discussed. So she peled and sliced apples and pears while I mised the brown sugar, garlic, lemon, ginger (fresh and crystallized) and golden raisins. Having never made chutney before we were going by a pretty basic recipe. When everything barely fit in the stockpot we added some of the Apple Farm's extremely potent cider vinegar, and a dash of water, and let it cook. We tasted it halfway through for seasoning and added a touch more vinegar and a couple handful more salt but otherwise it was delicious. When the chutney finally cooked down it was this amazing combination of caramelization-sugary and vinegar-spicy that I don't know I've ever appreciated in chutney when it's service temp. Pretty much the first thing I thought was, damn, this would be really good with apricots.

too many apples

2008-09-17T11:47:00.002-07:00

I have so many apples I just don't know what to do. They're a mixture of Gravensteins, Ashmead's Kernels, Pink Pearls and a couple other varieties, all from the Philo Apple Farm. We have already made two separate batches of applesauce. C showed me how she learned to do hers from her Polish relatives, by boiling the apples till tender, then draining and mashing them. At that point, you sugar, season and continue to reduce the sauce. We're planning a pierogi-making fest so we can eat the applesauce with something yummy, dreaming of crazy nontraditional pierogi fillings like caramelized onion-winter squash. Personally I think parsnips would be nice.

My next apple creation was a spiced sour cream cake with sauteed apples that's perfect for breakfast munching. Goodbye to another six or so apples.

That said the bottom drawer in our refrigerator is still packed with apples. We were thinking of making some chutney. I'm sure I could make a tart of pie or even some flaky turnovers.

It did occur to me yesterday that I could just eat the apples. As in, not cook them. Enjoy them raw. What at idea that would be.

mystery box

2008-08-29T01:05:00.003-07:00

someone sent me a box of fruit.

ripe cal red peaches and flavor king pluots from brentwood's frog hollow farm, a place i know very well. at first i thought it was from my old employers themselves...who else would send me such a gift?...or else from my mom, just being nice, or from my dad and stepmom thanking me for entertaining them on their visit. there was no card inside to clue me in. tomorrow i'll call up the farm and see if they can shed some light on it for me, but in the meantime...

here in california it's easy to play the ant. stone fruit season starts in what, may? continues through till october thereabout, at least september. when you get delicious fruit at work every day (and it's not convenient to your schedule to go to a farmers market), you snack on scraps of what you get at work and you use the fruit to make what is on your menu, and unless you are very diligent, that is about it. then the apples show up and, if you're me, you're kind of confused. like, it's apple season already? and there's only apples (pears, pomegranates, persimmons) to hold us til winter? in new england, where you don't get a good nine months of strawberries, everyone is anticipating the local harvest so much that in some ways it's easier to appreciate it. the peaches are here! this month! hurry, hurry...cause you know the cali peaches the store's been stocking all summer were picked way too early to ripen well should you decide to take them home.

this year for some reason my mom's been really awakened to local produce and what it means, tastewise. it's finally come together for her that when you buy something out of season, or when you buy something that's been trucked or flown up from south america or across this country, you are losing out on flavor for the nominal joy of having raspberries in your cereal. only they don't taste like what you remember a berry tasting like.

so in the meantime...maybe i'll take some peaches camping with me. maybe i'll can them in verbena butter, make a plum rose compote. i have been meaning to buy some cans and do some canning, especially with our yard tomatoes fast approaching. i have at last found one white peach worthy of eating. the snow king (ours are from blossom bluff). white peaches (white fruit in general) tend to be high in sugar and low in acid, which means that all you taste is sugar and texture, and any indigenous flavor is pretty much lost. these snow king have a subtle perfumy flavor that's really kind of nice. i thought of them immediately for desert candy's white peach cardamom conserves.

time to play grasshopper kids.

i also got another present today. a genuine pasta king pasta bracelet. oh no, not the one in sonoma. sf's very own bicycle-riding pasta king.

this is just to say

2008-08-25T22:46:00.003-07:00

I am entirely guilty of eating plum crisp for breakfast today. Made with delicate italian prune plums purchased from Blossom Bluff. The man at the market noted my beat-up arms and wanted to know, was I a cook? This of course led to an interesting conversation about where I work and what is going on there. Such a small town, this is. The fruit vendors try to engage you in gossip. Also at last week's market I picked up some of my favorite discovery from last year, Alfieri's Summer Royal grapes. Deliciousness. Of course, once I decide I can manage stopping by the Tuesday market once a week for some produce I'll want to eat and some reconnecting with my favorite farms...ye olde schedule changes again. I can still stop by in the early morning for a manageable load-up, I spose, and carry my goods with me to work. Or I can just start commuting outside the city Sundays to a non-SF market. I do have lots of choices, sometimes I just need to be reminded of that fact.

puttering

2008-08-21T12:56:00.002-07:00

I know that I haven't been posting. It would make me sad if I weren't so happy to keep my time to myself. We've been living in a state of permanent houseguests, some more and some less grateful and courteous, for at least three weeks although it feels like longer, since C's mom was out here for a week shortly before that. Our washing machine's been broken so dirty laundry is piled up everywhere, making the space seem smaller. I've been not very chatty on the phone with people, cause I have had no time to myself! Luckily it's almost over.

I've been slowly working on clearing up the garden for a fall planting of chard, brussels sprouts, carrots, beets, and the like. Meanwhile I've polished off the first arugula crop and should be able to get a second planting in. It's hard to want to garden when the fog swarms in and it feels like an east coast November, but I've got to get the seeds in the ground soon.

C and I, and maybe some friends, are going camping in the Anderson Valley over Labor Day. We're going to hit up The Apple Farm folks as well as the Navarro winery and the disc golf course at the Anderson Valley Brewing Co. Hopefully this time around Buster will be a better camper. I'm hoping it'll be warm up there. If anyone's got any other fabulous suggestions, we'll try to check them out, in between hiking and thrift store searching and campfire-making.

#300 /why oscar wao

2008-08-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

Trying to get back to the simple things in life now that my company's gone. Like cooking dinner at least once a week, calling up those I haven't seen in a long time, continuing to turn our Sunset house into a den of fabulous (or frivolous) decoration. And writing, and reading.

What I loved about Oscar Wao was that it was so different from Drown. Drown, though beautifully written, embraced at times a sort of ghetto chic perspective of difference. In writing that sometimes bordered on romanticism Diaz brought for slices of life (the Jersey/Washington Heights DR diaspora, the realities of growing up on food stamps not knowing your father, the clannish intensities of (im)migrant neighborhoods) that were, yes, missing from "contemporary fiction." Over and over, tough-boy narrator Yunior held forth that you could look through the window but you would not know, in a manuscript that held difference over assimilation or non-assimilation, in a way of speaking that made space for otherness/queerness/difference apart from (not of nor in).

Wao, though, is the nerd-chic fatboy younger brother of Drown-era Diaz. It's Diaz's Corrections, his Caramelo, his Middlesex. Wao takes on the language of RPGs and fantasy books, movies, D&D as much as it draws on Spanish-inflected English and Dominican history. The books is so round, and so real, that reading it I forgive the tired genre it stems from...the old family history stretching back in time, that so masculine snapshot-of-three-generations, this is the key, the thread, the connection. This sort of grand family planning seems to be the archetype of our time, that and memoir, and even David Sedaris bridges the gap (both archetypes! one book!) For as much as I love so many of those books I'm ready for something else to capture our collective literary imagination, but until it does, I'll hope it doesn't take 11 more years of nationwide literary-geek snickering til Diaz produces another piece, and I'm hoping that those of us on the margins will continue to take on the constructs of the center to break apart more open spaces.

where/what

2008-08-08T10:13:00.004-07:00

yes, it's true, I did take long disappearance from blogging. new and less desirable work schedule to acclimate to, family in town, getting newbies settled, etc. etc. I haven't checked my email or gotten any writing done for the better part of two weeks. bah.

Another garden bbq this weekend and my part will be, I think:
rancho gordo yellow eye beans

watermelon salad with garden cilantro, radishes and greens, red onion, balsamic redux. or something in that vein.

We're also having the infamous veggie kebabs, grilled corn, meat of some sort and goodness knows what else. And I think I'm being called on to make myself look pretty and go to the Presidio Social Club, and I must say, the menu they have on their website looks extremely undelicious. Although they do have mac n cheese. Which would of course then be what I would get.

Maryusa asked what I have been doing with myself and it's been pretty much this: watering the garden, painting the kitchen, entertaining various family and friends, working, making homemade marshmallows for the boys, cleaning, working my way through a stack on slightly overdue library books. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the parade of visitors seems to KEEP COMING as I've got a college friend and fellow ice cream addict flying into town for a wedding next week. dios mio!

keep my head down and work, keep my head down and write.

garden shots

2008-07-13T21:15:00.002-07:00

squash and blossoms, cherry tomatoes, first harvest of arugula and radishes.

blueberry jam

2008-07-06T20:23:00.003-07:00

That was the fun project for today. I'm not sure whether it was so satisfying to make because the color is really gorgeous, or because the texture is fun or just because blueberries are sentimental to me, but there you go.

I also processed some black raspberries for candy making, made nectarine and pluot sauces, did a sponge cake, semifreddo, made a ganache

(and it broke, but i now know how to fix it, which is very rewarding)

everpresent chocolate cookies and pastry cream, and prepped and organized lots of fruit.

we have a lot of currants. I am not sure what to do with them, but they are really exciting to look at.

True to form, I got black raspberry puree all over my coat as I tried to get it through the strainer. But at least tomorrow I can go in, make candy, and not get messy. There will be ice cream stuff to do, another cake to make, custards to prepare.

I always try to spend some extra time doing inventory on my first day back after a couple days off. Going through the ice cream bases, chocolate stock, nuts, fruits and doughs, because I know by now it's best to have a clear idea of what the week will look like.

chocolate work has me up at night

2008-07-02T22:29:00.003-07:00

when i am already tired. looking through my cookbooks for ideas, or possible answers to questions like why my hazelnut ganache broke today. or how to make a fruit flavored ganache that actually tastes like fruit. without setting it up with gelatin (and in that case is it still a ganache? what is it properly? trying to understand how, why, etc, remembering that sometimes chocolate breaks. and you can try it again. and you can put the pieces together. but in the meantime...fruit puree + ganache. nut paste + ganache. infusing a flavor into white ganache without having a carryover white chocolate taste, yet having it be stiff enough to set naturally. chocolate work is a headache. for me it isn't my favorite. but i would like to learn...if only to carry my own weight. i am given the opportunity to play around...but i do need the tools to get better, so what, who? who should i read? where should i search?

and how can you patent a fruit ganache?

harvest!

2008-06-29T21:50:00.002-07:00

my neighbor Aaron gave me handfuls of plums today. what to make, what to make...thinking of jams. i also know another plum tree to forage in the community garden so the plum-product will depend on how many plums i am able to harvest.

today i made grapefruit-mint candies...am sleepy.

fruit list

2008-06-24T21:34:00.002-07:00

sooo much:

white peaches
yellow peaches
apricots
pluots, 2 varieties
golden raspberries
red raspberries
strawberries
blueberries
fresh chamomile
fresh lavender
red currants
purple basil
lemon verbena
nepotella
spearmint
golden marjoram

it's going to be a long summer

2008-06-23T19:34:00.003-07:00

it's going to be a long summer.

i'm working a five-days-in-a-row schedule. with saturdays off! and nights! which is to say, strange.

it's cool today but it's been hot and the garden has been wilty. the tomatoes flowers are ready to burst into lil tomatoes. the lettuce is loving the cool and is starting to grow.

i've spent an hour on each of the last two days trying to get the damn taylor at work to, like, work. i'll spin a base, ten try to rinse out the machine and it won't turn back on. there's no manual, of course. i took it apart 4 or 5 times. rinsed and cleaned every part of it. made sure the inside wasn't icy, or cold. some time later, say about an hour, the taylor will decide to work again. i'm not sure if there's some little thing i'm not doing right (which wouldn't make a lot of sense, but still could be) or if there is something broken with it.

i had a bonfire until 2 the other morning with the upstairs neighbors and the boys from the band, and c. crispy-toasted marshmallows, beers, and the dogs running around underfoot. too little sleep after a long hot day. it's going to be a long summer.

the kitchen was so hot. cooler, now. the freezer broke, was down for a day, and is fixed. more things are changing on the menu and we almost ran out of peaches today. i'm not sure when specifically the menu is changing which leads me to wonder what to make/not make tomorrow. but i should eat. and get things done. the garden is watered. the sunset's fogged in.

conversations with cooks

2008-06-21T19:37:00.003-07:00

The conversations we have with one another can be strange, surface-seeming at first. To play the game usually you have to find out where someone has worked, who they've worked with, and if you know people in that city it becomes the game of who-and-what you know. I spent some time last week in Boston having lunch at a server friend's new restaurant, and when his chef and sous chef came out to chat us up, we fell into cook talk. Where you've worked. How hard you've worked. Getting out of the hotels. It's a shorthand banter. I asked the sous chef where they got their fish from, and he started complaining about the deliveries being inconsistent. Same Thing With Our Egg Guy, I commiserated. He Can't Commit To A Number Of Cases. You shrug; what do you do? What can you do? I asked him about farm raised or wild, we discussed salmon.

When regular people find out I'm a cook, the questions tend to fall along a couple lines. They go for the how-did-you-get-into-THAT? tact, especially if they know I'm a writer with a masters degree. Or the cool-where-do-you-work (oh-i've-never-heard-of-it)? Then there's the what's-your-specialty? question. It gets interesting when people ask you what you make, because a lot of the time when I answer them directly (brown butter sponge cake, coffee pastry cream, cardamom ice cream) I am fairly certain they have no idea what the process involves. I can try to talk about what it's like to roll truffles between your hot hands while trying not to get cocoa powder everywhere to melt the chocolate. Or what it feels like to stand next to a hot stove in the unexpected heat wave drinking water all day long yet always needing more. Or what it feels like to shape fifteen loaves of bread quickly, so some brunch cook can have the space next to you, and then later to take them out of the oven with the pizza paddle and pile them up strategically so they don't fall. But I'm never really sure what information gets translated. I think part of the appeal of food television cooking shows is that it always looks easy...or at least manageable. Do you need the visuals to understand cooking? Or if I describe the process of making anglaise for ice cream base what do you take away from it? Are desserts less approachable than savory food? How does food media and food writing affect the conversations cooks have with one another and with others?

doughnut plant, revisited

2008-06-18T12:47:00.001-07:00

artisinal doughnuts, anyone?

all fogged in

2008-06-03T20:26:00.004-07:00

The plants are still alive. The nasturtiums decided to poke their head out of the ground today in response to my massive watering last night. The herbs are the only things not responding to the garden, which leaves us with a future harvest of:

arugula
lettuce, two kinds
radishes
cherry tomatoes
other assorted tomatoes of which I am not certain
crookneck yellow squash
cucumbers, maybe
sunflowers
jalapenos

There's also blackberries and a mysterious fruit tree in the backyard. Hmph. Ahhh, research reveals it to be a quince tree.

I made a delicious apricot compote tonight to eat over ice cream, though it'd go really well with biscuits and whipped cream as a shortcake. But there are limits to the amount of cooking I'm in the mood for right now, and I also made dinner.

list

2008-05-30T19:10:00.002-07:00

almond tuile
chamomile panna cotta
pit cherries
roll truffles
bake cookies
shape cookies
SS
process strawberry sorbet
pain perdu custard base
salted caramel anglaise
toasted coconut pastry cream
pink grapefruit pate de fruit
peach prep
.

A couple days ago I saw a half-blind man sharpening knives out of the back of a rusted Chevy truck on 9th Ave. It was a fabulous sight, the sort of thing that makes you stop and stare and stare again. He had a wet stone. He worked fast. It's such an improbable, interesting thing (like so much of this city) and I like to think about him driving around the city to the back doors of various restaurants, one tiny part of this big business.

where i'm going/where i've been

2008-05-23T08:36:00.002-07:00

bbq at the house, bonfire at the beach.
aziza, anchor and hope.
north beach, ocean beach.
the lex.
hot springs.
over the golden gate, north on 101.
the east bay.
the east coast.

the herbs have started growing now. so far we have arugula, two kinds of lettuce, radishes, summer squash, tomatoes, jalapenos, mint, tarragon, chamomile, basil, carrots, wildflowers, and unlucky watermelon. i should probably go water it soon. it's nice having this huge yard, having a garden again, although i am surprised every day i wake up and it's all still there and hasn't died somehow overnight. i don't think i have actually grown anything from seed before, except for maybe lettuce.

in praise of tuesday

2008-05-10T20:49:00.002-07:00

would you believe it if I said I had beautiful chocolate handwriting today?

It's almost Tuesday again and I'm excited again. Tuesday is my favorite day now. It's routine in the best ways...I am using the best products. I am working in all the kinds of ways I need/want to be working. I strive to work better, faster, cleaner, more productively. and don't think of taking shortcuts. I have one day a week to carry me through the rest. But it won't always be like this. Soon, soon enough I hope, things will be better.

I mean, cmon, I busted out that handwriting. It's only a matter of time.

potential

2008-05-07T22:37:00.002-07:00

It's going to be a challenge to turn the yard into a *nice* yard but it's got tons of potential. I bought a scuffle hoe today and it made me really, really happy. I cleared out two of the raised beds we have (yeah, we've got a bunch of raised beds. and a lot of direct and indirect light.) It took a lot of work but they're finally down to earth, and I watered and turned over the soil.

We've got berry bushes, a charcoal grill, a smoker, and some type of wild onion. As far as what to actually plant, I'm still figuring it out. I'm used to the east coast, when things would just be getting in the ground right about now. As is, we're behind, but should still hope for some sort of harvest. I'm really happy with the new place, even if it is a lot of raw materials that need some good care.

the ice cream game

2008-04-28T08:24:00.002-07:00

It's sort of my new favorite thing to do. At least at 1:30 in the morning when I know I should be sleeping. It's easy. What flavor are you? What flavor are your friends? Are you any of the following: vanilla, meyer lemon, malted vanilla, brandied cherry, rocky road, rose, cookies n cream, honey lavender, pink peppercorn, plum sorbet, coffee chicory, maple walnut, irish stout? Do you get to be a flavor that you like? If you don't like the flavor that you are what does that mean?

Last night was very interesting. Went to Medjool. More later, perhaps. I'm so so so tired.

where i've been lately

2008-04-22T22:00:00.002-07:00

making chocolate cake. like, lots of chocolate cake. meh.
plating. working on consistency of portion size. saucing plates, wiping plates, etc.
hulling flats of strawberries.
crackin eggs. so many eggs. today i found three sets of double-yolked eggs, and i figured maybe my luck was changing, except we make our own luck most of the time anyway.
chopping things-fruits, nuts, chocolate.
i've been spending lots of time in strange kitchens and it's giving me an interesting perspective on the way i've been taught to work/am bring taught to work/whatever.

CH rant

2008-04-14T09:35:00.005-07:00

is this why pastry chefs get the shaft? In a long review of Epic Roasthouse the original chowhound poster can only describe the dessert in the most vague terms--a butter cake, with caramel sauce. Apparently the dessert was delicious, and its taste still in the poster's mind days later, which is the goal, right, in preparing delicious desserts, but the level of description brought to the other courses was utterly lacking with respect to the last course.

Dessert. Really not an afterthought for some of us out there.

Searching around for info on the "butter cake" I find it's an almond brown butter cake with toffee sauce and blood orange curd. Their desserts actually seem quite pricy for the number of components on the plate!

What is the contract between sweet chef and sweet eater? Do we owe them better food, more diverse food, something more than warm chocolate cake and vanilla creme brulee? Do they owe us more understanding of the tricks up our sleeves, the various items of our trade, the difference between a sponge cake and a butter cake, a creme brulee and a pot de creme and a panna cotta? When will we get the same level of rapt prose discussing our endeavors as that given to any number of garde manger items, main dishes, etc?

here

2008-04-13T21:29:00.004-07:00

I've got a lot on my mind. Working on a couple posts, writing-wise, cause I've been doing a lot of reading (and writing) of late. It's been a mostly fun weekend of dancing, beers, running into people randomly in these city streets....which makes me feel like I've been here for some time and know people, which in itself is a strange feeling.

I went back to Hard Knox last night cause I was totally craving some fried chicken, and it was pretty good (not as good as this stuff, but you can't have it all). On my original Hard Knox trip I was so saddened by the excessive use of white pepper in the mashed potatoes, and I think I was tasting a lot of it on the chicken, too. White pepper is just awful in my opinion. Blech. Even a tiny bit will ruin the taste for me. Black pepper, though? Unscrew the cap and pass it over! At Hard Knox you get three pieces of fried chicken and two sides for nine bucks, and this time I went with the mac n cheese and french fries.

There was something about the whole night that made me want to junk it all behind and head off to the south. Hit up Hot Springs, Memphis, Nashville, Tuscaloosa. Drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway and stop to wink at Asheville, again, dip toes in my slow and sultry city of birth, turn around and cruise through dead St. Louis and back to where it all began (improbably): Salina, Kansas and my fried chicken OBSESSION. It was hot and crowded in Hard Knox despite the ceiling fans. The tin shack decor only a simulacra in SF. Despite my longings the fried chicken was really yummy and I'm glad I gave Hard Knox a second try because I can have a little more balanced opinion of it.

smells like fire

2008-04-08T20:05:00.003-07:00

A weekend (more or less) of bbqs and birthdays.

First with work people/new friends. With absolutely tons of food (burgers, chicken, kebabs, chips n salsa n guac, pasta salad, rice n beans) and a delicious enormous birthday cake, a sunny afternoon, lots of beer and good conversation and marshmallow madness.

Then with old friends and wood foraged from John McLaren park and a giant fire in a backyard fire pit.

Sporadic conversation but mostly silence, in the way that things settle between people who have known one another for a long time and have complicated histories. No food except for meat and soda, which I guess is what happens when you let the boy plan the bbq.

This morning we took Jes back to the FPFM for one last trip (kumquats, strawberries, dried kiwi, dried hachiya persimmon) and now she is almost home, and though she admits that California has some nice things I know she is glad to be there.

un-chocolate?

2008-04-04T22:30:00.003-07:00

I am really curious how you can have a "chocolate" flavor of something that tastes absolutely nothing like actual chocolate. This is something I haven't experienced in my life until tonight. Like...

a brownie that tastes nothing like chocolate.
hot fudge that tastes 2% like chocolate.
chocolate ice cream that tastes nothing, but nothing, like chocolate.

See, tonight I went to Maggie Mudd for an enormous banana split brownie sundae with caramel and hot fudge. I shared it with a friend. We got three flavors of ice cream-espresso, pecan praline (which come to think of it had no nuts, hmm) and chocolate. The chocolate was incredibly dark, more the color of chocolate sorbet than actual ice cream. All the ice creams were in general entirely too sweet, which I'd suspected they might be from what I'd had there before. What baffled me most about the whole experience was the utter lack of chocolate flavor of any kind. When I asked the scooper kids what was in the chocolate flavor, they said it was "some kind of chocolate chips and cocoa powder." I'm gonna try to find out, cause it was completely bizarre. Since they do a lot of dairy-free products I'm wondering if they don't use actual chocolate at all in any of their products.

Enough complaining. In the morning one of my best friends ever comes to town. I am going to take her to the farmer's market, because she is a farmer, and I am really curious to hear what her take will be on the FPFM.

the paco jet

2008-04-04T00:39:00.002-07:00

is it overrated? is it wonderful? I've had a couple conversations recently about this thing and, for me, I kinda have a hard time respecting it...

At Oleana, Maura had a pacojet because chef Ana saw one on her kitchen tour of WD-50, I think it was, and determined they needed to get one. She used it for sorbet, but spun her ice creams upstairs in the office, in this old and crotchety machine they got from Toscanini's when they first opened.

{this, in itself, is commentary enough on the boston scene...everybody knows everybody else, and they are generally sort of helpful in a noncompetitive way....like, say, when you're deciding to open a bakery, too, why not get information from the owner of the (arguably) most successful bakery in town? the sf scene is, shall we say, different.}

Maura was particular about using the pacojet only for sorbets, but was vague as to the reason why. I next encountered the pacojet on a trail back in September, where I had to re-spin all the ice creams for service and was slightly terrified I'd break the thing.

I do hear that by using a pacojet for ice creams, you've got to change the nature of your base and stabilize the fuck out of it. Which feels intrinsically wrong to me. Not to mention that the cannisters are so damn small (and kinda quenelle-unfriendly, I'd say).

But then that just raises another question. What's the best quantity to produce ice cream in, for a restaurant setting. At Sonsie we'd spin about 6 quarts in some tiny ic maker with a continuous freeze chamber. So all day it'd be spin the ice cream, keep checking on it...bust out other stuff....check the ice cream, spin more ice cream...and by the end of the day we'd have gone through the batch of base. Now we spin probably the same amount, 4-6 quarts I'd say, and that goes into 2 or 3 containers and takes not-very-long to spin. and generally gets used up I'd say in about 2 weeks' time, maybe more. Hard to say.

And that just brings up another question. How does the freezer affect taste? The constant tempering and re-tempering, does it affect the quality of the ice cream? After a week or after a month? I taste all our ice creams fairly often (if not daily) because I'll use any excuse to eat ice cream and I notice sometimes the texture is different to work with/quenelle. But not the taste.

It's sort of hard to meditate on ice cream and not be able to eat some right then and there. {I have, literally, NO FOOD, in my house. like, coffee beans and half a lemon.} Perhaps tomorrow after I look at yet another apartment, I shall take myself to Maggie Mudd.

reading: amy bloom, away

2008-03-30T21:06:00.003-07:00

I've been a big Amy Bloom fan for a while, ever since Love Invents Us. She writes mostly contemporary fiction (novels, short stories) and always features queer characters of some sort in her writing, which is something I always find really interesting. But I wasn't very excited to read Away, a novel set in 1920s America chronicling a Russian Jew searching for her long-last daughter via an overland journey from New York to Siberia. Originally it was Bloom's prose more than the story that won me over...the story seemed like a mishmash of all the other narratives of displacement, rootlessness. The plucky female heroine immigrant road trip, or at least that's how the logline for the movie would read.

I read the book in a day...can't remember the last time I did that. I had two MUNI rides to get started, and stayed up late turning the pages. The details were vivid, sharp, unique. There was the requisite backstory (think Beloved, think Lipshitz Six), a horror story of violence, and that threaded repeatedly through the book.

What turned me off from the book was Bloom's habit of flashing forward. Since the book is a road narrative, the main character leaves every character she encounters, and all those characters give her something (physical or psychic, tangible or immaterial) to push her on her journey...and each time the MC leaves, Bloom offers a paragraph summary of where that person ends up. This is how he dies, or lives, this is where she goes. It's cute...it's the gratification of the reader impulse to "know where" the secondary characters end up, because they/we have come to care about these characters. But it gets old. It gets annoying. Especially as the book nears to a close.

I think it's in part the gimmicks of omniscience that turn me off of third person fiction. The author's tidy tricks. Life is much messier than that. In reality, those characters fade away. It's interesting to think about the novel's weak points in relation to my own work.

I've been writing a lot, especially on MUNI...put on the ipod and go. It feels really good. I'm writing a lot about food and it allows me a place to push against things, think things over.