It wasn't strawberries this year that made me kick-start giddy into spring. It was rhubarb. We were tasked to come up with a dessert special, maybe a crisp, and suitable ice cream was made. We all brought cookbooks...rhubarb the great unknown, the pinkish vegetable, the first blush of spring. I was the only one who'd used it before.
I had never thought to peel rhubarb before but my coworker (who must've read it somewhere) told me to do so, and I had another stupid moment as I chopped the peeled rhubarb, a body memory return to last spring and the mountains of rhubarb I used for crisps and whatnot at Frog Hollow. The slices would always stick together by this fibrous membrane, and I'd curse it out and hand-separate them (or not, mood depending). But it never, ever, occurred to me to peel the thing. Genius.
So it was the body memory that got me, and then the smell. A rough earthy smell, a green smell. Not a perfume, nothing sexy. A smell of spring and beginning. It took me back to the Oakland days, to when I knew nothing and no one here. To how great it felt to finally be on my own in a kitchen and playing with whatever produce was on hand, plus the flip side of that, ignorance, the thousands of unanswered questions and uncertainties and things-left-to-learn.
Rhubarb...it smelled so new again. And like a thousand old things I'd left behind.
Maybe because of the rhubarb, maybe not, but the rest of the night was great. I was working both stations and getting enough garde manger tickets that the board was getting filled up and I needed to work quick and clean and wipe...and when the intermittent pastry ticket it was time to turn around and tend to the cakes, custards, sauces. We had a good number of dessert sales, too, and though I gave my coworker a 20 minute shot at the station because she missed it (and went off to consolidate walk-in stuffs), on the whole I was into service and had a really good rhythm going.
The whole night was like a gift. A reminder of what I am here for. I love working with food. I love the excitement and possibilities of a new dish. Especially a dish like crisp is so fraught with memories for me. I thought back to all the FH crisps that were too soggy or too stiff, the parade of peach and nectarine varietals, the experience of making 9 months' worth of crisp and having to guess the right amount of starch to balance out the liquid from the fruit. I love my coworkers. It feels like we've all been here for so long, but really it's been the blink of an eye. In September, I stood in the Oleana kitchen nervous to go back to SF and start a restaurant job with serious people and Maura said to me that all restaurants weren't like the ones I'd worked in. She promised me there were good restaurants and good people, and when you see it? It's seductive. You can try to explain it to the other people in your life, those who aren't in the industry, but they won't get it.
Showing posts with label body memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label body memory. Show all posts
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
mixed messages
We lose the scrap of paper on which we wrote down the phone number. We lose the phone or it breaks. If I ever had your phone number, I've lost it (again) because my phone broke (again). The text message fails to send the words we write but do not say, the invitation is obscured, the blog post deleted. We try to manage our communication but sometimes it balks at us, makes us human only. Sometimes we are out of touch with what we mean to say/what we are actually saying/what they are actually hearing. And then what, what next?
Oh wait I'm pluralizing again, how selfish of me.
It's an emotional thing for me, being in touch with people. Now when someone texts or calls, I get to know them once again. You are not lost to me is what this says. You are still here. Some people I know I will lose. Those who have no email. Those who know no one else I know, who are outside the chain. If I ever had your phone number and you are reading this, take a second to send it to me again.
At work yesterday, I rolled the better part of 150 phyllo pastries. After a while, whenever I stopped (to get another half-cup of coffee, or to melt more butter, or to refill my pastry bag), my mind kept trying to roll phyllo. When you do something like that for so long it seems like it is all you do or ever could do. Like piping rosettes onto cupcakes with a pastry bag....Do you stay connected to it? Think about how even though this is the 110th pastry you've rolled it's someone's first experience of this dessert, and so it needs to look just as good as if not better than your 17th pastry? Or do you shut down your mind, not think just act? Become the machine that moves phyllo from spot a to spot b, butters the phyllo, sugars and repeats, pipes, butters, rolls, repeats? My boss wants me to stop thinking. Focus on the series of movements that make up a task, focus on doing them cleanly, fluidly. It seems like it's not hard for other people but it's hard for me.
Oh wait I'm pluralizing again, how selfish of me.
It's an emotional thing for me, being in touch with people. Now when someone texts or calls, I get to know them once again. You are not lost to me is what this says. You are still here. Some people I know I will lose. Those who have no email. Those who know no one else I know, who are outside the chain. If I ever had your phone number and you are reading this, take a second to send it to me again.
At work yesterday, I rolled the better part of 150 phyllo pastries. After a while, whenever I stopped (to get another half-cup of coffee, or to melt more butter, or to refill my pastry bag), my mind kept trying to roll phyllo. When you do something like that for so long it seems like it is all you do or ever could do. Like piping rosettes onto cupcakes with a pastry bag....Do you stay connected to it? Think about how even though this is the 110th pastry you've rolled it's someone's first experience of this dessert, and so it needs to look just as good as if not better than your 17th pastry? Or do you shut down your mind, not think just act? Become the machine that moves phyllo from spot a to spot b, butters the phyllo, sugars and repeats, pipes, butters, rolls, repeats? My boss wants me to stop thinking. Focus on the series of movements that make up a task, focus on doing them cleanly, fluidly. It seems like it's not hard for other people but it's hard for me.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
the girls do it better than the boys
Bread, that is. Some lonely like cook wandered into our kitchen a couple days ago to use the big mixer, and I'm not sure what he did (or didn't do, more appropriately), but all of a sudden he was shoved aside and my boss was coddling his bread dough.
There was no salt, for one. So while she explained to him about the importance of salt, what salt's role is in dough, she finessed the right amounts of water and flour. He left. He didn't come back for a while, so she continued, taking the dough out of the mixer, kneading it into a bowl, whispering sweet nothings into its yeasty lil ear. One of the sous chefs came by and was like We're Supposed To Get It Like A Windowpane, Huh? That's What You're Doing?
Short answer, yeah.
As I was hastening to get my second pot of goodness on the stove, I saw how the sous chef was shaping the bread. I stopped. I've got about nine months of day to day bread experience-rolls, focaccia, cornbread, crackers, light wheat, potato bread, biscuits, pizza dough-on my resume. And he was treating the bread like he was a kid playing bouncy ball by himself and he had all day to shape those out-in-the-air lil rounds as if they weren't gonna get crusty. I planted myself next to the prep table, picked up a round of dough. Spun it in one hand, feeling the contours of the dough ride up against my fingers and tighten. Like A Baby's Bottom, my old boss used to say. It's a body memory.
Like This, I said. Feel This. Now Feel Yours. His were flabby. We loved this dough into existence for him and I was not gonna let him do the next step without giving him something to aim for. I barely had time for a mini explanation before my arms were overloaded with dairy and I was back to work.
There's this chiboust I've been making every day at the new job. Ostensibly it begins as a pastry cream, but all the body memories of pastry cream are stripped form it and the project's turned inside out. Yolks and flours, flavorings are whisked into hot milk and the entire thing is cooked on the stove, on extremely low heat.
But mostly it's being whisked like you're Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman is after you. Did You Break A Sweat? my boss asked the first time I made it. Well You're Not Whisking Hard Enough.
if you can talk you're not whisking hard enough
if you breath in-out you're not whisking hard enough
if you can think you're not whisking hard enough
if your muscles aren't straining burning, if your hands aren't calloused
you're not doing it right
One of the guys said if he had to make this every day he'd hate his job but I just shook my head and bent over my task. Each time I come to it I notice something new. Each fresh batch is a chance to whisk it better, to see how it reacts each time some level of starch or dairy is cooked out and the mixture thickens. To take it less seriously is to risk ruining it. I was trying to explain to a friend while biking home last night why it needed this level of care. That's Crazy was all he said. I've got boys shirking at the thought of whisking something with all your might for the better part of half an hour, but you know? You figure out what the purpose of movement is, what it really means to whisk something, what you bring to the kitchen and what kind of compromiser you are.
Each time you try to do it with all your heart.
Oh, and per the bread: there is no jest here. It's the sort of thing where if someone told you that you'd be in a kitchen where talented chefs were doing amazing things, and coaxing every molecule of yeast into its full potential, and everyone around you would be all flushed and happy and you couldn't wait to get to work every day, you'd laugh because you wouldn't think it could ever be true that you oculd be handed such gifts.
There was no salt, for one. So while she explained to him about the importance of salt, what salt's role is in dough, she finessed the right amounts of water and flour. He left. He didn't come back for a while, so she continued, taking the dough out of the mixer, kneading it into a bowl, whispering sweet nothings into its yeasty lil ear. One of the sous chefs came by and was like We're Supposed To Get It Like A Windowpane, Huh? That's What You're Doing?
Short answer, yeah.
As I was hastening to get my second pot of goodness on the stove, I saw how the sous chef was shaping the bread. I stopped. I've got about nine months of day to day bread experience-rolls, focaccia, cornbread, crackers, light wheat, potato bread, biscuits, pizza dough-on my resume. And he was treating the bread like he was a kid playing bouncy ball by himself and he had all day to shape those out-in-the-air lil rounds as if they weren't gonna get crusty. I planted myself next to the prep table, picked up a round of dough. Spun it in one hand, feeling the contours of the dough ride up against my fingers and tighten. Like A Baby's Bottom, my old boss used to say. It's a body memory.
Like This, I said. Feel This. Now Feel Yours. His were flabby. We loved this dough into existence for him and I was not gonna let him do the next step without giving him something to aim for. I barely had time for a mini explanation before my arms were overloaded with dairy and I was back to work.
There's this chiboust I've been making every day at the new job. Ostensibly it begins as a pastry cream, but all the body memories of pastry cream are stripped form it and the project's turned inside out. Yolks and flours, flavorings are whisked into hot milk and the entire thing is cooked on the stove, on extremely low heat.
But mostly it's being whisked like you're Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman is after you. Did You Break A Sweat? my boss asked the first time I made it. Well You're Not Whisking Hard Enough.
if you can talk you're not whisking hard enough
if you breath in-out you're not whisking hard enough
if you can think you're not whisking hard enough
if your muscles aren't straining burning, if your hands aren't calloused
you're not doing it right
One of the guys said if he had to make this every day he'd hate his job but I just shook my head and bent over my task. Each time I come to it I notice something new. Each fresh batch is a chance to whisk it better, to see how it reacts each time some level of starch or dairy is cooked out and the mixture thickens. To take it less seriously is to risk ruining it. I was trying to explain to a friend while biking home last night why it needed this level of care. That's Crazy was all he said. I've got boys shirking at the thought of whisking something with all your might for the better part of half an hour, but you know? You figure out what the purpose of movement is, what it really means to whisk something, what you bring to the kitchen and what kind of compromiser you are.
Each time you try to do it with all your heart.
Oh, and per the bread: there is no jest here. It's the sort of thing where if someone told you that you'd be in a kitchen where talented chefs were doing amazing things, and coaxing every molecule of yeast into its full potential, and everyone around you would be all flushed and happy and you couldn't wait to get to work every day, you'd laugh because you wouldn't think it could ever be true that you oculd be handed such gifts.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
how i got my new job and other stories
It's all starting to come full circle. It rained today in San Francisco. At FH, we've still got the gamut of summer pastries but the winter staples are starting to trickle in...pear frangipane instead of peach. Get your stone fruit while you can. Today at the market I bought quince from Farmer Dan with the two apple trees, Black Missions figs from Knoll and dry-farmed tomatoes from Ella Bella, and was given an onion by my coworker. The last two are getting turned into tomato sauce tonight. The quince, I'm not sure yet and the figs are just for eating out of hand.
Last night I went to Chow, where the waiters are just all so cute. It helped that we were starved after a day of eating only desserts, but my wood-oven spinach and cheese lasagna was yummy, and then I polished off my friend's mashed potatoes as well. We split and analyzed dessert: a ginger cake with whipped cream and pumpkin ice cream. The ice cream was appealingly orange but not properly pumpkin, the cake was dry, the caramel made it slightly better.
I have such an uneasy relationship with writing and cooking. One is always being done at the expense of the other. I told my friend last night that the day I opened up my secret shop would be the day I was never going to write a book. It Doesn't Need To Be That Way, he told me. Sure, I'm getting lifetimes of great material and I've already used some of it. Sure, I'll one day be too old to cook. I Would Love To Go On Book Tour In Like, Three Months, I told him (an impossibility for sure). Y'Know, Just Take A Break From Work.
Would You Give Up Cooking In Three Months? he asked. And Never Go Back To It?
I sighed. I pouted. His question was an impossibility it seemed. Something laughable and off the map. No, I said.
You know you're in it when you come home from working your sixth day in a row and cook dinner and make sorbet. You know you're in it when you read cookbooks for fun, and when you order more than one dessert after dinner. When you get up before dawn and everyone asks you how you do it, and you don't know how you do it, but you don't even complain about it anymore really. It is what it is. When you let kitchen words seep into everyday life and suddenly you want to yell Behind at all those slow walkers. When another burn on your arm is just that: another. When you agree to spend your one day off helping your boss plate desserts. When the farmers at the market know your name, give you the good stuff, when you know their names.
I have a new job. This means I'm now working six days a week, since I still have the old job. Details? Not tonight. Tonight I want to tell you about how my job offer came to me.
Last month I was in Marin working as a prep cook. I was at George Lucas's ranch. I was dealing with meat and cutting up vegetables and pretending I knew how to make sauce. I worked with these two guys who started campaigning for me to get a job there. The head chef was filling in until the current pastry chef could find a replacement for her position and move across the hill to the other ranch. Maybe I said on day one. On day two I started getting the specifics: when would I work, what would I do. It was tempting to work making muffins in the middle of Marin County for Mister Star Wars and his people. Even though I *still* have not seen Star Wars. It would have been Monday through Friday but I would have had to get up every day at 430, and quit FH. We were still all just talking--which is usually nowhere near getting a kitchen job--when I got the phone call. Let Me Think About It. I'm Working Right Now is what I said. The rest of the afternoon I floated around plating food, breaking down the barbecue, busting out dishes, having the guys urge me again to please apply, thinking all the while about the new thing that had come my way.
When I got back to the city I called back, said yes, and quit my job the next day. I'm still in that post-relationship phase with the cupcakery. I miss certain of my coworkers. Occasionally I miss the cupcakes. I don't miss the screaming, the tension, the back and forth, the one who lied. I sort of want to visit but only at certain times. I want to hear the news. I wish them all well, certainly, and I didn't really get to say goodbye since my boss basically gave me most of my last week off. The weight of it all is still on me. While I worked there sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and my hands would be frozen. Clenched open. I'd force them to move and think about what I was doing to my body with all the piping and with only eating cupcakes and perhaps a carrot during an eight hour shift (and I didn't even pipe that much).
The new job is new and exciting. I get the feeling it's all ready to burst right open. It's giving me all this writing energy.
But I got sidetracked and what I wanted to say was how it's nice to have people to talk to. Especially when you can't stop talking--and you get going on a half hour digression from the original question so that by the time you think you might be done you're still so far away form the original point so you've got to talk your way back. So you walk around some, eat a horrid cookie, resist telling the cookie-seller that you know it's underbaked because you're a pair of bakers, dammit. Then you've walked everywhere and you're still not done talking so you go up to Bernal Heights. You point out the landmarks in the city below, map its geography. You stay up past the hour when you should reasonably be in bed and then you get up in cold darkness, bike to work, stand in the rain and buy quince and tomatoes and muscle through the exhaustion because what else is there to do.
My flash fiction is up here. The editor says "the piece sure does have atmosphere." Tell me what you think about the ending.
Oh, & hell yeah. Baseball. Postseason. Do you know what I"m talking about?
Last night I went to Chow, where the waiters are just all so cute. It helped that we were starved after a day of eating only desserts, but my wood-oven spinach and cheese lasagna was yummy, and then I polished off my friend's mashed potatoes as well. We split and analyzed dessert: a ginger cake with whipped cream and pumpkin ice cream. The ice cream was appealingly orange but not properly pumpkin, the cake was dry, the caramel made it slightly better.
I have such an uneasy relationship with writing and cooking. One is always being done at the expense of the other. I told my friend last night that the day I opened up my secret shop would be the day I was never going to write a book. It Doesn't Need To Be That Way, he told me. Sure, I'm getting lifetimes of great material and I've already used some of it. Sure, I'll one day be too old to cook. I Would Love To Go On Book Tour In Like, Three Months, I told him (an impossibility for sure). Y'Know, Just Take A Break From Work.
Would You Give Up Cooking In Three Months? he asked. And Never Go Back To It?
I sighed. I pouted. His question was an impossibility it seemed. Something laughable and off the map. No, I said.
You know you're in it when you come home from working your sixth day in a row and cook dinner and make sorbet. You know you're in it when you read cookbooks for fun, and when you order more than one dessert after dinner. When you get up before dawn and everyone asks you how you do it, and you don't know how you do it, but you don't even complain about it anymore really. It is what it is. When you let kitchen words seep into everyday life and suddenly you want to yell Behind at all those slow walkers. When another burn on your arm is just that: another. When you agree to spend your one day off helping your boss plate desserts. When the farmers at the market know your name, give you the good stuff, when you know their names.
I have a new job. This means I'm now working six days a week, since I still have the old job. Details? Not tonight. Tonight I want to tell you about how my job offer came to me.
Last month I was in Marin working as a prep cook. I was at George Lucas's ranch. I was dealing with meat and cutting up vegetables and pretending I knew how to make sauce. I worked with these two guys who started campaigning for me to get a job there. The head chef was filling in until the current pastry chef could find a replacement for her position and move across the hill to the other ranch. Maybe I said on day one. On day two I started getting the specifics: when would I work, what would I do. It was tempting to work making muffins in the middle of Marin County for Mister Star Wars and his people. Even though I *still* have not seen Star Wars. It would have been Monday through Friday but I would have had to get up every day at 430, and quit FH. We were still all just talking--which is usually nowhere near getting a kitchen job--when I got the phone call. Let Me Think About It. I'm Working Right Now is what I said. The rest of the afternoon I floated around plating food, breaking down the barbecue, busting out dishes, having the guys urge me again to please apply, thinking all the while about the new thing that had come my way.
When I got back to the city I called back, said yes, and quit my job the next day. I'm still in that post-relationship phase with the cupcakery. I miss certain of my coworkers. Occasionally I miss the cupcakes. I don't miss the screaming, the tension, the back and forth, the one who lied. I sort of want to visit but only at certain times. I want to hear the news. I wish them all well, certainly, and I didn't really get to say goodbye since my boss basically gave me most of my last week off. The weight of it all is still on me. While I worked there sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and my hands would be frozen. Clenched open. I'd force them to move and think about what I was doing to my body with all the piping and with only eating cupcakes and perhaps a carrot during an eight hour shift (and I didn't even pipe that much).
The new job is new and exciting. I get the feeling it's all ready to burst right open. It's giving me all this writing energy.
But I got sidetracked and what I wanted to say was how it's nice to have people to talk to. Especially when you can't stop talking--and you get going on a half hour digression from the original question so that by the time you think you might be done you're still so far away form the original point so you've got to talk your way back. So you walk around some, eat a horrid cookie, resist telling the cookie-seller that you know it's underbaked because you're a pair of bakers, dammit. Then you've walked everywhere and you're still not done talking so you go up to Bernal Heights. You point out the landmarks in the city below, map its geography. You stay up past the hour when you should reasonably be in bed and then you get up in cold darkness, bike to work, stand in the rain and buy quince and tomatoes and muscle through the exhaustion because what else is there to do.
My flash fiction is up here. The editor says "the piece sure does have atmosphere." Tell me what you think about the ending.
Oh, & hell yeah. Baseball. Postseason. Do you know what I"m talking about?
Saturday, August 04, 2007
my best private moments are in public ...
The FPFM was hopping today as usual! Cardoons, stinging nettles, purslane, lemon basil, heirloom tomatoes in all stripes and colors, figs, peppers sweet and hot. I intended to go shopping for some tomatoes and maybe some greens, lemon basil perhaps.
But then I was seduced on my way to the secret bathroom, where all the chefs and otherwise cool kids trot off to. I found a man sampling grapes, and when I asked to try one he handed me a cluster. I knew they weren't Concords but they looked similar in color. I smiled my thanks and ran off toward the bathroom, absentmindedly plucking a grape off the stem, popped it in my mouth, and came to a stop. The flavor of that grape jolted me, and I didn't move, didn't sway an inch except for the slack-jawed expression on my face of disbelief and thrill, but I felt naked in public. Had I known that grapes could taste like that? Or rather, that grapes could taste so purely and sweetly and not be the thickly fleshy, sexual kind where you work your tongue around the seed, the sort of grapes the Hudson Valley recalls though surely they are everywhere? I promised the man that I'd be back and then I continued my trek to the bathroom, pulling grapes into my mouth and almost laughing, bursting in on strangers in the bathroom, disrobing from my uniform, becoming a person again and not the white uniform.
I bought the grapes (I got them at Alfieri, and I'm planning a trip back Tuesday to see if there are more). And some Green Zebras, some lemongrass for coconut ice cream or sorbet), some spinach from the very expensive Star Route. Two things more on the FPFM: I really love the berries I've been getting from Yerena. They're organic. The blackberries last week were the best I've ever had. The strawberries are prime flavor this week. And best of all they give me heaps of berries (24 baskets between three kinds) for 44 dollars. And second, the Apple Store place in the FPFM had a large bundle of apple sticks tied together and a sign saying Faggot for Hearth or Bonfire. Technically a faggot is indeed a bundle of sticks, but cmon, I think its usage has evolved past that point and I really don't think the farmers market is the place to question your relationship to sexuality.
Cooking tonight for social events. The THINGy ice cream, for the cupcakery. And a grape-rosemary focaccia with my amazing grapes for a potluck in Oakland tomorrow night. Pictures when I can find the digital camera cable.
Body memory tonight while preparing the focaccia. It came time to stretch the dough, and so I oiled a half sheet pan and slowly got ready, not looking forward to this part. I lay my ball of dough on the half sheet pan and then I remembered how I'd done this twice a week for six months (and before that as well in another position). That it was in me, the method to stretch the dough was something my hands knew, even if my brain was nervous and out of practice. So I let them go at it, pulling and stretching and that dough just poured through my fingers out to the edges of the pan like it knew I was the master. It's baking now and I can just begin to smell it. Got to check if the ice cream base is cold. I'm sleepy. Cupcakery was intense today. I hauled my ass for three hours, busting out two 30 quart Hobart batch size buttercreams start to finish in an HOUR while depanning cupcakes, whipping frostings and then on to the decorating frenzy. Left me exhausted. I've been very tired this week. Lots of things on my mind, mostly women and work, and writing.
I want someone to come shopping at the farmers markets with me. And I want someone to share these private moments in public with. Then I get cold when people call me {well, people who haven't had the balls to call me in a year} and say I'm busy like in the middle of five different things gotta run. I want to say that the door closed, and you lost the right to be my friend when you treated me like such a stranger. And you mostly lack the cojones to question that. But is that really the right thing to do? Sometimes I miss these people but they act so much like children. I miss Somerville tonight. Cambridge. I'm on a quest for sahlab and other things appropriate to middle eastern ice creams. Tell me, Bay Area, that someone somewhere is making ice cream with sahlab. Somewhere there is dondurma, somewhere the strange ice cream with noodles that my manager wants. Because, really, are you gonna let Boston have one up on you?
But then I was seduced on my way to the secret bathroom, where all the chefs and otherwise cool kids trot off to. I found a man sampling grapes, and when I asked to try one he handed me a cluster. I knew they weren't Concords but they looked similar in color. I smiled my thanks and ran off toward the bathroom, absentmindedly plucking a grape off the stem, popped it in my mouth, and came to a stop. The flavor of that grape jolted me, and I didn't move, didn't sway an inch except for the slack-jawed expression on my face of disbelief and thrill, but I felt naked in public. Had I known that grapes could taste like that? Or rather, that grapes could taste so purely and sweetly and not be the thickly fleshy, sexual kind where you work your tongue around the seed, the sort of grapes the Hudson Valley recalls though surely they are everywhere? I promised the man that I'd be back and then I continued my trek to the bathroom, pulling grapes into my mouth and almost laughing, bursting in on strangers in the bathroom, disrobing from my uniform, becoming a person again and not the white uniform.
I bought the grapes (I got them at Alfieri, and I'm planning a trip back Tuesday to see if there are more). And some Green Zebras, some lemongrass for coconut ice cream or sorbet), some spinach from the very expensive Star Route. Two things more on the FPFM: I really love the berries I've been getting from Yerena. They're organic. The blackberries last week were the best I've ever had. The strawberries are prime flavor this week. And best of all they give me heaps of berries (24 baskets between three kinds) for 44 dollars. And second, the Apple Store place in the FPFM had a large bundle of apple sticks tied together and a sign saying Faggot for Hearth or Bonfire. Technically a faggot is indeed a bundle of sticks, but cmon, I think its usage has evolved past that point and I really don't think the farmers market is the place to question your relationship to sexuality.
Cooking tonight for social events. The THINGy ice cream, for the cupcakery. And a grape-rosemary focaccia with my amazing grapes for a potluck in Oakland tomorrow night. Pictures when I can find the digital camera cable.
Body memory tonight while preparing the focaccia. It came time to stretch the dough, and so I oiled a half sheet pan and slowly got ready, not looking forward to this part. I lay my ball of dough on the half sheet pan and then I remembered how I'd done this twice a week for six months (and before that as well in another position). That it was in me, the method to stretch the dough was something my hands knew, even if my brain was nervous and out of practice. So I let them go at it, pulling and stretching and that dough just poured through my fingers out to the edges of the pan like it knew I was the master. It's baking now and I can just begin to smell it. Got to check if the ice cream base is cold. I'm sleepy. Cupcakery was intense today. I hauled my ass for three hours, busting out two 30 quart Hobart batch size buttercreams start to finish in an HOUR while depanning cupcakes, whipping frostings and then on to the decorating frenzy. Left me exhausted. I've been very tired this week. Lots of things on my mind, mostly women and work, and writing.
I want someone to come shopping at the farmers markets with me. And I want someone to share these private moments in public with. Then I get cold when people call me {well, people who haven't had the balls to call me in a year} and say I'm busy like in the middle of five different things gotta run. I want to say that the door closed, and you lost the right to be my friend when you treated me like such a stranger. And you mostly lack the cojones to question that. But is that really the right thing to do? Sometimes I miss these people but they act so much like children. I miss Somerville tonight. Cambridge. I'm on a quest for sahlab and other things appropriate to middle eastern ice creams. Tell me, Bay Area, that someone somewhere is making ice cream with sahlab. Somewhere there is dondurma, somewhere the strange ice cream with noodles that my manager wants. Because, really, are you gonna let Boston have one up on you?
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