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.
Showing posts with label envy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label envy. Show all posts
Monday, December 01, 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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
doughnut plant, i miss you so
don't don't don't let's start
i got a weak heart
&i don't get around how you get around
I tried out Eagle Donuts today, on Mission 2-3 blocks after Cesar Chavez. It didn't get much press on Chowhound, but it was one of what, two, places in SF proper. I went with a maple old fashioned, which was lighter than the one from All Star. I should have gotten a yeast doughnut also for comparison's sake, but they didn't look so good.
I've been craving doughnuts. Ever since I finally found Doughnut Plant. I checked and of course they don't ship doughnuts...which means that there's just no way to get them and they're little pieces of heaven. And the only way to get close to them, of course, unless this Bob's place delivers that kind of insane goodness, is to learn how to make my own doughnuts.
Doughnuts. Malted vanilla ice cream. Sometimes you just can't stop thinking about something that is completely inaccessible to you. How can I get them? Where can I get them?
In all my free time, hah. NYC report...almost ready.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
confessions, or "It's a POT show...and this is the nicest pot!"
1. My "I" key has been sticking for days. This is very annoying.
2. I'm really sick of making upside-down cakes. I have been making them every week since March, and I don't like them. They always sell really well at the FB market. Whwn I frst started making them, I tried David Lebovitz's recipe, was unenthused, *did not* try the FH recipe because it was basically the same as DL's recpe, tried a recipe that was in a recent Gourmet, and tried (with most success) the recipe from Chez Panisse Fruit. I've adapted the CP recipe and that is what I have been using since, oh, April, and I've been okay with that until this week. I tasted one this Saturday to make sure it was all right since I had to trek over to the cupcakery before they were finished, and I took one bite and threw the rest out. There's nothing I shouldn't like. Brown sugar caramelly ooze. Pluots and nectarines. The cake part is always disappointing bad, tough enough to endure fruit without getting soggy, kind of bland, the sort of cake that makes people say they don't like cake. And I'm frustrated because I thought I solved this. It makes me wish I were still staging at Oleana, because every single time I told Maura I didn't like something (bread pudding, meringues), she would show me a version of it that would change my mind completely about the item in question. How do I reinvent this cake? It takes a lot of time to make it and I don't want to put the tme into something I don't like. And why don't I like it when it's got everything I should enjoy?
3. I ate pepperoni grease yesterday. The pizzeria across the street sent us over a free pizza, half cheese half pepperoni. And the slice of cheese I picked up had somehow been infected with meat grease, because during the first bite my mouth flooded with that flavor, which I haven't eaten in probably 13 years. I ended up eating about half the piece, because I was hungry, and *minded* the meat flavor, but wasn't really *eating* the meat. Eventually it got to me, so I just pulled off the crust. On the long walk back to my car, I felt the grease all slick on my tongue and that was uncomfortable. I had to endure until I got home. What is pepperoni, anyway?
4. I took one dozen cupcakes from my job and brought them to the Slideluck Potshow. I am allowed to take as many cupcakes as I want, whenever want, but it's kind of mean to do it when it's the last dozen cupcakes and the store is still open and customers want cupcakes. And I could have stickered the box so potluckers could see where the cupcakes that were gone SO fast came form. But I didn't. I also brought lavender walnut shortbread cookies.
5. And I thought for a good ten minutes about stealing the big Le Creuset from the potluck table. That's terribly, horribly wrong and immoral. Yes, those things run about two hundred dollars, and yes, really I want one but I'm not a thief. My friend said he'd take it if I wasn't going to steal it, because he wanted one too. The getaway car was around the corner. t would have been so, so easy especially once they turned off the lights. I always think about stealing things I really want.
6. Did I confess already to having a plot to steal my favorite cookbook out of the Boston Public Library. This plot was hatched in May I guess, and Leah was going to join the BPL, check out the book, and mail it to me. even told her specifically where it was and that it was hard to find, but should be there. She couldn't find it, and the plan never proceeded. At that time, the book was going for about 100 on used book sites. Now it is up to $474.00. Retail cost of $40. I'll never find it. Not even at the Strand.
7. Something odd happened to 2 of the 4 buttercreams I had to make yesterday. I have made a lot of buttercreams and by now I know what they look like when you have whipped your whited with sugar for plenty of time before adding cooked sugar, what it looks like when you add the sugar before the whites have really peaked, how it takes longer or shorter to firm up, and so on. n both of these instances I added a small portion of granulated sugar while shipping whites but they never got to soft peaks. The liquid whirled around in the Hobart bowl looking like skim milk. The first time poured the hot sugar. The next time I just dumped it out. The bad batched settled into white foam on top and yellow white on the bottom. I used a mixture of Eggology whites straight from the jar and some whites cracked in-house for the 4 buttercreams. am kind of glad it happened twice even if it was a waste of product and time, because t makes me feel more like the whites were contaminated (or the bowl was dirty or something) than that I personally fucked it up.
8. I don't enjoy decorative work. Even though my piping skills are now adequate.
9. I'm feeling really sensitive to sugar lately. I'm trying to east less processed sugar and more fruits (!?!?!?!). This is pretty much against my philosophy of living. So I hope this sensitivity goes away soon.
10. This whole week (last Sat. market, Tuesday market, and yesterday's market) I have bought nothing but fruits from the FB market. Yesterday delicious grapes again and some figs from my Sox fan at Knoll Farms.
I manhandled a ton of figs at the Slideluck Potshow, because I wanted to eat one but only if they were really ripe, plus I was afraid they weren't going to be as good as the ones from Knoll. I ate peanut noodles and homemade noodles and a really sexy key lime tart. I met my first food blogger and he was wearing leather suspenders and he loved my shortbread. When I fessed up to having a food blog myself, he said he'd blogroll me. I was also made to try a vegan{no dairy/no fat} broccoli soup. This man came up to me and my friends and sad to me (and only me) "Hi, how are you, I made this soup, no one's eating it, you should try it." So I did. I told him it needed butter and cream (such a pastry chef), and pepper. Then I told him he needed to try my cookie. We had the most San Francisco conversation, the three of us, it was all about sustainability and markets and not at all about art.
About the art, it was really refreshing to see an art show. It made me a little sad for the artist I used to live with who once made me a cowboy drawing on a lightbox and who had a wall full of drawings of cutie pie. I have such a crush on visual artists. It has always depressed me that I'm not talented in that way (not that being a writer isn't thrilling in its attention to detail and long, lonely hours--kind of like being a chef). Photography has been on my mind a lot since the Leica dream. These days I feel like everyone things they're a photographer because they know how to compose a shot and they've got a digital. If they're one step above that, they can play with the color balance or saturation in Photoshop (confession: I first started playing with Photoshop back in 97, 98...back when digital photography was a little amusement on a day when the darkroom was crowded). What was so refreshing about the slide show for me was the little things that get lost in the automatic digital age...the color balance, the precision of focus, proper use of lighting, nightshots or blurred shots that say something and don't just look cool (and if I said "cable release" would you know what I meant?). I was always drawn to photography because it was a visual art I could do, and I put in enough time to be ok.
What I actually never realized until last night was how narrative photography is, or can be. This despite the fact that I have actually had so many narrative photo projects myself. I must have known instinctually (it's a writer's art, just like pastry cheffing is, and foil-fencing), but until I saw on the cement gallery floor with my knees up and watched the slide show, feeling like a kindergardener at nap-time and about that tired, too, it wasn't anything I could have voiced. My favorite photographers are even narrativists (Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Nikki Lee, Mary Ellen Mark (though she is less), and for old time's sake Dorothea and Ansel). It was a nice realization to come to, even though haven't touched my SLR in two years (it's got an undeveloped roll of California pictures in it, of all things). It made me feel more comfortable with something I have grown so distanced from. And it made me feel like my favorite art still has merit, authenticity and fun. Photography isn't dying in the age of digital. The book isn't dying in the age of internet. {But what of darkrooms and publishing houses?}
I'm totally going to make dinner now and work on some writing. I have so much to do before the Alabama trip including somehow go to Oakland to return my library books (I was happy to realize that if I do this I can use the free printers at the Oakland library instead of the expensve ones at SFPL), go to the SFPL to pick up a book I should have read a long time ago but is now impossibly trendy, made Chez Panisse reservations, get a haircut so don't look like a scruffy teenaged boy in a dress (though that would be a new sight for Alabama)...
2. I'm really sick of making upside-down cakes. I have been making them every week since March, and I don't like them. They always sell really well at the FB market. Whwn I frst started making them, I tried David Lebovitz's recipe, was unenthused, *did not* try the FH recipe because it was basically the same as DL's recpe, tried a recipe that was in a recent Gourmet, and tried (with most success) the recipe from Chez Panisse Fruit. I've adapted the CP recipe and that is what I have been using since, oh, April, and I've been okay with that until this week. I tasted one this Saturday to make sure it was all right since I had to trek over to the cupcakery before they were finished, and I took one bite and threw the rest out. There's nothing I shouldn't like. Brown sugar caramelly ooze. Pluots and nectarines. The cake part is always disappointing bad, tough enough to endure fruit without getting soggy, kind of bland, the sort of cake that makes people say they don't like cake. And I'm frustrated because I thought I solved this. It makes me wish I were still staging at Oleana, because every single time I told Maura I didn't like something (bread pudding, meringues), she would show me a version of it that would change my mind completely about the item in question. How do I reinvent this cake? It takes a lot of time to make it and I don't want to put the tme into something I don't like. And why don't I like it when it's got everything I should enjoy?
3. I ate pepperoni grease yesterday. The pizzeria across the street sent us over a free pizza, half cheese half pepperoni. And the slice of cheese I picked up had somehow been infected with meat grease, because during the first bite my mouth flooded with that flavor, which I haven't eaten in probably 13 years. I ended up eating about half the piece, because I was hungry, and *minded* the meat flavor, but wasn't really *eating* the meat. Eventually it got to me, so I just pulled off the crust. On the long walk back to my car, I felt the grease all slick on my tongue and that was uncomfortable. I had to endure until I got home. What is pepperoni, anyway?
4. I took one dozen cupcakes from my job and brought them to the Slideluck Potshow. I am allowed to take as many cupcakes as I want, whenever want, but it's kind of mean to do it when it's the last dozen cupcakes and the store is still open and customers want cupcakes. And I could have stickered the box so potluckers could see where the cupcakes that were gone SO fast came form. But I didn't. I also brought lavender walnut shortbread cookies.
5. And I thought for a good ten minutes about stealing the big Le Creuset from the potluck table. That's terribly, horribly wrong and immoral. Yes, those things run about two hundred dollars, and yes, really I want one but I'm not a thief. My friend said he'd take it if I wasn't going to steal it, because he wanted one too. The getaway car was around the corner. t would have been so, so easy especially once they turned off the lights. I always think about stealing things I really want.
6. Did I confess already to having a plot to steal my favorite cookbook out of the Boston Public Library. This plot was hatched in May I guess, and Leah was going to join the BPL, check out the book, and mail it to me. even told her specifically where it was and that it was hard to find, but should be there. She couldn't find it, and the plan never proceeded. At that time, the book was going for about 100 on used book sites. Now it is up to $474.00. Retail cost of $40. I'll never find it. Not even at the Strand.
7. Something odd happened to 2 of the 4 buttercreams I had to make yesterday. I have made a lot of buttercreams and by now I know what they look like when you have whipped your whited with sugar for plenty of time before adding cooked sugar, what it looks like when you add the sugar before the whites have really peaked, how it takes longer or shorter to firm up, and so on. n both of these instances I added a small portion of granulated sugar while shipping whites but they never got to soft peaks. The liquid whirled around in the Hobart bowl looking like skim milk. The first time poured the hot sugar. The next time I just dumped it out. The bad batched settled into white foam on top and yellow white on the bottom. I used a mixture of Eggology whites straight from the jar and some whites cracked in-house for the 4 buttercreams. am kind of glad it happened twice even if it was a waste of product and time, because t makes me feel more like the whites were contaminated (or the bowl was dirty or something) than that I personally fucked it up.
8. I don't enjoy decorative work. Even though my piping skills are now adequate.
9. I'm feeling really sensitive to sugar lately. I'm trying to east less processed sugar and more fruits (!?!?!?!). This is pretty much against my philosophy of living. So I hope this sensitivity goes away soon.
10. This whole week (last Sat. market, Tuesday market, and yesterday's market) I have bought nothing but fruits from the FB market. Yesterday delicious grapes again and some figs from my Sox fan at Knoll Farms.
I manhandled a ton of figs at the Slideluck Potshow, because I wanted to eat one but only if they were really ripe, plus I was afraid they weren't going to be as good as the ones from Knoll. I ate peanut noodles and homemade noodles and a really sexy key lime tart. I met my first food blogger and he was wearing leather suspenders and he loved my shortbread. When I fessed up to having a food blog myself, he said he'd blogroll me. I was also made to try a vegan{no dairy/no fat} broccoli soup. This man came up to me and my friends and sad to me (and only me) "Hi, how are you, I made this soup, no one's eating it, you should try it." So I did. I told him it needed butter and cream (such a pastry chef), and pepper. Then I told him he needed to try my cookie. We had the most San Francisco conversation, the three of us, it was all about sustainability and markets and not at all about art.
About the art, it was really refreshing to see an art show. It made me a little sad for the artist I used to live with who once made me a cowboy drawing on a lightbox and who had a wall full of drawings of cutie pie. I have such a crush on visual artists. It has always depressed me that I'm not talented in that way (not that being a writer isn't thrilling in its attention to detail and long, lonely hours--kind of like being a chef). Photography has been on my mind a lot since the Leica dream. These days I feel like everyone things they're a photographer because they know how to compose a shot and they've got a digital. If they're one step above that, they can play with the color balance or saturation in Photoshop (confession: I first started playing with Photoshop back in 97, 98...back when digital photography was a little amusement on a day when the darkroom was crowded). What was so refreshing about the slide show for me was the little things that get lost in the automatic digital age...the color balance, the precision of focus, proper use of lighting, nightshots or blurred shots that say something and don't just look cool (and if I said "cable release" would you know what I meant?). I was always drawn to photography because it was a visual art I could do, and I put in enough time to be ok.
What I actually never realized until last night was how narrative photography is, or can be. This despite the fact that I have actually had so many narrative photo projects myself. I must have known instinctually (it's a writer's art, just like pastry cheffing is, and foil-fencing), but until I saw on the cement gallery floor with my knees up and watched the slide show, feeling like a kindergardener at nap-time and about that tired, too, it wasn't anything I could have voiced. My favorite photographers are even narrativists (Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Nikki Lee, Mary Ellen Mark (though she is less), and for old time's sake Dorothea and Ansel). It was a nice realization to come to, even though haven't touched my SLR in two years (it's got an undeveloped roll of California pictures in it, of all things). It made me feel more comfortable with something I have grown so distanced from. And it made me feel like my favorite art still has merit, authenticity and fun. Photography isn't dying in the age of digital. The book isn't dying in the age of internet. {But what of darkrooms and publishing houses?}
I'm totally going to make dinner now and work on some writing. I have so much to do before the Alabama trip including somehow go to Oakland to return my library books (I was happy to realize that if I do this I can use the free printers at the Oakland library instead of the expensve ones at SFPL), go to the SFPL to pick up a book I should have read a long time ago but is now impossibly trendy, made Chez Panisse reservations, get a haircut so don't look like a scruffy teenaged boy in a dress (though that would be a new sight for Alabama)...
Friday, July 13, 2007
just wanna feel the sand beneath my toes
The air this morning smelled like the ocean {which is to say, the east}. Next week I'm driving down to a beach, though of course we won't be able to go swimming. Things we can do, though: see fish (I love fish), drink wine, get fruit, see the Santa Cruz Wednesday market where I have a coffee vendor friend, go camping, smoke birthday cigars (that wasn't my idea. my idea was pie.)
Last night I did something I shouldn't have done and now I'm tempted. SORELY. Last week someone tempted me too and then today, just now tempted again. Going to think about all this temptation while I'm trying to find the perfect Santa Cruz beach on Route 1, that one I dropped my keys in six years ago, the first time I came to California in my big black car.
Reminder: I came here for specific things.
Counterargument: Thinking on that.
I'm back in a kitchen and things are better. Discipline, order, sequence. Even though the fictional world is fragmented, petulant, needy.
Last night I did something I shouldn't have done and now I'm tempted. SORELY. Last week someone tempted me too and then today, just now tempted again. Going to think about all this temptation while I'm trying to find the perfect Santa Cruz beach on Route 1, that one I dropped my keys in six years ago, the first time I came to California in my big black car.
Reminder: I came here for specific things.
Counterargument: Thinking on that.
I'm back in a kitchen and things are better. Discipline, order, sequence. Even though the fictional world is fragmented, petulant, needy.
Monday, July 09, 2007
my mother used to call it "piggy meat"
Yeah that was me this morning at Cafe Flore. EATING BACON. just a bite, but oh, I'm slipping, I'm not me anymore, I'm down the rabbit hole.
There was SO MUCH foodie gossip at the cookout last night in an East Bay suburb. FB gossip too. My boss gave me some more background information on market stuff, the Slow Food fight was discussed, chef ventures rated, farmers markets in many towns discussed. We had many offers, for instant reservations at Quince, job hookups for me at ice cream joints, vacations, dinners, whatnot. Wild times were had.
It was really great to see the family of a dear family friend, which so happens to include my boss (whom I never see) and her husband. And it made me want to be the next Jonathan Franzen so I could write about how an interest seeps its way through one generation of a family, how its roots grow. How the children marry cattle farmers and fruit farmers and become the sort of people who covet reservations at The French Laundry, how the generation after that becomes chefs and bakers and coffee-makers. My own family is fairly small, and no one is quite sure where I got my passion for sweet things or voracious appetite for bookishness.
I'm not doing a very good job of keeping out of the East Bay. Chez Panisse two nights ago (upstairs, this time). Rocket salad with pickled onions and warm figs on toast. Morel ravioli in pea sauce. Warm fig and raspberry tart with honey ice cream (the most well matched flavors I've had in a long time in dessert, though it could just be I'm in a figgy mood). Tomorrow we're walking cutie pie at the Albany shoreline, going to the Tuesday market, hitting up the Berkeley Bowl and stopping by Ici so we can compare it to Bi Rite. In other words, doing all the day off things I normally do.
Bi Rite tonight was better than the Bi Rite we had at work (honey lavender, salted caramel, cookies n cream, all with those Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel chocolate things). The honey lavender was too much lavender for my taste. And I don't like honey ice cream unless it's that amazing honey lavender candied pistachio ice cream I made for my Chez Panisse dinner party. And their salted caramel ice cream is not Claudia Fleming's. Ici, however, does not inspire me to make comparisons to recipes I prefer. It only inspires me to eat ice cream and lots of it. Tonight, though, was a banana split with vanilla ice cream, caramelized bananas, hot fudge sauce, lightly whipped cream and walnuts, made slowly and carefully just for me!
It's my birthday soon and I really want some homemade pie and ice cream. Perhaps the rosewater mastic ice cream, or sweet corn, or oatmeal to go with something yummy and fruit. However I don't actually think I'll have time to make myself something for candle-wishing and growing older. I may very well be in Santa Cruz looking for the most perfect beach ever or in Monterrey communing with the fish
(my last birthday actually was also spent at an aquarium and, ahem, if you were with my on the last birthday, this one is sure going to be better). Should we make ice cream next week? If so what kind? Pie? Or would you rather just hit up my favorite spots, go zaatar tasting and remember those perfect desserts?
There was SO MUCH foodie gossip at the cookout last night in an East Bay suburb. FB gossip too. My boss gave me some more background information on market stuff, the Slow Food fight was discussed, chef ventures rated, farmers markets in many towns discussed. We had many offers, for instant reservations at Quince, job hookups for me at ice cream joints, vacations, dinners, whatnot. Wild times were had.
It was really great to see the family of a dear family friend, which so happens to include my boss (whom I never see) and her husband. And it made me want to be the next Jonathan Franzen so I could write about how an interest seeps its way through one generation of a family, how its roots grow. How the children marry cattle farmers and fruit farmers and become the sort of people who covet reservations at The French Laundry, how the generation after that becomes chefs and bakers and coffee-makers. My own family is fairly small, and no one is quite sure where I got my passion for sweet things or voracious appetite for bookishness.
I'm not doing a very good job of keeping out of the East Bay. Chez Panisse two nights ago (upstairs, this time). Rocket salad with pickled onions and warm figs on toast. Morel ravioli in pea sauce. Warm fig and raspberry tart with honey ice cream (the most well matched flavors I've had in a long time in dessert, though it could just be I'm in a figgy mood). Tomorrow we're walking cutie pie at the Albany shoreline, going to the Tuesday market, hitting up the Berkeley Bowl and stopping by Ici so we can compare it to Bi Rite. In other words, doing all the day off things I normally do.
Bi Rite tonight was better than the Bi Rite we had at work (honey lavender, salted caramel, cookies n cream, all with those Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel chocolate things). The honey lavender was too much lavender for my taste. And I don't like honey ice cream unless it's that amazing honey lavender candied pistachio ice cream I made for my Chez Panisse dinner party. And their salted caramel ice cream is not Claudia Fleming's. Ici, however, does not inspire me to make comparisons to recipes I prefer. It only inspires me to eat ice cream and lots of it. Tonight, though, was a banana split with vanilla ice cream, caramelized bananas, hot fudge sauce, lightly whipped cream and walnuts, made slowly and carefully just for me!
It's my birthday soon and I really want some homemade pie and ice cream. Perhaps the rosewater mastic ice cream, or sweet corn, or oatmeal to go with something yummy and fruit. However I don't actually think I'll have time to make myself something for candle-wishing and growing older. I may very well be in Santa Cruz looking for the most perfect beach ever or in Monterrey communing with the fish
(my last birthday actually was also spent at an aquarium and, ahem, if you were with my on the last birthday, this one is sure going to be better). Should we make ice cream next week? If so what kind? Pie? Or would you rather just hit up my favorite spots, go zaatar tasting and remember those perfect desserts?
Saturday, July 07, 2007
a damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw
...except it wasn't a dulcimer, it was a Leica. And she gave it to me.
And since then I've been seeing things differently.
The size of the chocolate chunks in the scones has changed, and so has the color of the cherries. The sugar feels like salt in my hands, its grains square.
Back in the city, but still not really around.
And since then I've been seeing things differently.
The size of the chocolate chunks in the scones has changed, and so has the color of the cherries. The sugar feels like salt in my hands, its grains square.
Back in the city, but still not really around.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
!!!
Last night in Oakland. Moving to SF tomorrow. Life=going to be easier except for the barrage of visitors in and out of my house. Three Weeks Straight of company. How is a cook to make some money, nevermind show up at work, especially at 5 am?
I will admit to no longer having any sympathy when friends who don't work in the industry talk about their work and how they can't really take time off/call in sick, etc. I tend to ask them if they really, truly *can't* or if they just don't think the boss would approve, don't really have the status quo there to vacation, have already called in sick that month, and so on. Because try being the only one who can do that job, whether or not you want to, whether or not you're sick, hungover, food-poisoned (well in that case you are supposed to stay home, but who does? who does?), having company, didn't sleep the night before, were up all night cleaning up after your dog, had too much fun at the black tie party, it was New Year's Eve, and so on. When I take next Friday off from work so I can lollygag in hot n sultry wine country, it means there just won't be any special pastries for market on Saturday.
Special pastries, what a black market item. All made with love, or else humor, possibly experimentation, and sometimes bearing a strange resemblance to UFOs.
More lemon verbena love today. I made candied lemon verbena with some of the preciousness, and the mananger got carried away and asked me pretty please to put it on the lemon tarts. She tends to want me to do decorating things I'm not into (dousing things with lavender or other herbs) but sometimes I humor her. So we had lemon curd tarts with chopped verbena and little tails in the meringue stars in the middle of the large lemon meringue tarts, thyme and raspberries on the chocolate souffle tarts. Lemon verbena's my new drug of choice. Except, I just learned (and why do people not tell me these things?) that we actually have some rose geranium growing in the flowerpot right outside our store.
So I'm thinking, something with the following: graham crackers, breton dough, plums, ganache, rose geranium cream. That is really two desserts and I'm going to have a pick a course and stay my hands. What goes with plums? Damned if I know. I've only ever made plum soup from that first menu at Sonsie and that was served with lemon yogurt and some kind of tuile, and didn't go over well at all. Also thinking of making a dessert in homage to the famous plum poem. But how would I illustrate the icebox, the implied company, the requisite formica counter, the man with the neat part in his hair [for these are all things i think about when i think about plums], the sadness within that knowledge? Rose geranium cream over ganache, but from there, where? I'm not much of a poet. Brevity is not my thing and I tend to stick to the details too much, the intricacies of a lived life and worries of an anxious mind.
Avoiding packing. Not quite sure how it got to be ten o'clock. Getting better at decorating the cupcakes, according to the boss. I'm not one of those pretty,prissy girls, but damn, I always wanna try.
Oh! + shortcakes. Biscuits almost there. The cream scones I tried out today had a really nice mouthfeel, great crumb, crunchy on the outside. This recipe was from Cook's Illustrated, quite possibly the most boring if earnest food magazine ever, modified by me to include 1/3 part cake flour. Still missing the cornmeal crunch and fantastic rise of the preferred biscuits, but it's been really great to take a recipe apart and learn bit by bit why I like what I like. i also sort of want to make the biscuits but with maple syrup instead of sugar but 1)they're barely very sweet anyway, 2)there's no maple syrup here and it's not local OR seasonal, and 3)not ideal for strawberry shortcakes.
Goal for next week: to not make my shortcakes look like pac-man style monsters. I just get really excited and earnest. I want to give people LOTS of berries and LOTS of cream. Like Bakesale Betty's does. So i toss some verbena-kissed berries on the biscuit, pack a punch of whipped cream, mound more berries on top and doff the biscuit-top hat at a lovely angle. My strawberry shortcakes are the summer you wish this was. They're Nantasket beach or Crane's beach, soft serve dipped in chocolate, skinny teenaged girls with eyeliner and cigarettes hanging from their lips. My shortcakes stay out too late, soak up the heat, burn their fair Irish skin and then peel, have sand stuck between their toes. My shortcakes ain't exactly pretty but they've been around some and they think they know a thing or two but they've got another think coming. They need to be a little more contained. Or, they *should*. I'll pretend I'm making shortcakes for the Jefa. After all, they're not just going on any dough anymore.
I will admit to no longer having any sympathy when friends who don't work in the industry talk about their work and how they can't really take time off/call in sick, etc. I tend to ask them if they really, truly *can't* or if they just don't think the boss would approve, don't really have the status quo there to vacation, have already called in sick that month, and so on. Because try being the only one who can do that job, whether or not you want to, whether or not you're sick, hungover, food-poisoned (well in that case you are supposed to stay home, but who does? who does?), having company, didn't sleep the night before, were up all night cleaning up after your dog, had too much fun at the black tie party, it was New Year's Eve, and so on. When I take next Friday off from work so I can lollygag in hot n sultry wine country, it means there just won't be any special pastries for market on Saturday.
Special pastries, what a black market item. All made with love, or else humor, possibly experimentation, and sometimes bearing a strange resemblance to UFOs.
More lemon verbena love today. I made candied lemon verbena with some of the preciousness, and the mananger got carried away and asked me pretty please to put it on the lemon tarts. She tends to want me to do decorating things I'm not into (dousing things with lavender or other herbs) but sometimes I humor her. So we had lemon curd tarts with chopped verbena and little tails in the meringue stars in the middle of the large lemon meringue tarts, thyme and raspberries on the chocolate souffle tarts. Lemon verbena's my new drug of choice. Except, I just learned (and why do people not tell me these things?) that we actually have some rose geranium growing in the flowerpot right outside our store.
So I'm thinking, something with the following: graham crackers, breton dough, plums, ganache, rose geranium cream. That is really two desserts and I'm going to have a pick a course and stay my hands. What goes with plums? Damned if I know. I've only ever made plum soup from that first menu at Sonsie and that was served with lemon yogurt and some kind of tuile, and didn't go over well at all. Also thinking of making a dessert in homage to the famous plum poem. But how would I illustrate the icebox, the implied company, the requisite formica counter, the man with the neat part in his hair [for these are all things i think about when i think about plums], the sadness within that knowledge? Rose geranium cream over ganache, but from there, where? I'm not much of a poet. Brevity is not my thing and I tend to stick to the details too much, the intricacies of a lived life and worries of an anxious mind.
Avoiding packing. Not quite sure how it got to be ten o'clock. Getting better at decorating the cupcakes, according to the boss. I'm not one of those pretty,prissy girls, but damn, I always wanna try.
Oh! + shortcakes. Biscuits almost there. The cream scones I tried out today had a really nice mouthfeel, great crumb, crunchy on the outside. This recipe was from Cook's Illustrated, quite possibly the most boring if earnest food magazine ever, modified by me to include 1/3 part cake flour. Still missing the cornmeal crunch and fantastic rise of the preferred biscuits, but it's been really great to take a recipe apart and learn bit by bit why I like what I like. i also sort of want to make the biscuits but with maple syrup instead of sugar but 1)they're barely very sweet anyway, 2)there's no maple syrup here and it's not local OR seasonal, and 3)not ideal for strawberry shortcakes.
Goal for next week: to not make my shortcakes look like pac-man style monsters. I just get really excited and earnest. I want to give people LOTS of berries and LOTS of cream. Like Bakesale Betty's does. So i toss some verbena-kissed berries on the biscuit, pack a punch of whipped cream, mound more berries on top and doff the biscuit-top hat at a lovely angle. My strawberry shortcakes are the summer you wish this was. They're Nantasket beach or Crane's beach, soft serve dipped in chocolate, skinny teenaged girls with eyeliner and cigarettes hanging from their lips. My shortcakes stay out too late, soak up the heat, burn their fair Irish skin and then peel, have sand stuck between their toes. My shortcakes ain't exactly pretty but they've been around some and they think they know a thing or two but they've got another think coming. They need to be a little more contained. Or, they *should*. I'll pretend I'm making shortcakes for the Jefa. After all, they're not just going on any dough anymore.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
taste, memory
It's hot out tonight in a sticky, East-coast kind of way, and I miss New York. Tonight while I walked the dog, I pretended I was in Poughkeepsie. It isn't hard. The streets of my neighborhood are alive in the same way the streets of Po-town are alive. The only stores open are places you don't really want to go in, places that hold weird hours. Dudes sit on the street corners and call out to you in a friendly sort of way. You overhear all sorts of sounds--music from the cars or houses, kids you feel like might have better places to be. There are too many liquor stores. There aren't enough places to get fresh produce. Where I am is mostly Mexican, and in Poughkeepsie the dominant culture is an uneasy blend of Italian and West Indian (mostly Jamaican) in the city, and white folks in the town. At the farm market across form Vassar I'd sell tomatoes to old Italian mamas and to the lady who ran the Vietnamese restaurant, and to young families with food stamps, my teachers, my friends.
But if I were in Poughkeepsie right now I'd find a way to get across my favorite bridge
and steal my favorite adventure buddy
away from her job as farmer this farm.
We'd take the train down to the city, and does it ever need another name or an introduction, that city? Then we'd be in my favorite place, Grand Central, and we'd run downstairs and hop one of the express trains downtown to Union Square where we'd wander the Greenmarket and I'd probably still be able to get some of my favorite apples from someone's cold cellar. I'd buy nuts from one of the street vendors. We'd go to Dean and Deluca's (again), because it's my New York ritual and I have to. I mean (of course) the one on Price Street, so that afterward we could go to HousingWorks bookstore and Kate's Paperie, and of course we would not have wandered to Dean and Deluca's without stopping at my other New York ritual, The Strand where with any luck I could finally buy myself a used copy of Claudia Fleming's cookbook and if my Hamptons-house-having friends could host actually eat some Claudia Fleming dessert. Right now. But in New York I'd cut across the Village to the Haagen Daaz by Carmine street and begin wandering the West Village looking for McNulty's. I'd go to Brooklyn. Walk through Prospect Park with my friends. Eat at Sea, and go to the bar with the really good burlesque, and order a pint of Yuengling and then a pint of Lager and drink them slowly. I'd actually visit the Doughnut Plant. I'd go to Fabiane's for some chocolate mousse. I'd remember how the streets smell and how they feel. How it feels to go rushing around like there's always someplace better you have to be, how it feels to put on that stone mask a simple act like getting to work requires, how it feels to be on the train clacketying through the center platform, on your way somewhere, now. How it feels to want so badly to be on your way somewhere. How it feels to be stuck.
I would ride the yellow trains all the way out to Coney Island and stand in that sand ditch, right at the point where the people are hidden and when you look straight ahead all you can see is sand and then ocean. The East Coast.
Maybe it's okay if someone else is doing these things right now. If some other girl is buying roasted nuts on her way home from work. If someone is having a pint with his buddy at Enid's or that black and red bar down by the L train. Some other cute baker is eating at North Fork tonight, or at Sea, or is just walking around listening to the crazy rush of New York and daydreaming of how the fog looks when it hangs low over the Golden Gate Bridge and it feels so good to be in the bright blue air and walking down Marina Blvd after a day of making cupcakes.
I've been doing lots of fiction-writing and it makes me introspective. But maybe it's just the heat, the way tonight feels like a thousand nights spent on the other side of the country.
But if I were in Poughkeepsie right now I'd find a way to get across my favorite bridge
and steal my favorite adventure buddy
away from her job as farmer this farm.
We'd take the train down to the city, and does it ever need another name or an introduction, that city? Then we'd be in my favorite place, Grand Central, and we'd run downstairs and hop one of the express trains downtown to Union Square where we'd wander the Greenmarket and I'd probably still be able to get some of my favorite apples from someone's cold cellar. I'd buy nuts from one of the street vendors. We'd go to Dean and Deluca's (again), because it's my New York ritual and I have to. I mean (of course) the one on Price Street, so that afterward we could go to HousingWorks bookstore and Kate's Paperie, and of course we would not have wandered to Dean and Deluca's without stopping at my other New York ritual, The Strand where with any luck I could finally buy myself a used copy of Claudia Fleming's cookbook and if my Hamptons-house-having friends could host actually eat some Claudia Fleming dessert. Right now. But in New York I'd cut across the Village to the Haagen Daaz by Carmine street and begin wandering the West Village looking for McNulty's. I'd go to Brooklyn. Walk through Prospect Park with my friends. Eat at Sea, and go to the bar with the really good burlesque, and order a pint of Yuengling and then a pint of Lager and drink them slowly. I'd actually visit the Doughnut Plant. I'd go to Fabiane's for some chocolate mousse. I'd remember how the streets smell and how they feel. How it feels to go rushing around like there's always someplace better you have to be, how it feels to put on that stone mask a simple act like getting to work requires, how it feels to be on the train clacketying through the center platform, on your way somewhere, now. How it feels to want so badly to be on your way somewhere. How it feels to be stuck.
I would ride the yellow trains all the way out to Coney Island and stand in that sand ditch, right at the point where the people are hidden and when you look straight ahead all you can see is sand and then ocean. The East Coast.
Maybe it's okay if someone else is doing these things right now. If some other girl is buying roasted nuts on her way home from work. If someone is having a pint with his buddy at Enid's or that black and red bar down by the L train. Some other cute baker is eating at North Fork tonight, or at Sea, or is just walking around listening to the crazy rush of New York and daydreaming of how the fog looks when it hangs low over the Golden Gate Bridge and it feels so good to be in the bright blue air and walking down Marina Blvd after a day of making cupcakes.
I've been doing lots of fiction-writing and it makes me introspective. But maybe it's just the heat, the way tonight feels like a thousand nights spent on the other side of the country.
Friday, June 08, 2007
thoughts after 12 hour day
incongruous is
Chefs in their pristine whites hustling through the financial district on a clear, sunny June day, chefs mostly men but then there's me, a baker, trying to get some air while walking toward the bus on Kearny? Geary? Whatever street is it I get the 30 Stockton on, only today I get the 45 and then walk down down down Divisadero staring at the green bay and trying to meet with more chefs before work. Chefs striding across busy streets, one carrying a brown paper bag, and without my uniform I'm just a girl in an ARMY shirt and suspicious clogs. Around us, suits talk about what they drank with their lunch at the Slanted Door the day before and if they can get away with a two hour lunch today, and when I reach the front of the line at Out the Door they give me a discount and heaps of smiles and before I can even put my change away my food's done, there's some times when a uniform is just a code and you fall down the rabbit hole, and if we give each other special treatment it's because, well, we know the price of daylight and the true cost of a working lunch. Fall into the bakery at 230 in time to sift most of a sack of powdered sugar and make frostings, fall out onto the 30 once more and s l o w l y this time eke downtown, too late for chef-sighting now even though there's still a couple conversations to be had.
And what is it about bakers (or, what is it about me, or both) that we covet the camaraderie of the brigade, that somewhere in our heart of hearts while we bent over Hobarts in the space between creaming and beating and secretly wish we were butchering or working the line, just on the other side. There are many things in cake and ice cream, but they lack the glamour, the edge, the brute strength and discipline and all those other masculine adjectives hurled about by the real food writers (which is to say the chef-writers and not the food media). We feel like the geek in the corner; Anthony Bourdain calls us out as neuroscientists, Molly O'Neill rues the way we will never be rock stars in our own right, just sugar-coated early risers alone in a dark kitchen. We/I miss the company of restaurant kitchens even if we've no one to talk to who speaks our languages, even if we're out the door into the still-light evening while our rockstar coworkers mise for dinner service. We invent fake blogs and write fiction and write ourselves out of the story, even as we keep real blogs to tell the story of what we strive to do, our endless testing, our love of the pleasure business.
I once told a talented chef that bakers are underpaid and get no respect and she laughed in my face and told me she did her pastry chef's inventory and plated dessert s when her pastry chef got slammed, and the shock on my face must not have conveyed my regard for her attention, even if it is only getting done what needs to get done.
When I write about restaurants, my characters are rockstar chefs and tough sous chefs, neurotic managers and angelic line cooks, and wherever my fiction pastry chef is hiding she has not seen fit to make an appearance, for my stories begin too late at night and continue into dawn. Too soon, work.
Every kitchen has drama...and gossip is currency, but I would rather be doing.
Chefs in their pristine whites hustling through the financial district on a clear, sunny June day, chefs mostly men but then there's me, a baker, trying to get some air while walking toward the bus on Kearny? Geary? Whatever street is it I get the 30 Stockton on, only today I get the 45 and then walk down down down Divisadero staring at the green bay and trying to meet with more chefs before work. Chefs striding across busy streets, one carrying a brown paper bag, and without my uniform I'm just a girl in an ARMY shirt and suspicious clogs. Around us, suits talk about what they drank with their lunch at the Slanted Door the day before and if they can get away with a two hour lunch today, and when I reach the front of the line at Out the Door they give me a discount and heaps of smiles and before I can even put my change away my food's done, there's some times when a uniform is just a code and you fall down the rabbit hole, and if we give each other special treatment it's because, well, we know the price of daylight and the true cost of a working lunch. Fall into the bakery at 230 in time to sift most of a sack of powdered sugar and make frostings, fall out onto the 30 once more and s l o w l y this time eke downtown, too late for chef-sighting now even though there's still a couple conversations to be had.
And what is it about bakers (or, what is it about me, or both) that we covet the camaraderie of the brigade, that somewhere in our heart of hearts while we bent over Hobarts in the space between creaming and beating and secretly wish we were butchering or working the line, just on the other side. There are many things in cake and ice cream, but they lack the glamour, the edge, the brute strength and discipline and all those other masculine adjectives hurled about by the real food writers (which is to say the chef-writers and not the food media). We feel like the geek in the corner; Anthony Bourdain calls us out as neuroscientists, Molly O'Neill rues the way we will never be rock stars in our own right, just sugar-coated early risers alone in a dark kitchen. We/I miss the company of restaurant kitchens even if we've no one to talk to who speaks our languages, even if we're out the door into the still-light evening while our rockstar coworkers mise for dinner service. We invent fake blogs and write fiction and write ourselves out of the story, even as we keep real blogs to tell the story of what we strive to do, our endless testing, our love of the pleasure business.
I once told a talented chef that bakers are underpaid and get no respect and she laughed in my face and told me she did her pastry chef's inventory and plated dessert s when her pastry chef got slammed, and the shock on my face must not have conveyed my regard for her attention, even if it is only getting done what needs to get done.
When I write about restaurants, my characters are rockstar chefs and tough sous chefs, neurotic managers and angelic line cooks, and wherever my fiction pastry chef is hiding she has not seen fit to make an appearance, for my stories begin too late at night and continue into dawn. Too soon, work.
Every kitchen has drama...and gossip is currency, but I would rather be doing.
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