very little can bring me such joy, but...

all I have to say is...

guess who learned to spin ice cream today? i haven't spun any, but i will soon, but really...

guess who doesn't have to beg anymore...like, really, beg with a sad-puppy face on and the knowledge that even though i beg i'll still not be taught but i have to ask anyway, cause

it's the ice cream machine...and i have to ask...

I Hope I'm There When You Actually Get To Use It said one of my coworkers today.
Why, Cuz I'll Be Happy And Bouncing All Day Long? I said.
Yep.

it's true, sometimes it's just the little things.

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?

there was indeed birthday pie

There's a story in it somewhere. How Leah and I drove down Route 1 after work on Monday with vague plans to camp somewhere between Santa Cruz and Monterey, with a car full of cupcakes, one dog, and no gas. How every campsite was full until darkness hit halfway to Big Sur. How I told her of Kerouac's nighttime arrival in the book of that name and said I don't want to be driving this road in the dark. As the fog rolled in, grey upon grey, I asked the gods (and yes, I don't believe, or know what to believe) for a sign of this next year.


How we drove some time more and found an empty campsite and a store to buy groceries (hummus+stoned wheat thins for me, beer, smores stuff, tuna sandwich for Leah). How we brought the dog into the no-dog campsite hiking in darkness and me in flip flops but he wouldn't stop barking, so we stopped trying to set up the tent and hiked back out. How we ate in the car and brought beers to the hood to watch more shooting stars than I've ever seen before. How I slept in the car and Leah slept on the car and we woke five hours later bleary eyed, starving, and stumbled up the road to a diner where I ordered not one but two breakfasts (huevos rancheros, homemade cinnamon bun) and the coffee was good.

How I wanted to go to the aquarium but instead we went wading in the cold and dark blue waters with sea anemones and otters.




How that entire day we kept stumbling into scenes of freakish beauty. How I had so many things to think about, but found the time to get away and stop thinking so much about everything, but only about the important things.

How there was, after all, birthday pie, and strawberry picking in fields that kissed the sky.


Swanton's berry farm just happened to be on our journey home, so we picked strawberries, which Leah had never done before, and bought a big ollallieberry birthday pie for me.

How we ate sweet sweet strawberry shortcake, but it wasn't as good as mine at the FB.


How we arrived back to SF and didn't' get to go to Aziza. But had marvelous beauty, deep fog, and undertones of fiction I'd written when moving to the Bay was just a dream in my writer's mind.

That's the sort of story I want to write about food. A story about how food is sustenance when you're starving and haven't eaten in 24 hours, but then again food is a sign from above, and a sign you're doing something right {for once}, how food is a gift you give someone else, a memory, a key. I will write the story of that trip south. I may have been tasked to write it in longhand, in the shadow of the Maritime Museum down by Ghirardelli Square. In the place where my characters would have fished.

It was a very literary trip, as well.Good for the mind.

Things are afoot but no time to explain.

beginnings, endings

I have reconciled with the chocolate cherry cake. It has been much maligned in these pages of late, and so I'm glad that we have come to terms, because people really do like chocolate and cherries and flourless chocolate cake substances, even if they're not especially captivating to me.

When I originally made the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe from Ripe for Dessert, substituting cherry conserve for the candied cherries, and I think this was actually my favorite version, but it didn't sell well at all. Next step, once cherries arrived of course, was cherries cooked in syrup with David's cake...too moist, and too dominated by chocolate.

The next step was to find a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe and add in the cherries. The chocolate was less dominant (actually only used cocoa powder), but it was too challenging to handle.

For the birthday cake it was requested I use up some of the ancient, pre-divorce Guittard semisweet from the Berkeley Bowl (there's a Bay area mouthful). I took (if you love me, buy me a digital scale) approx. 2/3 cup of the Guittard chips and approx. 3/4 of the bar of Scharffen Berger 70%. The blend of chocolates worked really well, ad the Guittard tamed down the winey intensity of the Scharffen Berger and allowed the cherries to really come through. A much better balance of flavors. It was really appreciated by the party guests. Which was nice, yknow, cause it didn't really look like much. Flourless cake or any souffle like cake tends to look like crap. I left it unadorned. We ate it with chocolate mousse and ice cream. It's been a very, very long times since I had a non-Sonsie chocolate mousse.

However, it is still too moist. There really isn't any liquid, aside from what little the cherries ooze out...maybe if I make it again I shall drain them well...Not really sure how to correct that otherwise. Cake being too moist, what an odd problem.

I've got lots of odd problems right now. Lots of things on the brain. I took a long bike ride tonight through Fruitvale and again was reminded of Poughkeepsie. There's even a building on International that looks just like the old mental health hospital on Route 9 right across from the CIA. Poughkeepsie, maybe I will see you in the fall? When there's not much growing on the farm except for bitter greens and my farmer friend is tired. But nevermind that. I'll never get to Poughkeepsie without a car. So it will be my last meal was here, and my last adventure was the chocolatier. Poughkeepsie. I've got to get back. Maybe the farmer will fetch me? Bus to New York and the the familiar train ride from platform 36? The places we love aren't always pretty and who can possibly understand my deepest love for Poughkeepsie, New York?

The east is coming to me, in packages and in persons, all month next month. I want to smell the salt on the water; I want to feel the heat heavy in the air.

Lately I've been thinking about intentionality and cooking. What we are cooking out of. What is on our minds during the actual act. I'm trying to cook only from positive places. It's a struggle to always hold on to that love and compassion for strangers. Cooking is giving away the best parts of yourself. So is writing, but you can't see words or their effect on people, and so it's almost still your guarded secret. In cooking the things you make are real, tangible, and to the outside eye not defined by or created by anything per se. But it really should come from the best place, because otherwise there's just so much heartache in the business, why bother?

Cooking. Making me a nicer person? I dunno, you tell me.

moving to the leeward side

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

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

Yesterday was homey. Today was like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

notes from the kitchen sink

Information is the currency of every kitchen.

Apparently I understand enough Spanish to be drafted to help the dishwasher ask a question about his schedule to the boss (but really, I don't).

There's always a secret code of glances, a reason behind the style of walk or tone of voice or measured pace of work. I get in trouble in these kinds of systems because I don't like to play the game. Information=currency (but food=love, right?). I try hard. I voice concerns. Even if they're not always welcome. Today someone tried to convince me my concerns weren't welcome but then apparently that wasn't the case, but check back with me next week because I might have a different opinion about the matter then.

It's just food, people. Some famous chef or other once discussed never sending out a plate you weren't 100% satisfied with, that didn't represent your best. No half-assed adequate food, nothing you weren't proud to put your name behind. If it wasn't good enough fix it. Replate it. If it's too salty bake another batch. If it isn't right, don't bother. I'm trying to work up to that standard. I'd love to one day be there. Sometimes I am. Go have some bread pudding. Or cupcakes. Do it right, and quickly. In the workplace, I require two things above all: discipline and communication. And the secrets (the secrets of bakers, the secrets of managers, the secrets only the Mexican guys know, the secrets that don't translate from English to Spanish or back around) just fuck with my mental mise.

I'm doing lots of cleanup duty at the cupcakery, being the last baker there. I'm cleaning out the dishwasher, organizing the walk-in, writing the inventory count. I'm learning the nuts and bolts of its daily grind, the kind of things you only assimilate by doing over and over, thinking each one is beneath you. Until it hits you how they accumulate. How you know things that others probably don't simply by being aware and by cleaning up every day. If you want to know the politics of a kitchen, ask its dishwasher. So every task is education, if you approach it the right way.

I'm getting all sorts of crushes lately. Inappropriate and silly crushes. Perhaps because it's warm and the fruits are crashing into each other, peaches old news by now since plums and nectarines are sighted (but the new peaches are better, and I grin slyly while I eat small bites but save my enthusiasm for the Jade nectarine, so juicy I thought it was a plum). Maybe it's the bounty of the earth. Maybe it's having a home in the city at long last. Likely it's a phase, but I avert my eyes lest I blush. Too many crushes. It makes me giddy. I want to bake them all cupcakes. I want to make them all pie. I want to keep wearing a stupid smile while I work twelve hour days and figure out how to keep my mouth shut, how to make less of a mess of the powdered sugar, how to make a peach gelee, how to end a story so it resonates in the white space of the page.

Think about fiction with me. Eat plums with me. Recite Wallace Stevens though and I'll bake you anything you might ask for. The weather is bounty and I want to get out and play in it. Go camping. Biking. Hiking. Sit around and eat lots of ice cream, with or without cupcakes or pie.



(These, apparently, are the best cupcakes I ever made. I made them last 4th of July for a BBQ. Coconut buttercream (one of Cheffy's perfect recipes). Dyed-pink cake from some crap Nigella Lawson recipe. Decorations. These cupcakes were gone in under five minutes and some folks were two-fisting them. I'd like to think I could do better now...)

slightly off topic...

...But in what other city in this country can you go to a literary reading and get homemade cookies? Baked by the hostess who happens to be an author you really like? Tonight I went to the Radar reading at the SF public library, featuring comix artists Ariel Schrag and Alison Bechdel as well as a novelist and spoken word artist. The icing on the evening, as it were...Michelle Tea's homemade sugar cookies with rose sugar, extra sugar-y icing. I did not get a cookie, but I *did* snag one of the last copies of Stuck in the Middle, practically causing a little fistfight (really I just waited in line and beat out these other girls who had snatched em up...hahah)

Nice to remind myself of things I like about this city when I'm having such an impossible time finding housing in it...And now I'm working 5 days a week and not 4, which means more commuting headaches.

authors + cookies, what could be better?

Craziness this weekend. The cupcakery was slammed with work--part of it was due to not enough staff scheduled. We had two people for production (and I think we're the fastest at production, of the bakers there), and Sunday we were running out of things and frantically busting through as much as we could so that we had enough of everything to be able to bake today. So today of course is evaluation day, about why yesterday was teh way it was and how we can prepare better in the future, and so on. It's stressful, sometimes fun. More often a game. How can we do things better. How can we get ahead.

There isn't any getting ahead there (well, maybe with batter). There's only having enough on hand for the immediate future. But I think the mentality's going to have to shift. It's interesting, working at a business going through it's first year. They've never experience summer before. They don't know what it will be like, how the new store will take off depending on the influx of tourists from week to week, the crazy SF weather, and so on. We have to adapt, but we're not really sure what we're adapting to or how. Because of my restaurant background I see things differently, I think, than some of the other bakers who have only done culinary school to the cupcakery.

I told my boss about Frog Hollow, how I'm going through the same thing there but going it alone. I'm not saying I have the answers, or others don't, but...getting slammed one day when you're expecting it to be slow is one thing. Being in the weeds half the week is another. We've all got to figure out how to be prepared as best we can all the time, and it's nice to be invited inside that decision process. I do wonder though if there are too many cooks in the kitchen, to use the old metaphor. Of course, we do need another baker, and I suggested a culinary student might not mind working just part time, but I guess there's been bad experiences before.

Everybody's got to learn. At my first job, I called in "sick" several Saturdays because after a busy work of culinary school and graduate school, getting up at 6 to be at work by 7, just to bake off frozen cookies and roll put pie dough was not something I really had the energy or wherewithal to do.

I've been introspective a lot lately, writing a bunch. Cooking as always though. I made some triple chocolate cookies from an epicurious recipe that went over pretty well at the cupcakery. Tonight for dinner is mushroom-zucchini-onion enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, with zucchini from Full Belly Farm. While cooking this dinner tonight I realized how much time I spend cooking and how much more time I'd have in my life if I didn't cook. I had to go to Mi Ranchito tonight to buy veggies to cook with because I have no food (seriously, just rice and ice cream and salad stuff). I am not the sort of girl to eat fast food or eat out every day. I learned this when we lost use of all kitchen equipment save the microwave and toaster oven. I need to eat well. I get cranky when I don't. I wish all of America had this feeling. At Mi Ranchito tonight I saw all these Mexican laborers still in their work clothes (postal workers, electricians, painters) and buying food for dinner. I identify with that; it's my life too. Being too poor to afford nice meals whenever I want them. Cooking because it really is cheaper. Tonight I got two pounds of tomatillos, two avocadoes, 50 corn tortillas, two hot peppers, and several white mushrooms for only five dollars.

Tomorrow night I'm going to the Sox game (the A's game, but...really...the Sox game).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like a person again now that I've got my zaatar

(it's true)

Today after apartment hunting I went to Samirami's, a Middle Eastern food store in the Mission. My supply of zaatar from Sevan had run out and I'd been without for weeks. At first I was doubtful...I'd found spices, but no zaatar. Then I spotted giant pound-sized bags of zaatar. Boulette's sells it for $2.25 per oz. but this was 5 bucks for a giant plastic tub of zaatar! And then, oh joy, I saw a bulk spice section with three kinds of zaatar (Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian)...this I hoped would be the freshest. So I filled two bags with some Palestinian and some Lebanese (I think the Sevan stuff was Jordanian). I did not let myself get sumac (it's trendy now though, I think) but I did ask the man behind the counter for mastic. And, to give him credit, he didn't seem surprised that a whitegirl wanted mastic. That sent me back over to the other side of the store for rosewater for Claudia Roden's gum mastic ice cream (I bet my new Vitamix blender can be used in lieu of robotcoupe). I looked for mulberries for ice cream, but no luck. My Persian supervisor at Frog Hollow *did* say she'd bring me a cup of mulberries (we had to negotiate the amount I wanted into a small enough amount she could spare it).

Rosewater/mastic ice cream...a taste memory. I am sure there's an Oleana-ish restaurant here in SF, and sometimes it's the memory of taste (the warm not cool mint flavor, the everpresent rose slightly oily in aftertaste, the milkiness), and sometimes it's in the memory of small and deliberate perfection. Here, I'm not in a community of people who serve food made with love on plates shipped from Turkey in suitcases. Here I'm in a community of baker-girls with boyfriends, career-change chefs whose restaurant experience is much more limited than mine. I bruise my hips on walk-in doors, decorate cupcakes, daydream about clafoutis and brunoised rhubarb and baby fennel. I feel like a person now I've got my zaatar, and I will let you know which kind I prefer. But I would like some people to talk about food with, for real,and I've been nostalgic for restaurants lately. Even for the gloomy darkness of Sonsie upstairs, getting coffee and looking out the windows on Newbury Street too early in the morning for foot traffic, whittling away time making 40 shots of espresso for ice cream and dreaming of California. Although there was no conversation at Sonsie, no dialogue about production and menu change and how to be better at what we do.

I'm not frustrated with work (really I'm just overworked, and pulling doubles the next two days). Just lonely for someone who can help me fix my polenta cakes, and who understands my zaatar longing, and whose taste buds are more refined than mine. Which is nothing new.

don't fuck with my mise!

strawberry shortcakes
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

I should be going to sleep soon, but it's really nice to have energy. Especially since I almost fell asleep this evening when I got home from work, and almost burned my teriyaki chicken (rescued just in time to still be tender, mostly, and have REALLY crispy skin). I've been working like a dog since Friday.

I used to not really understand very well the teamwork aspect of professional kitchens, because where I've been the pastry person is always alone and usually taking up someone else's counter or oven space
(insert memories of Sonsie brunches and fighting over the oven for bacon versus focaccia).

During the Saturday market the girls would get low on pastries and forget to ask me to bake more, then come to me as I was cutting fruit for fruit tarts, whipping vanilla cream for shortcakes, etc. and demand seventy pastries be egg washed and baked. I'd do it immediately, push my project to the side, get my table dirty, clean, go back to my mise, be interrupted again, and not be able to bake off the new pastries because there was no oven space. It could all be avoided by proper planning. But please, don't fuck with my mise. It makes for a very long day.

However, it's very nice to be able to pop some shortcake in your mouth in the middle of a long day. I was feeling very frustrated on Saturday that it's my job to make yummy things for other people but not part of my job description to eat them. I was feeling like I needed food=love to get some energy to wash away the frustration, and get back to busting out pastries. It worked very well. It's hard to take a moment to eat or take a real break when you have enough work to keep you occupied. It saddens me that food workers don't get to feed themselves properly, but I go all day without eating too.

Saturday night was a catered wedding at Tilden, with a Masse's wedding cake. Two layers of chocolate raspberry and one of passionfruit. I demanded and got some of each. The passionfruit one was good, better than I was expecting. Better than the Tartine passionfruit coconut cake I got to try today since one of the girls at the cupcakery bought one for us all to try (must be nice to be rich, eh?)Tartine's was all about the overly large shredded coconut on the outside, and not skinning the underside of the cake, which is something that bothers me if you're going to be presenting cakes. Masse's was nicely trimmed. From the texture of the cake I was afraid it was going to be dry, but it wasn't. There was passionfruit bavarian and curd, or curd lightened mousse, or something. The caterer wasn't quite sure. There was also wine and Hennessey's cognac to take home, and quite drunken bridesmaids.

Then up this morning to get to the cupcakery by 8 (tomorrow as well). It was a big production day and I didn't leave the back room at all. Just busted through batches of chocolate and vanilla frosting, chocolate batter, cream cheese frosting. The funny thing about being the new girl is you do things like made a 4x batch of frosting and put it all in the large Hobart and then when your butter's good and creamed and you're adding the sugar (my first experience with American buttercream) the other bakers get around to telling you no one's ever done a batch that large in that mixer before. It's not cockiness when I pull it off and it's fine, and I get to cross it off the production list, and everyone's stoked that we saved some time, but rather a quiet happiness for something done efficiently.

The Sonsie days really are behind me. They've been on my mind lately, possibly because I know that for right now I'm not going to be working in any restaurant kitchens. Lifting large Hobart bowls that I'm not strong enough to maneuver (but trying to do it anyway) recalls the daily battle with the pizza dough, or the vanilla pound cake. It's interesting now that I'm also in a creative position. I'm on a big herbal kick right now. Scented creams, infusions, berries and spice. I get tired of making things week after week and have considered doing away with the strawberry lavender tart (just after it's developed a following, ah!). it's my duty now to think about flavors and components. When making the polenta cake, I found myself thinking of texture/crunch/creamy/sweet, which was a nice step from "I miss that semolina cake, maybe I'll make one with blackberries since we have them on hand." But there's still so much more I need to understand.