one more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in praise of tuesday

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

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

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

confessions

If not offering excuses is the first step, then I'll say it here:

I fuck things up.

I am guilty of daydreaming, of being inattentive to things sometimes. My boss got very frustrated with me today because I overbaked some tart shells and then I underbaked these lil phyllo shells. I should know how to do these things better but I forget to taste and touch and smell and it's stupid. I shouldn't forget those things. I have a very physical job and I should be physically engaged with it, with more than just my hands.

I am not sure why this is happening because it's not like I ever overbaked a tray of cupcakes at my last job. But. It is, so then...

I hate disappointing people. Especially those who are my boss/my friend. People I respect. I hate expecting to disappoint them. I should stop it, right? Admit my faults, right? Because that is the only way to get better, and if I keep being mulish I'll only ever dig myself out of a kitchen, out of learning, not in.

And I want to be in. I want to be in enough that I ate some raw lamb the other day, and I have never eaten lamb and not eaten red meat in 14 years. But now it's in a dish on garde manger and I was disappointing the chef, and my boss, and B, and I knew I'd get in trouble for it if not that night then soon. Imminently. I had to be able to taste it and I have to be able to taste it now, each time I put an order out, and it may not be something I like at all but it's necessary.

I don't want this to sound like I'm whining because I'm not whining. I don't want sympathy or any sort of assurance. I don't like being told what to do but I don't like doing the wrong this just as much, so it would make sense that I learn to do the right thing, and do it, rather than think I know what the right thing is. It would make sense, yes. Stop being so pigheaded, jackass.

I like to pretend that I'm tough, that I'm tough enough. I hold myself at a distance without meaning to and then when people see my vulnerability, I like to think they see it all the time. I like to think they know how I really feel/what I really think even if that wall goes back up because we're close now and it's sometimes scary. I have this problem with women, too; I'm detached enough to pursue the ones I'm not very interested in, and have such a push-pull with the ones I do like, because, god, would there be anything worse than admitting I might like you? And it might be all wrong, or you might not like me, or that it might not be enough to push aside the other things in life? I like to think I know the score, the inside information. Sometimes, it's true, I do. Sometimes all of what I think can turn out to be so not true, or half-true. Sometimes it doesn't even matter.

I am not where I could be. Not even where I should be, perhaps. In order to get there-or at least try-I need to give up a little on all of my ideas of certainty.

Because, clearly, I don't know.

I can be strong and stubborn and stupid. This can serve me well when, say, I have no savings, but a home and a stable job but desperately want to move across the country where no job awaits me, and nothing, and no one. But here, now, it's not working for me.

I'm so hungry. I forgot to eat this morning and I'm kind of sick so I don't have an appetite (or taste buds or a sense of smell). I ate a lot of staff meal but that was hours ago. It took me an hour and a half again to get home on MUNI cause my line stops running direct after 9 pm. And the bottle of cough syrup I had in my bag spilled , and then dripped from my bag all over my leg, so I was commuting home in chef pants with sticky wet goo all over me. I should get some sleep so I can get up early and go open tomorrow, but my mind's too wired. But I'll get up and go in early tomorrow, even if I feel worse than I did this morning, because there's no such thing as a sick day in my industry. Never mind running late. And you know what, no complaints. We have long crazy days. All the time we've overworked, running on little sleep or food or both, and it's just how things are.

I used to be such a good student in high school and college, even grad school, but I wonder if it was because I liked being taught per se, or I liked being rewarded for being smart and knowing things, or struggling together to figure them out...so it can't be that I don't want to learn.

I think there is a a part of me that worries that if I admit my faults I still won't get better. Irrational, perhaps? Of all the things my old boss said to me, there's only one that echoes in my mind, sometimes, like a superstition or a curse:

It's Clear You Have Potential, But No One Can Seem To Get It Out Of You.

pistachio/ out to sea

If you are coming here to find out information on the obvious, the thing I am not talking about except for vaguely, yes, I have a new boss. But that ignores the fact that I have worked for this person since being hired at the restaurant, that we know one another's strengths and weaknesses and work personalities and tastes. We are into the second week and things are becoming routine again, in a sense. We have replaced most of the things we no longer have, so that trying to get a job done does not mean a discovery of no rolling pin, no pastry bag tip, no magnet or marker. We are redecorating the kitchen.

We have almost all (one was xc) been in touch with our old boss. Heartfelt emails exchanged, replies (or not) waited for...this thing requires distance. It could have spun a thousand ways but the pieces fell this particular way. We get sad, we get angry, we navigate all kinds of tension in the course of a day. This is not easy. And we have not been silent even though sometimes that may be easier, too.

We did not ask for this, but we nonetheless react. Make new sweet things. People ask me, several of them, if I am planning on leaving now as if, because I signed up to work for one person and that person is no longer there I would want to leave. Hell No I tell them. I tell them how I would never abandon my team, not least in their moment of need even if I *did* feel I could no longer work there without this one person. And then I tell them how my new boss has so much knowledge and experience and I feel lucky to learn from it. Do I have confidence in my new boss? Do I like her food? Am I happy to be there? Yes, to all of these. To more.

But in the end, it's just another day at work. Chopping things. Making salads. Doing inventory and cleaning and watching.

fruit memories/newness

I made some fig jam today at work for one of the two parties we had. Took black mission figs, cooked them down with some sweet muscat wine and a little water. I took some time to appreciate the sugar sheen on the figs as I diced them, stopped several times to stir, add, adjust, left some space for patience. Pureed the whole thing. It was very good. It went with fried graviera cheese.

Today I also learned how to cook the octopus, from someone who I am strangely starting to bond with. When the dish was put together, he handed me a piece of tentacle. I stared it down, remembering the rubbery feeling in my hand. I tasted it. I let go. It was good, better with sauce and with the side salad. Do You Wanna Show Me? I asked him. Do You Wanna Learn? he replied. There was a time when I wouldn't have said yes.

I worked garde manger tonight so I stayed out of the pastry kitchen, mostly, except to try a spoonful of some fresh-spun ice cream that my new boss held out to me. When I tried to taste it, still so soft and precious, it slid down my throat instead in the manner of an ice cream shot. Some slight hint of flavor lingered in my throat, but it went too fast to make a full impression. Come Back When You Learn To Eat, she said. Visitors to our kitchen soon learn that we tease mercilessly though it is, like a schoolboy's crush, always affectionate at heart. So I went back to the savory kitchen but there it was, an impression, a tease, a hint of an answer to a question.

Yesterday I tasted something good lord so delicious. I was in the pk while it was being born and I got to watch it come to life, got to dip fingers in process, asked the whys. It was incredible. I'm so excited for it.

Change is constant. What do you believe, what do you believe in? Do you fight or do you let go? Me, I'm trying to hold to the things I resolved at week's beginning.

I loved that fig jam. I made it with love. I made it meditating on the first perfect fig I ever ate, in a small Palestinian town, which led me to the figs from Knoll, and the fruit-stealing adventure in Berkeley with some perfect figs devoured on spot, and faint memories of Jerusalem, desert sunrises, certain women, Sonsie figs, my bad habits, my good intentions. Food is love. Food is a springboard. Food is a lot of things, but only with human intervention.

the update

There are two moments I keep coming back to from the last few days. One is Monday night after a very lazy day...I went out driving, and I drove until I felt like I could write. Until I felt like I could open a cookbook and let the flavors, textures and ideas wash over me. I drove through from Oakland through Emeryville, slipping through streets but never getting lost, then down Ashby and back to the freeway, and back here. I came upstairs and wrote for a while. Then I opened the Oleana cookbook and paged through, and the dishes felt at once like coming home and like variations on a theme. When I look at that cookbook I see the tiny kitchen and its spice rack, its back line, its dish. When I look at the pastry recipes the reaction is more visceral. I remember them....and tied up with remembering them is the crazy abundant wild energy I had at the time. The gluttony of food. The desperation to move to SF. I may have been in Boston but I wasn't, not really. I felt that on Monday, again. At least a faint glimmer of it. I tried to think of ways to keep it close to me, to carry it through the week. To do certain things differently.

And then the week started. And Tuesday afternoon I was washing out a pastry brush someone left in the sink, and went outside to shake it off. I looked back inside, through the glass windows that seem to have grown larger, like some kind of Alice in Wonderland trick, to see two of my coworkers laughing at me. I went back inside, asking what was all so funny. They told me the brush wasn't dry enough and I needed to keep doing it. Then my other coworker walked in the room. Wait Here, I told her. You Have To Stay Here To Laugh At Me, Too. I walked back outside prepared to shake out the brush, and of course looked back at their faces, and almost fell over laughing. There was something about it all...how their faces through the glass mirrored mine, how the moment felt stretched to a minute perhaps, how it grew larger and seemed very fictional, almost. Except there was no realization, no epiphany, no sense of largeness. Only laughter, but strange and joyous and not unkind. I shook the brush and we all laughed, and I went back inside.

They already tell me when I'm being stupid, mean, or plain inept, anyway...

happiness is a warm...

what if someone could give you everything you ever wanted?

or, better yet, what if you could create it together?

Make all of those things you talked about when you were wee Vassar students be more than great and wonderful and crazy dreams(things that later click into odd sorts of sense as scientists become farmers become stagiares and writers become cooks)? One day is what we always said...we shall see what we shall see but somehow we keep pushing and growing closer together toward something. tangible becomes intagible. i'm betwixt and between. meet me here, at the borders?

Just got off the phone with my favorite person in Po-town. Who may come visit me here in the next couple months, oh I hope, because she would adore the FPFM and everything else.

hiding.

I've been hiding out at morgan's house, with a dog and the computer I just got back from the apple store, trying to make order out of chaos. I recovered a lot more material than I thought I would find, including several published pieces, my entire thesis manuscript, my first story ever about SF, and the draft of a wonderful flash piece I was hoping to recover so that I could send to to a journal who was really, truly hoping to publish my oaklandish flash piece but got there several months too late. So today is editing that piece back to polished, sending it to the editor, and keeping my fingers crossed.

Here's the thing: I need to find a new place to live. By the end of this month. With a dog, it's tricky. I'm trying to take my own advice to a friend and not stress out about the things I can't control but really, I've just had shit luck since december 18th and if you work with me or know me and think I have been sad or grumpy it's true and I am trying really hard to be more positive. There are a few bright spots in the whirling fog and work is one. Even if I'm only cleaning down the bakeshop at the end of the night rockin out to Crimson and Clover. Work is my rock in the middle of all this messiness and I am so thankful to feel that way about a workplace. It's unusual for me.

I'll be at the RADAR reading series this thursday gettin my writers' groove on, knitting some handwarmers and checkin out the pretty girls. I'll be at work most every night. I try to spend most of my time out of the house. But hiding out in others' houses means I'm hiding from the problems at home and that isn't good either. So I'm forcing myself to get the things in order and do the hard work of moving on for the third time in a year.

a work story

I've told this story twice in the last week and both times my boss interrupts me at the same moment and says that I am not doing a good job of telling the story. I'm not telling it right, and I'm supposed to be a writer. The problem lies in the fact that we both right, and we both see the point of the story as being different. So I'm going to tell it again and I'll try to do it better justice this time, though perhaps it is only a funny story if you know me and you know my boss.

So we're all sitting down eating staff meal and it's Wednesday night, and this weekend have insane numbers of parties coming up. In addition to regular service and production and having one of the pastry elves working garde manger, we've got to come up with extra-special treats. My boss asks me what I'm doing that night (nothin') and then she says to me

Do You Want To Stay Late And Work On Some Fun Things For The Parties With Me {insert enthusiastic hand motions here of twinkling fingers, because my boss is big on that sort of thing}

and I say

Yeah. {this is the point at which she always interrupts to say that I'm not telling the story right, because I need to clarify that the Yeah is not an enthusiastic, good lil employee yeah, but the sort of Yeah you'd give if someone offered you a piece of their orange. a sure-why-not Yeah}

because to my boss it's a story of her giving me a chance to learn something new and fun and to play with persimmons and me having a response not as exciting as she wants, which, yknow, was sort of the same response she got when she offered me the job, which actually doesn't mean that I'm not excited, tho it may come off that way...

So my boss says, OK, Let's try this AGAIN, What Sort Of Answer Is That. Lindsey,
Do You Want To Stay Late And Work On Some Fun Things For The Parties With Me?

Me: Yes, Chef, I Would LOVE To Stay And Work On The Parties With You, What Are We Going To Make?

and she says, Gingerbread And Two Parfaits.

I nod, continue eating my staff meal and then it sinks into the brain that, lo and behold, she's actually TOLD ME what we are going to make. Because Every Time there's something new in the pastry kitchen I ask what it is, and every time my boss says Oh It's A Surprise or Oh You'll See, so I said

Wait. Stop. You Just Told Me...

Historic moment, people. Because for me, the point of the story is every time there's something new going on I ask and every time I'm not told, and you would wonder why I don't stop asking and accept the fact of all the mysteries. But her non-answers to me didn't mean I was no longer going to wonder what the mysterious projects were, so I asked without expecting an answer the way you ask a really pretty girl for her number, because you don't think you'll get it but what if you did? This to me is the point of the story.

I told my boss that it should happen more often and she said No, she didn't think it should.

I hope your work week is shorter than mine has been, and that there is something fun at the market tomorrow.

queer(ing) food

Tonight I’m thinking about food, ancestry, homelands and food knowledge. How do we come to know what we know about food and how do we pass it on?

I got home from working today un-hungry (for once) and with a pile of FPFM veggies in the fridge and some open tofu and leftover brown rice. So I walked to the store to get myself some supplies to make a giant pot of Indian-style curry. I hadn’t made the dish in…I want to say, since I lived in New York but that might not be correct. Although I don’t recall making it in the Somerville house, or since coming west. I started sautéing a potato with the pot lid on to get it moist, and after ten minutes or so I added broccoli, then a lil later some peppers and zucchini, and somewhere along the way a liberal dose of curry powder. At some point when everything is fairly cooked, put a few dollops of yogurt in, check the seasonings and let it come together for a while on the stove. I added more+ curry powder, some chili substance, hot pepper flakes, apple cider vinegar and salt and ended up with a tangy, spicy-but-not-overly-hot yogurty pile. I had to change skillets because it outgrew the 9" cast iron pan. There’s currently a big baggie in the freezer and 1-2 servings in the fridge.

The smell took me back to college. Our school cafeteria had this area called The Vegan Station, where you could create your own stir fry with an array of vegetables, noodles/rice, spices, although for sauce you were pretty much limited to soy and a couple of oils. The more hardcore indie-rock-vegan kids got fairly adept at creating little vials of orange-teriyaki or peanut sauce while they waited in line. When I moved into senior housing, we were cooking a lot of Indian and I think I started making this dish then, with some jar of curry paste I’d gotten at Pearl River or something {back in its Canal Street days, before it got all Soho-chic}. I used to make it all the time with an assortment of veggies, plus chickpeas, almonds and raisins. Tonight I missed the chickpeas.

My roommate asked what I was doing and if I was going by any sort of recipe. Not Really, I told her. But I Used To. And the winging-it factor, though informed by my career of course, was more a matter of having made the dish so many times, and in so many places. I have a vivid memory of my friend cooking it for us and her then-boyfriend-now-husband in their Manhattan apartment. Nothing Needs To Be Made With Heavy Cream, she told me as she dolloped in nonfat yogurt. I pouted in protest.

It’s all the Claudia Roden article that’s got me thinking, really. In the excellent New Yorker profile, they discuss her work, her personal history, and how she filters time though recipes, through food. Try to find Claudia Roden’s Istanbul, Jerusaelm, Damascus. It’s historical, emotional, art as much as artifact. Her treatment of cultures is part meditation, part documentation. The article made me want to go out and request all of her books from the library. But that’s be a lot to bike ride home with.

In the spirit of food as passageway, food as memoir, food as sign and signifier, is there such a thing as queer food? Can food be queered and if so what would that look like? To think of queering food as a transgression or a coupling of inappropriate items, well, so much of cuisine is exactly that anyway. If that were the case it seems like fusion food would be queer food. The heterosexuals can have classical cuisine and the homos can have the rest.

We have ways of dressing. Ways of acting. We read each other in all kinds of settings. We negotiate various codes of silence or appropriateness. Sometimes we pass for straight. Sometimes we’re mistakenly addressed as Sir or Ma’am or assumed to be dating someone who’s really just a friend or offered to be fixed up with a nice boy and sometimes we make these same assumptions about our own. Sometimes we say one thing and then at other times we can’t speak those same words. We love, we fight, we fuck, we surrender, we work, we worry about if we will get beaten up, we worry if we can get health care/marriage/babies/tax breaks, we go to pride events or not, we read the rights books, we someone and slowly learn all of these codes. I Can Just Tell I’ve told my mother how many times about men or women that are queer. We read; we’re read. How strange and wonderful it would be if we had a cuisine for all of that too, but who would be its cookbook author and what would we serve? Our community, such as it is, is far flung and divisive. International. Multilingual. Representative of every gender variation. If we can’t queer food, and surely some theoretician more dedicated than me will prove we can do this, then can we prepare queer food?

The Beehive, Sibling Rivalry + Picco: a South End report

{When I was just a kid, the South End...which is not the same as South Boston, yo...was the up and coming gay neighborhood and, coincidentally or no, the place where food-with-a-capital-F came to town. Since gentrification of course, the gays moved away and the neighborhood has seen many restaurants come and go}

The Beehive was something I found out about right before I moved to SF and it's finally open. Housed inside the old Cyclorama, it's got a bar, live music, a funky downstairs dining space...and lots of noise. Too much noise for my mom and I to actually stay and enjoy a meal, not that the menu was anything we'd especially want to stay for. I really wanted to poke around--the Cyclorama's a gorgeous and interesting space, and I'd worked a couple banquet gigs there and wanted to see how they'd transformed the space--but we went for the food and it appeared to be one of the last considerations. The restaurant had a good management team with a strong background. The chef was ex-Via Matta/Michael Schlow. What could be bad? Evidently you need to have your priorities straight in opening a restaurant and the Beehive team seemed to be focused on getting young straight people drunk in a stylish setting.

We left and walked a few doors down to Sibling Rivalry, which is run by Chef brothers David and Bob Kinkead. The brothers split the menu between them, each developing a dish around a key ingredient: shellfish, tomatoes, bacon. Then you choose whose food you eat. Gimmicky if it weren't so well executed. This time we shared a ravioli appetizer with fresh pasta and the lightest, creamiest filling, a side of zucchini fries that tasted too fishy from the deep fryer, and a vietnamese style crispy squid salad which I agreed to try because my mother told me squid tasted like onion rings. I've actually never seen *her* eat it before but she swore she liked it. Sibling Rivalry used to have an awesome pastry chef who has since left, and the dessert menu only really tempted with orange blossom crepes with cheese and poached pears, so we headed down a few more doors to

Picco, an ice cream and pizza joint. My mother got peach, which was a mild vanilla base with some peach pieces. I got coconut and caramel peanut swirl...the coconut was delicious. It was smoothly textured and looked to have a vanilla bean in it (or what else would make it flecked?), but every now and then I'd get a mouthful of coconut flakes. The peanuts had me skeptical but they were nice (salty), if the caramel was a tad sweet.

Home for baseball-and-knitting. Challenging to remain calm when the Yankees are coming to town on Friday, even if we're five games up and tonight we were losing {to the Devil Rays, which is just pathetic} right from the start. I'd furiously knit in between batters and stop when the count reached 3-2 or if anyone hit anything. I make so many mistakes when I knit while watching baseball, but it's one of the only things that keeps me even tempered. Cooking while listening to a ball game...yeah, I'll let the timers beep and the milk bubble over if we're in a tight spot. Heh.

I love the people here. Get to know your local New Englander, if you don't already. I love how they talk. I love the Yankee-hating. I love the way we can never be optimistic especially when baseball is concerned. I love how humble people are here, how the greatest enthusiasm is tempered through all kinds of filters and registers only to the observer as casual interest. I love the way culture is underground, food culture especially. It's very different in SF. This is a town you need to know how to navigate. You need to know the rules. Even if you have lived here always.

That all said I just told someone I was ready to get back to SF, and it's true. I've seen or will see everyone. I'm ready to be in the kitchen again...my postage stamp, hot plate, FPFM-madness kitchen and the insanity of the Saturday market. see you there?

frolicking

Running around the town. Chez Panisse last night, Aziza tonight followed by an Ocean Beach bonfire and home to peach crisp that's currently baking. Frog Hollow Summerset peaches with some Woodleaf Blue Diamond plums tossed in for good measure. Running through the streets of Berkeley with a battered takeout box carrying the rest of my perfect eggplant pizza from CP, getting hit on by drunken boys (boys!) on BART, falling asleep standing up with my head resting on burned-up arms, trying to make it to Ici twice in one day, not being able to get there, eating gelato instead which just isn't the same as ice cream, even if it's violet flavored, cuddling the cutie pie, making BBQ plans for next week, having brunch and hanging out with normal people because it's the weekend and I'm not working for once, getting an open invitation to play with an ice cream machine(!!), spying on someone else's new ice cream machine(?!?), staying up until mid morning and being very un-bakerly, and of course, gossiping, for the last time perhaps, with the cupcake makers, about why the boss was surprised to hear I was leaving...I mean, really, surprised...and what I'm going to do next.

things we did + didn't say

There are a lot of things I want to say right now but I can't (some of them I just said in an email).

5.13 miles tonight on foot from the Ferry Building basically to home, because I didn't really feel like getting on any of the early BARTs and then by the time I hit Civic Center Vas Ness wasn't much further up or Mission and I could always catch a bus, only if I was at 13 then my home wasn't all that much further away plus now I could see it, that odd hill with the misshapen trees on top that look like some African safari landscape, the fog still holding off. By the time I arrived home the fog was coming down moving fast now.

3.92 miles each way on my bike Friday night (from the hillside through the Mission's flatness eke across Market zigzag around the Lower Haight hills suddenly all the way down Fell cruise the Panhandle for some time and then turn around, in reverse, stopping by Bi Rite for ice cream on the way home)

I put so much energy out in my last post about what I want and what I'm looking for and so many responses came back from the world. But the words to discuss it I can't find or I can't say so I've been restless. Moving not in straight lines. Right now is the quiet time, I understand it even if I don't want to accept it. Waiting for the results of all that energy to manifest in the form of, if not the ideal, something closer.

{I thought I knew what the ideal was but it is not to come to me now, in the most commonsense way, so then what?}

How did I forget that part, that it is my weakness I am impatient for change? That I want to be better yesterday?

And what I enjoy is this: the moment when a question arises or a subject. Buttercreams. Caramel. How to stir ganache. Whatever. And then everybody gives their answers taught to them by some chef or boss or food television personality, who knows. It's a dialogue, a debate, certainly learning. But I don't want to take the authoritative voice or be the center of attention and so I don't call myself teacher.

There is one more this I want to say but it's best not to say it. Exercising my rarely if ever used filter.

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)...

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?

birthday cakes for diabetics

...Someone just called me and now I'm all fidgety and my mouth is quirking itself into funny little expressions. Fidgety fidgety gonna fidget till Friday, dios mio.

My buddy Brandon told me last night that all he wanted for his birthday was a birthday cake, and no one got him one. I'll hook you up I said, what do you want? Yellow cake, chocolate frosting. So tonight I'm calling my mom for the yellow cake recipe I like best, the 1234 cake from Joy (one of the many things left in Boston). I think I'm going to make american buttercream for the frosting, because I think the unfussy sweetness would be right for him. I kind of want to decorate it with rolled fondant diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs, cause he's a gambler, but I kind of want to try preserving nasturtium blossoms in egg whites and sugar, like violets are treated. I've got a couple weeks to figure it out. And it might just get some royal icing writing like a true birthday cake should.

Tonight I'm going to try making the ice cream base for the caramel THING-filled ice cream.

Trawl down Mission and back up the hill after a couple of drinks with your friend, the bartender, who orders you fancy cocktails because he'd prefer you drink something fussier than a beer. Enjoy the smiles and stares of the girl in short shorts who finds you something you don't find yourself. Discuss your industry, from your various points of reference. You landed here on flight from the nine to five world, and to give safe haven to your creativity. He landed here on a plan to get back to that world and put himself through college. Discuss what you want, what you really want, and how you've always thought you'd do more than what you have done thus far {but also, how you haven't rested, how you've always been fighting your way forward}. When he opens up to you about things you have not yet heard, you keep the information like you keep all your secrets. But you're also a storyteller. Bits and pieces of the private stories find their way into textual longings.

In college I always used to ask my favorite professor how I'd still write after school. How to get published and how to be a better writer. I wanted him to tell me what to do. The five-point step to be the next Jhumpa Lahiri {Amy Bloom. Michael Cunningham. Carole Maso.} All he'd ever tell me was that the fact I was asking these questions was the evidence that I would do it. This is what I've been repeating to myself these days as I focus so much energy on other things. The fact that I'm still here spending so much time and energy on the page is the proof that I'm for real. I'm going to spend more time focusing on how to get my words out there.

This week at Frog Hollow the nectarine cake should be making her debut, if all goes well. I've tried so many peaches lately but they just don't do it for me the way the nectarine does.