jam-time!

I figured out what I want to do with those pluot-plums in the freezer, and the wad of rose petals I ganked from the Albany shoreline trail and my old Fruitvale house. Plum-rose jam!

I haven't made jam in a long time, not since culinary school when we made buckets of jam, any and all flavors. Some of them are still sitting around my Somerville house. Some were given away as presents. Not sure when I will get around to this jam, but likely I'll try to get a sourdough starter going so that my the time I'm jammed up there will be good toast. I am such a bread-brat these days; I only eat Acme.

My favorite jam excursion is from my days on the farm, when I went across the river to my favorite farmer EVER's house and we had gallons of strawberries from the PFP and we made jam all day long, some with pectin and some without. I'm sure we talked about love, and why we love the wrong people or love too soon, too long, or without giving away all of ourselves. But now I only remember the jam.

I've got three fresh burns from last week as a reminder not to work distracted, and worked distracted all day.


I just got to say to a friend Autumn leaves and apples!

This is why I'm going to Boston in October (and hopefully NYC, the city I love to hate, as well). I make up little lists that go something like apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apples, ICA, Oleana, East Coast Grill, Lydia Shire stories, Herrell's, Harvard square, crunch of leaves
or
finding the Doughnut Plant for real, McNulty's, Bklyn, Grand Central, the 6 train, my two favorite places on Broadway ever, will I ever eat at Gramercy Tavern, I could go to Babbo, maybe I'll go be a line cook like Bill Buford, still haven't been to Cafe Lalo, or the Cloisters, Spuyten Duyvil, did I really ever live here.

God I love apples and I'm so nervous they won't have my apples here.

Thinking of doing utterly crazy things, specifically two, but they are secrets.


No more cooking with herbs. Get over this lavender, rose geranium, lemon verbena, slight thyme kick. Find something else and it better not be a spice.

Ai, forgot to make Chez Panisse reservations. I'm gong to have to put Chez Panisse in my cell phone and that is kind of sad. Determined also to go to another fine restaurant while Leah's here...Where I have been in this town: A16, Delfina, Frisson, Jardiniere.

Sometimes the recipe finds you and sometimes you find it...

I never liked bread pudding except for the Figs' version, until I tried the brown butter bread pudding at Oleana, because Maura made me. She always persisted in asking me how I knew I didn't like something, and most of the time she succeeded in changing my mind.

She gave me that recipe and any other I cared to take, and I took many. And now that I know how it works, and why I like it, I've brought it here in adapted form. Vanilla custard bread pudding with cherries and peaches. The Acme pain de mie performs well. It's got the lightness characteristic of Maura's BP, but a summery taste. It's mellow but addictive, and if you don't like bread pudding, well, you should come try it.

I used to know the Sonsie recipe for chocolate bread pudding. Their hallmark. You'd see ads for Sonsie in the local papers and they'd feature the bread pudding with chocolate drizzle. Whose recipe was that? Chef Bill's? Not Michael's. The bread was Biba's biga. I once knew how many quarts of cream and cups of milk to how much chocolate. I finally mastered that recipe, but I never liked it, so I didn't try to take it with me. I knew it wouldn't have meant anything.

I made shortcakes today. Emily Luchetti's recipe. I don't like the farm's version, which uses hard-cooked egg yolks (just for texture? or is there some other purpose), and yields grainy, crumbly biscuits short on taste. I do enjoy using the farm's cream scones as shortcake biscuits, however. Tomorrow I'll bake them, and evaluate.

I'm on a quest now with the chocolate cherry cake. When I first started this job, I was working with a lot of David Lebovitz recipes, because he was someone my boss and I both admired, and because I wanted to start out small. Figure out what stock we had, what had been done before, ease into the role of being in charge so if things didn't go well, it wasn't entirely my idea (yeah, that's why I'm reluctant to actually call myself the pastry chef, see. And what I discovered in working with a bunch of recipes from Ripe For Dessertand a couple from Room For Dessert was that I found David's ideas to be really inspiring and accessible. It's sort of like reading an author's oeuvre. As I recently discovered, though Mary Gaitskill has some devastatingly brilliant short stories, she can't sustain a novel-length narrative and the two I've read seem to have the same plot (codependent relationship between two women, one ugly and one sexy)... But I was never satisfied with the results of my recipes...Bread Pudding with Pears, Cherries and Chocolate (custard too watery). Orange Poppyseed Cookies (good but got tired of them). Orbit Cake. (that was good). Chocolate Cherry Cakes (Pack a punch, too dense, fudgy, liquidy, but tasty). Finanicers (not as good as Cheffy's). Upside Down Cakes (strange texture). So today I went off-roading, freestyling on the cherry cakes that sold so well last week and that I do like, in principle. I took a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe from epicurious (if I remember the Sonsie proportions I would've done that, but oh well) and folded in some candied cherries and cherry syrup. The end result is, after banging around SF in my bag all day and making it home to Fruitvale, we got a crumbly cake that tasted good, though the cherries were more tough to chew this time around). Better, yes. My recipe, not yet.

Sometimes it finds you. The bread pudding from Oleana. If you ask me to, I'll make you another sort of bread pudding, but it won't be what I want to do at all. My manager told me the other day I could make bread pudding but I'd have to make a fruit sauce to go with it. ?That was how the farm served theirs. I'm not doing thatI said. I'm very particular about my bread pudding.

Learning from others, and learning from myself. It's always o much easier when someone else can show you the way. Let you in on their way, their secrets. But unless you've tried what you can find out there, unless you've gone to the sources you know and trust, how do you really know what you like, and how can you effect change when it is required?

yes, those are checks!

Walking past this thrift store tonight on the neverending apartment hunt, I found a male mannequin dressed in a blue vest and the regulation houndstooth. When i saw the checks I thought a uniform store, maybe, so maybe I could get new duds, but it was no such thing. I would seriously love to see some dude sporting the checks as part of a fashionable ensemble. I do, weirdy enough though, see many uniformed chefs swarming around the Civic Center BART. 4 total in a week. What do they do there? Will they take me with them in my baker-regulation jeans and dirty black clogs?

Today at Frog Hollow we scooped free samples of cherry granita, and I told them I'd sell it at Market if they got me an ice cream cart. Actually, my first suggestion was that they approach Ciao Bella about carrying granita +/or sorbet under the Frog Hollow name. There isn't enough collaboration in the FB and I think it could do better that way. Of course, I did almost deck my supervisor when she suggested we serve ice cream every week, but before I had to grit my teeth and explain how I wasn't going to be able to bake if I was spending Saturdays scooping, she reassured me it wouldn't be my job.

I made custard for bread pudding today, and vanilla simple syrup to lighten it. I bought pan de mie from Acme

Amazing how much easier it is to make bread pudding when you're not dealing with a custard base of 8 quarts cream, 2 c. milk, 90 yolks plus chocolate, making 96 servings at a time. Considering a peach leaf bavarian with peach gelee and peach compote. But the goal for tomorrow is pared down, nothing to finish or Saturday. Simplicity. I am not going to worry about not having enough, because I really can't count on finishing things on Saturday anymore. I'm going minimal for a few weeks, at least to figure out the rhythm of market days now that there's actually fruit.

I'm nervous about the bread pudding. I want it to be creamy, vanilla-laden, tossed with cherries and manybe something else. But I so rarely like bread pudding. In fact there are two I like: the brown butter milk jam + mulberry concoction from Oleana, which should one day appear in a national foodie magazine or else Sara Moulton's cookbook, and the white chocolate challah from Figs, even though I'm not into Todd English. And I know that it will be fine--really good, in fact--whether or not I like it, but I so want to like it.