The streets are slick with rain, the work is almost done. There are things I need to write about the cake and the glaze, the bizarro Flo Braker jam cookies, baking incidents and whatnot. Meaty and interesting stories, not like this. But right now I'm trying to clean my house for my mother's impending xmas visit. Right after which I will return to Boston for a few days. Family dealings that I am not excited about, but I need to support my mom.

It's hard sometimes, being a good daughter. I've inherited a nice catholic guilt complex and so I feel as though I should not be here in SF going to work every day and laughing with my coworkers, teasing my chef.

But the world goes on when bad things happen. I could have stayed in Boston for new years and I thought about it--or more apt I thought about going to new york to see people I haven't seen in over a year--and then I sat, stuff it, I'm here now. I'm not a good holiday person and I don't really have rituals but I am here now and it seems silly to commit to the next year elsewhere.

I'm cooking brussels sprouts and parsnips now because it's all I have food wise. Delicious, eating at midnight.

i'm so hungry...

And all I want these days is pizza. It's like I've reached my apex of missing it, or it's become some symbol of east-coast-ness (though I don't miss the cold). It's not that I don't relish burritos or certainly eat more than my share of them. It's just hard to live on Mexican to-go alone...and there's nothing for quick eating like a nice slice. You really have to seek that out in this city. I might try to get some on my way to work today. There's a few places in the Mission worth seeking out, so I hear...

Work...days blend into parties and back again, in and out. Sometimes I think about how it's mid-December and that means we're more or less half done with holiday insanity. Sometimes I think, but good god two more weeks of this? How will we keep up the pace without getting sick or exhausted? There's a strange rhythm to the days now, too. I'll come in to work, as I did yesterday, to a sea of plates in process for plated dessert parties. Then I'll be tasked onto making special party stuff, then back to our menu, then prepping the party station. Tonight we'll do a private party and then open for dinner, and what does that look like? How do you mise for half a night of service? These desserts we make for parties, they're flying onto people's plates. Are we not making enough or are we just really enticing?

It's good that they're popular. It's good to put out everything you have and hide in the back kitchen wiping down the counters, giving them a few minutes to realize you're not coming back out with more goodies.

I'm so hungry. Snippets of meals and nothing at home to eat. Time for dog, food, work. In that order.

I miss fall. So far it seems to be the only season in San Francisco that slightly mirrors the places I've left behind. The leaves turn brown show through with green, they crumple, their veins oddly vibrant. I pick some up off the Embarcadero on the way to work and hold them in my mittened hands, delighted. The air has the same weight and smells similarly and it makes me want to be home, on the other side of the country.

The apples are gorgeous, heroic in their variety. But even the tightness of their flesh reminds me of the East. It's October baseball and the Sox are in the playoffs (and the Yankees suck). Watching baseball makes me miss the shy and awkward enthusiasm of Bostonians.

I've got something really heavy and difficult in my life right now, and it requires me to act like a calm and rational adult all the time, and that is hard to do. Yesterday the situation got, oh, five percent better, which is something.

Last night after work I walked my bike home from the 24th St. BART in the rain and ran into my coworker from FH at his other job. You know you're home in a city when you run into your Mexican coworkers in distant parts of town and have conversations half English, half Spanish. I am here now, but this visceral longing unsettles me.

I've got Earl Grey ice cream base in the fridge, and orange shortbread cookies to make ice cream sandwiches, but what I don't have is the silky hot fudge sauce from work to drown it in. Tomorrow I am maybe, hopefully, eating persimmon ice cream and/or quince sorbet. Oh, and the noodle kugel ice cream is coming along. We have a plan. It is going to be fantastic.

kitchen humor

I may not be the best assistant. But I do try. And I am careful to know what I have on hand. So last night when service was almost over and we were waiting for the last table to finish up, one of the sous chefs was practicing his quenelles, and leaning over to rinse the spoon in the sink between each try. I was cleaning my station and lent him my bain of piping hit water. With the Spoons in it.

The Silver Spoons. The You-Are-Good-As-Dead-If-These-Disappear Silver Spoons. I put the spoons in there before service and I knew there were four of them, amidst an assortment of plain spoons and paring knives. He tries to joke with me about losing them and I tell him it's all him. Who would my boss believe, me or him? The bain makes it back to me a short time later and I'm inspecting it and suddenly there are only two spoons. I ask the sous Where Are My Spoons? Where Did They Go?

He feigns innocence. I Need Those Spoons, I say. Otherwise You're Replacing Them. One is stashed in his chef coat and he gives that up easily enough, but then there are three spoons. He tells me I lost one, or that my coworker took one back to the station. There Were Four When I Gave It To You, I am insistent.

I am about to jump on him. Pummel, bite, try to wrestle six feet of man to the ground. But we're in an open kitchen and there are diners about. Still I know there's fury written all over my face.

I clean and wrap my stock. What am I going to say if the spoon doesn't turn up? Am I a hundred percent sure my coworker did not take the spoon? No, but I can't leave the station.

The last desserts are fired, and when I am cleaning up my station I see there are once again four Silver Spoons in the bain. I am saved.

It's only on the way home that I remember what Anthony Bourdain has to say about situations like this...too late, but I need to remember it for next time, how to react to the special brand of kitchen humor.

Work today was like banging my head against a wall. My electricity kept shorting, so I'd be whipping whites and then...no power. Trying to boil milk for pastry cream and it would short out twice. Everything took about three times as long as it should have. My manager sent my coworker to buy a new power strip, but the cord was too short and of course, no extension cord. But it all got done, if ever so slowly. My manager wants me to do a rice pudding, which is just one more thing to go on the burner amidst the pastry cream, poaching Hosui and Warren pears, making custard base...

you know, I don't think I've actually ever *eaten* rice pudding before {aside from the risotto tart filling}. Nevermind made any.

comfort food

Feeling a bit better today. Went out for lunch with my old buddy Brandon who just moved to SF from the Sacramento area--he's a Californian and we've been friends for five years more or less, and I am at this point one of his oldest friends. He took me to a Chinese restaurant on Ocean Ave called Emmy's where they gave us a big table for 8, because it was all they had. Perched in between large groups of older Chinese men we ate sesame chicken (for him) and orange peel chicken (for me) which wasn't all that spicy. In fact it was so not-that-spicy that I kept eating pieces of the jalapenos (and wondering why they didn't use fresh or dried red chilies) and ate the piece with all the seeds still attached. And then ate lots and lots of rice.

Man, I miss the Millhouse Panda and their spicy orange tofu. Sigh.

I used to always wonder in places like that if the chicken is really chicken, and if not what it is. I used to care much more but these days not as much. Lots of rice and watery tea and discussion of various girls and crushes and jobs. It's nice to be with someone whose patterns you know. And who knows yours. Eating warm, greasy, crispy food and lots of fluffy soft rice and feeling hemmed in by the low-lying fog--but in a safe and comforting way--is good. I don't have many connections here in SF, but I do get little bits of what I need from various people out here and so it's nice to have something like an old friend. Brandon is the one who drove with me here, and the only person I think that I know who would help me travel three thousand miles to change my life.

After Emmy's we drove out to Ocean Beach and scuffed through the sand, and then back to his apartment in sunny Visitacion Valley, and then he left for bartending and I came home to take the cutie pie to Bernal Heights park.

We went blackberry picking and I came home with enough to make wild blackberry ice cream courtesy of Chez Panisse Desserts, which I am a little skeptical of because it contains all cream and no eggs. If I were a better pastry chef I'd know how to cut down the cream, add some milk, and supplement the fat with yolks. But ice cream experimentation usually ends in ice crystals and not silky-soft perfect ice cream. Lucky thinking ahead, I put the cuisinart bowl in to freeze this morning. Also considering using up the rest of my cornmeal dough (if it's any good) and making some pies even though the berry seeds tend to annoy me. The dough's less than a month old (just barely) and came over here from Oakland with me. Meditation class tonight, good for the stressed out baker.

Cornmeal in the fluffy, soft sweet nectarine cakes, maybe? What is my recent obsession with the grit in things?

moving to the leeward side

Change is always hard. There are the inevitable recriminations; you think it's not that bad it was never that bad.

You remember all the good times. And the bad ones. You begin to notice everything, reading fortunes in patters and adding up things that go down.

Yesterday was homey. Today was like this:

And things have been stressful at home. Your roommate comes into your room and asks if there is anything she can do. She has clearly seen the birthday cake, baked.

There is nothing she can do. The birthday party is tomorrow, and your boxes will be gone by then. All of the really fun stuff is packed. The books, the cooking things. The useful drawers all gone empty.

Or nearly so. (lemon verbena ice cream, cantaloupe sorbet, pear sorbet, pear ginger scones for Sunday, rose petals, lemon verbena, coffee, frozen chicken broth, frozen enchilada sauce, pistachios, more coffee)

You are quiet while she stands in the doorway. You know you will remain friends but that things are weird right now. You are not sure how the information current works in this house. You cook the birthday cake and then to use the half and half that is two days passed and the eggs you had to buy for the cake you make butterscotch pudding. The flavor is complicated in your mouth. You like the distraction from packing up, but then you have to pack up your kitchen things, most of them. Food is something level to hold on to, but it is also emotional currency. Food is something concrete, food means you are still here, cooking is a thing you can do where the rules are always the same (and always clear). And you don't like the way your body feels when you eat out every night, or at least the kind of meals that are readily available to you where you live now.

You take the dog out. You know the Fruitvale house was only a temporary option. It's hard to believe you've been here four months already. When you moved to Oakland, you had three boxes and a station wagon. You had nothing, but now you have so much more. You can't move across the Bay Bridge in one trip, this time.

If you had stuck to the original plan, this is about the time you would have been heading back to Boston. Your internship would have been over and you would have maybe been kicking around for one more month or so. If you hadn't like it here, finally, that is. And now you've been in California for double the amount of time you previously had (always in the East Bay, though). You got fired from the internship. You got a job at a cute bakery, which uses locally sourced products and makes cupcakes that taste good. You think about the internship, turning it over in your mind. You would be done by now. You wonder what happened with the other interns, if things were different for them. You avoid the Food Mill because you don't want to run into Miette people but sometimes you do and stories trickle down to you. You think about all the reasons this move is right for you. You think too much. A woman steps out of a car in a marijuana haze and starts talking to you or mostly to the dog. In between coos she chats you up I like your belt, ooh, I like your shorts and you try to have a reaction other than ...... She wants to see you around again and you nod like this is normal, shake your head at Oakland as you walk down the street, walk slowly home. You let yourself have some of that butterscotch pudding you made earlier. Your dog passes out at the other end of the bed. All around you the emptinesses glare out. You are trying just to be a little still, in the middle of the craziness around you, but you wonder if you've taken advantage of every opportunity. If you've had all your last looks. You know you'll come back at least occasionally, after all it isn't that far and you have actual friends in the East Bay but still you return like a lover to your favorite spots. As you walk, you never fail to be surprised by seeing something, or someone, differently, even as everything else changes shape.

notes from a bilingual kitchen

At the cupcakery, my fellow bakers and I are always trying to teach more English to the Mexican guys who work with us, and trying to pick up more Spanish from them. We've got the basics down, enough to say "mas zanahoria" and "dos bolsas chocolate." This morning found me trying to explain the concept of bragging to our 19 year old OCD dishwasher/prep guy who lines up all our cambros with the handles stacked in a perfect line. "Yo soy Miguel, rawr," posing with big muscles like a strongman. Then: "yo habla espanol, solo!" He laughs, but it's hard to know sometimes. What gets through? We thought we learned the word for mixer today but it was only sound, "sonido." In the kitchen we joke, we listen to energy or my ipod, we learn to force the overworked Mexicans to take a break. "Ahora," we say, "no mas trabajo. We'll do the dishes."

Bruce made crackers today with leftover flour tortillas and salt, and we had them with hummus. There's always snacks at the cupcakery, bagels or boxes of fruit picked up at Costco, cookies someone's made at home as if cupcakes aren't enough sweetness. With half a watermelon we made smoothies" watermelon, banana, lime juice, ice, some salt. Not great smoothies. Could have used some mint, some hot pepper. But nice to break up the day.

What I get from working at a bakery, what I haven't gotten in the restaurant scene, is bakers to talk about ideas with. Always the pastry person's alone, and at Sonsie every now and then Chef Bill and I would discuss things like making better muffins or how we could convince Michael to do a cupcake for the next menu, but this is different. I get to ask about things like if anyone has a good biscuit recipe. I get to share my idea for the roasted-apricot vanilla babycake with someone who won't just say "yum" but who will ask how much caramel, hard crack or soft. Someone for whom what I do is not just a component, so much less sexy than the crush of Saturday night service.

We want to make bread now, and crackers. I'm going to dig out some of Monte's recipes and Bruce is going to bring some in inspired by his Threestone internship. We've talked about starting a sourdough starter. I got Michelle into the idea of ice cream-injected cupcakes, so next batch, here we go. We feed off each other, on the good days. On the bad days we just bang stuff out in a flurry of decorating and scooping. But today was a good day, slow enough for cleaning and for talking. A nice way to end my new extra-long work week.

I've got some puttering to do at home,some peaches to make into pie and the bread recipes to search through, etc. I'm getting a reputation at the cupcakery apparently. Not at decorating (still can't pipe my way out of a room but I'm getting closer to the door). But for being good, for being fast.

comfort food

coconut cake
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

french fries n honey
mac n cheese
eggplant parmesan
teriyaki tofu
ice cream, any kind
coconut cake
warm chocolate chip cookies
hot chocolate
redbones bbq
mashed potatoes
crusty bread n butter
really good pizza
bread pudding, done right
leftover pastry cream
anything flaky and buttery
avocado
zaatar cheese toast
tapioca pudding
butterscotch pudding
chocolate pudding
honey mustard chicken
carrot cake
cupcakes
ice cream sundaes

I think I'm going to have to re-think the phrase "I don't like cheese." I also might have compose some some of french fry-honey dessert. Maybe I can start a veggie version of the bacon-in-dessert/breakfast-for-dessert trend. Cause who wants french toast (scuse me, pain perdu when you can have mapley, honeyed, crunchy, salty potatoes?

I also think it might be time to get some good cake...where to go? I've been meaning to try so many places. Maybe if I don't have to work tomorrow I'll pop off somewhere and get cake. This afternoon I bought a fileld churros from the lady on International. Somehow the vanilla custard filling when eaten with the churros dough tasted like butterscotch. It was good. Just what I needed before a post-work. three hours of sleep last night nap. But I almost liked the flavor of the churros they sell outside the Ferry Building better. This one, however, was freshly piped, freshly fried, tossed in cinnamon sugar and filled right before my eyes.

Every interaction in Oakland is some sort of cultural exchange. The shopkeepers switch to English for me. The thuggy guys keep their eyes on me, the white girl. In the Asian markets, I try to sound out the Vietnamese words. I wonder if I'll miss that, living in SF.