vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit

I used to be a little snot (used to be, you say?). One day during the course of my stage at Oleana, I told the pastry chef, Maura, that I wasn't a fan of bread pudding. I hadn't yet learned that you don't tell this to cooks; that claiming not to like something ends with you being prodded or strong-armed into trying their adaptation of it. Sometimes, when we say "don't like," what we mean is don't understand or aren't impressed by or, as my french chef used to say, "it is not very interesting."

I worked at the time at a bistro in Boston that served chocolate bread pudding with whipped cream (side note: it really irks me when people call it chantilly on menus...it's whipped cream people). We made four hotel pans of the stuff, using leftover house bread (baked by me & my boss) plus the supplementary bread we got on the weekends. The night guys usually cut the bread for us, two large fishtubs, but occasionally we'd have to top it off, then make the custard. I'd be up to my elbows in the stuff, tossing the bread, letting it soak. Then I'd have to portion it into the four hotel pans, bake them in barely-there hot water baths consisting of the 1/2-1 inch of water I could pour on the full sheet pan and, when baked, pull these same suckers out of the oven without spalashing hot water all over myself and burning the mitts. So I was usually pretty clumsy and usually made a mess (big surprise, right?). Suffice to say I'd had it with bread pudding and I felt that I was pretty well informed on the topic.

Well it only took a couple bites of Maura's bread pudding to change my mind. Hers was made with homemade brioche, pretty standard, and I had excellent results baking it with Acme pain de mie as well. Maura soaked her bread in a mixture of custard plus simple syrup; her theory was that the simple syrup prevented the bread from getting too heavy and resulted in a lighter final product. I'm not sure whether that's true but I know the results are certainly delicious.

This version below features stone fruits, with cherries just coming into season! We don't have peaches yet but we do have apricots, which are delicious baked or roasted. As promised a long time ago, here is the bread pudding recipe adapted from Maura's supremely wonderful brown butter bread pudding with mulberries and milk jam at Oleana.

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit:
{makes 1 lg. deep dish pan (9x13) +/- a few extra ramekins}


custard base:
eggs 9
sugar 2.5c
cream 4c
milk 2.5c
vanilla bean 2, split and seeded

for soaking:
simple syrup: 1c
cubed bread: 8c
custard base above

fruit, to add:
pitted cherries: 2c
peeled, sliced peaches: 2c

Warm dairy with vanilla beans and infuse 30 minutes. Whisk eggs and sugar together. Add cream and milk. Place bread in large bowl, coat with simple syrup and then with custard base. Let soak 1 hr or until most of liquid is absorbed, tossing bread every so often. Add cut fruit to soaked bread and mix. Pour into baking pan, using ramekins for any overflow. Cover with foil and bake at 325 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and bake 15 more minutes or until top is lightly browned. Center should be set. If not, keep baking.*

*I worked somewhere where we baked bread pudding FOR THREE HOURS once.

in other notes:
*huge burn blister on my finger with goo bubble the diameter of a caper. it needs to go away.
*valrhona cocoa powder, how i have missed you.
*i should do a post on ways to infuse vanilla beans, maybe i will.
*i ate the second half of my burrito for dinner and now i have nothing to look forward to at work tomorrow.
*claudia fleming is still awesome.
*i've been reading a book a day, about.
*my car is not dead and gone forever. hell yeah! road trip seattle anyone?
*i'm contemplating a series of podcast essays. main problem: i'm not interested in the sound of my own voice, unless i'm pretending to be claudia gonson. second main problem: that just sounds gimmicky and slightly pretentious.
*i need to learn to say no, sometimes, and stop doing everyone a favor all the time.
*i chopped orange peel for a long time today and it was really theraputic and zenlike. i recommend it.

so sorry

About two years ago, I received a comment on a short story I wrote that was published online. Apparently.

I just noticed this comment tonight.

Someone named Tricia begged me for the recipe for the brown butter bread pudding with milk jam from Oleana, the beloved Cambridge restaurant. How Tricia knew I'd spent time in the Oleana kitchen is a mystery...maybe she read the story, googled me, found the blog? Or the other way around?

Anyway, Tricia--who I'm sure will never read these words, not unless she's still out there googling toward Oleana's decadent yet homey brown butter bread pudding, I'm sorry. I do have that recipe tucked in a tiny pink notebook. I used to make that bread puding at Frog Hollow all the time, a brown butter version with pears and dried fruit, and a vanilla custard version with stone fruit. It was pretty universally loved.

I've got the recipe for milk jam also, a Middle Eastern confection similar to dulce de leche, made on an all-day slow simmering stove. I haven't made milk jam since those days, but I know that I will one day.

Three weeks and counting til I get to go to Sofra myself and maybe, if I'm very lucky, they'll have a version of that bread pudding for sale. In the meantime, two years too late, sorry.

a native's guide to boston

having spent the vast majority of my life in the great state of massachusetts, I am not going to tell you to do the Freedom Trail, Faneuil Hall, or any other such historical-interest thing. I can advise on where to eat, what the locals do, and how to understand them. Above all, it's best to keep in mind that New Englanders tend to keep their business to themselves and expect you to do the same. First rule of New England: Connecticut doesn't count. Neither does anything south of New York.

Should you find yourself in Boston, you can and should do the following:

museums:
*the Museum of Science is a very fun place, as is the New England Aquarium. Singlehandedly either could beat the Cal Academy of Sciences to a bloody pulp, but among the many things to enjoy count an amazing three story tank with tortoises, large sharks, and awesome fish, a retro electricity show, chicks hatching live, snake handlers, tons o' taxidermy, an otter tank, and neat views.

* the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is most famous for having Rembrandts + a Vermeer stolen and never recovered. That said it's got an amazing courtyard, great wallpaper, unique furniture, and this incredibly intimate feeling that most other museums don't.

* the MFA...I've seen and re-seen their permanent collection, which is pretty heavy on Impressionist and early American works (Winslow Homer, etc.). I still love the MFA. Their special exhibits are usually awesome also. I've seen over the years art deco, Monet, John Singer Sargent, Herb Ritts, el Greco-->Velasquez, David Hockney, the quilts of Gee's Bend, and many other exhibits.

places to eat:
*Clio (Hynes Convention Center): ken oringer. boston's foray into molecular gastronomy
*The Butcher Shop + Stir (Back Bay): barbara lynch's charcuterie and cheese shop + cookbook bookstore.
*No. 9 Park (Park St.): Barbara Lynch's original restaurant
*Oleana (Central): Ana Sortun is amazing.
*Sofra: Ana and Maura's bakery. The cookies are just incredible, and I'm not a cookie person.
*Clearflour: one of the three good bakeries, this one specializing in bread and laminates doughs.
*Hi-Rise (Harvard): my favorite of the three good bakeries, with delicious sandwiches. Do get the toast basket for breakfast and use lots of maple butter. The corn bread is excellent. If in Harvard, sit upstairs with coffee and food and feel like you're in an old timey schoolhouse.
*Sibling Rivalry (Back Bay): the brothers Kincaid duel different riffs on a shared item (a protein or veg). Everything I've had there had been quite good, and they used to have a rockstar pastry chef.
*Tealuxe (Copley/Harvard): tea and crumpets.
*Pinocchio's (Harvard): zucchini sicilian pizza, i miss you so terribly much!
*East Coast Grille (Central): now that Green St. Grille has taken a turn for the worse, East Coast reigns supreme for Carribean food, plantain goodness and fish. It gets very crowded and takes no reservations.
*Ten Tables (Stonybrook): it has only ten tables. i've heard nothing but good things.
*Craigie Street (Harvard): snooty waiters, fine French food.
*Darwin's (Harvard): sandwiches + soups for the 02138 intellectual. The Hubbard Park remains my fave sandwich, and do get some cape cod potato chips on the side.
*Redbones (Davis): pulled chicken sandwich with sweet sauce + mild sauce, and corn fritters with the bar regulars, a pint of something from the thirty beer wheel...this place sustained me through grad school!
*Helmand (Lechmere): Afghan pumpkin, eggplant, breads and delicious sauces. Get the meat, if you want, but it really isn't necessary.

places to get ice cream, and coffee:
*Herrell's (Harvard): if they have bourbon vanilla or chocolate peppermint, do indulge. The others flavors are delicious also.
*Toscanini's (Central): more purist than Herrell's (the inspiration to Ben and Jerry), people quite like the hazelnut.
*Christina's (Central): They serve malted vanilla. What more can I say? Christina's supplies plenty of restaurants (including Harvest) with fine quality ice cream.
*Espresso Royale (Copley/Hynes): your best option on Newbury, imho.
*JP Licks (Hynes/Stonybrook/Davis): my favorite for a long time was the oatmeal cookie froyo with caramel sauce. delicious. One day I was lucky enough to sample noodle kugel ice cream.
*Diesel (Davis): grad school writing dates, bright colors, and sceney lesbians.
*Dunkies: an institution that must be honored.

etc:
*The Boston Public Library (Copley) has a beautiful courtyard, John Singer Sargent murals, and now you can eat there, too.
*The Public Gardens/Boston Common (Park/Boylston/Arlington): Make Way For Ducklings + The Trumpeter Swan = YA classics.
*Fenway Park (Fenway/Kenmore): needs no introduction or explanation. Believe.
*Mt. Auburn Cemetery/Forest Hills Cemetery: Frederic Law Olmstead's cities of the dead.
*Arnold Arboretum (Forest Hills): sometimes rambling, sometimes manicured, always lovely.
*the Longfellow House (Harvard): lovely colonial house, nice gardens, vintage poet.

There are entire cities left uncovered. Harvard as an Educational Institution/Necessary Evil, or any other place of education, is unmentioned. JFK library, ditto. I make no mention of Allston, Brighton, Brookline, Southie, Dot, Roxbury, Chinatown, the North End, the suburbs, the beaches, the shopping, or the nightlife, though Somerville, JP and the South End do receive scant mention.

A couple of final tips:
1. the drivers are crazy.
2. the pedestrians are crazy.
3. dunkies is frequently a navigational tool.
4. don't mock the accent.

the paco jet

is it overrated? is it wonderful? I've had a couple conversations recently about this thing and, for me, I kinda have a hard time respecting it...

At Oleana, Maura had a pacojet because chef Ana saw one on her kitchen tour of WD-50, I think it was, and determined they needed to get one. She used it for sorbet, but spun her ice creams upstairs in the office, in this old and crotchety machine they got from Toscanini's when they first opened.

{this, in itself, is commentary enough on the boston scene...everybody knows everybody else, and they are generally sort of helpful in a noncompetitive way....like, say, when you're deciding to open a bakery, too, why not get information from the owner of the (arguably) most successful bakery in town? the sf scene is, shall we say, different.}

Maura was particular about using the pacojet only for sorbets, but was vague as to the reason why. I next encountered the pacojet on a trail back in September, where I had to re-spin all the ice creams for service and was slightly terrified I'd break the thing.

I do hear that by using a pacojet for ice creams, you've got to change the nature of your base and stabilize the fuck out of it. Which feels intrinsically wrong to me. Not to mention that the cannisters are so damn small (and kinda quenelle-unfriendly, I'd say).

But then that just raises another question. What's the best quantity to produce ice cream in, for a restaurant setting. At Sonsie we'd spin about 6 quarts in some tiny ic maker with a continuous freeze chamber. So all day it'd be spin the ice cream, keep checking on it...bust out other stuff....check the ice cream, spin more ice cream...and by the end of the day we'd have gone through the batch of base. Now we spin probably the same amount, 4-6 quarts I'd say, and that goes into 2 or 3 containers and takes not-very-long to spin. and generally gets used up I'd say in about 2 weeks' time, maybe more. Hard to say.

And that just brings up another question. How does the freezer affect taste? The constant tempering and re-tempering, does it affect the quality of the ice cream? After a week or after a month? I taste all our ice creams fairly often (if not daily) because I'll use any excuse to eat ice cream and I notice sometimes the texture is different to work with/quenelle. But not the taste.

It's sort of hard to meditate on ice cream and not be able to eat some right then and there. {I have, literally, NO FOOD, in my house. like, coffee beans and half a lemon.} Perhaps tomorrow after I look at yet another apartment, I shall take myself to Maggie Mudd.

rhubarb

It wasn't strawberries this year that made me kick-start giddy into spring. It was rhubarb. We were tasked to come up with a dessert special, maybe a crisp, and suitable ice cream was made. We all brought cookbooks...rhubarb the great unknown, the pinkish vegetable, the first blush of spring. I was the only one who'd used it before.

I had never thought to peel rhubarb before but my coworker (who must've read it somewhere) told me to do so, and I had another stupid moment as I chopped the peeled rhubarb, a body memory return to last spring and the mountains of rhubarb I used for crisps and whatnot at Frog Hollow. The slices would always stick together by this fibrous membrane, and I'd curse it out and hand-separate them (or not, mood depending). But it never, ever, occurred to me to peel the thing. Genius.

So it was the body memory that got me, and then the smell. A rough earthy smell, a green smell. Not a perfume, nothing sexy. A smell of spring and beginning. It took me back to the Oakland days, to when I knew nothing and no one here. To how great it felt to finally be on my own in a kitchen and playing with whatever produce was on hand, plus the flip side of that, ignorance, the thousands of unanswered questions and uncertainties and things-left-to-learn.

Rhubarb...it smelled so new again. And like a thousand old things I'd left behind.

Maybe because of the rhubarb, maybe not, but the rest of the night was great. I was working both stations and getting enough garde manger tickets that the board was getting filled up and I needed to work quick and clean and wipe...and when the intermittent pastry ticket it was time to turn around and tend to the cakes, custards, sauces. We had a good number of dessert sales, too, and though I gave my coworker a 20 minute shot at the station because she missed it (and went off to consolidate walk-in stuffs), on the whole I was into service and had a really good rhythm going.

The whole night was like a gift. A reminder of what I am here for. I love working with food. I love the excitement and possibilities of a new dish. Especially a dish like crisp is so fraught with memories for me. I thought back to all the FH crisps that were too soggy or too stiff, the parade of peach and nectarine varietals, the experience of making 9 months' worth of crisp and having to guess the right amount of starch to balance out the liquid from the fruit. I love my coworkers. It feels like we've all been here for so long, but really it's been the blink of an eye. In September, I stood in the Oleana kitchen nervous to go back to SF and start a restaurant job with serious people and Maura said to me that all restaurants weren't like the ones I'd worked in. She promised me there were good restaurants and good people, and when you see it? It's seductive. You can try to explain it to the other people in your life, those who aren't in the industry, but they won't get it.

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...

it's midnight and my. stomach. hurts

Tonight I found out a piece of my food writing is going to be published online in a few weeks. The journal had been really interested back in April or thereabouts and dropped the ball. While there are a lot of things I like within the piece it's sort of a negative piece in a lot of ways--definitely not a favorite with the writing group--if an important piece for me. It's strange to publish something I don't feel like I LOVE...although I do feel it's important, at least personally (though that is not a great reason)...it speaks to a lot of things I feel about this industry, and it's very of a certain time in my life, and it's perhaps challenging to think of it out of that time.

Nervousness and listmaking. My vacation is almost half over and there is so much left to do. It's so wonderful to see each person I get to see, but it's also an obligation:

do not leave anyone out.

So people want to see me again or have coffee or go driving but there's no time.

To go to New York or not. I will want to have gone by the time I'm back in California. It's just a lot to plan. Right now I'm researching bakeries and whatnot I want to hit up and I still don't really have dinner plans {which I should just make, right} and it's like...this is my vacation...like, relax already. The list so far:


il laboratorio del gelato
buttercup cakery
city bakery
doughnut plant
kee's chocolates
amy's bread/chelsea market
balthazar
kyotofu


Boys night out on the town Saturday to check out the new club, but it was all posturing and bored girls, me included. Been spending lots of time lately with people who remind me of myself too much and it's strange to see my reaction mirrored in someone else's face.

You can accuse me of being too intense, and you'd probably be right

I went to Oleana tonight. There are a lot of things I want to say about Oleana...and Aziza as well while we're discussing Turkish-North African cuisine...

{and I've tried to write already about Aziza a couple of times but it doesn't come out in a way that satisfies me as being accurate, and then there's sort of a lil rant I'm not sure if I should get into even though it really bothered me and it still bothers me a week later}

so for now there is only the things we ate at Oleana:

padron peppers with fleur de sel, yogurt
warm buttered humus with basturma, olives
zaatar focaccia
fideos with chickpeas and chard
spinach falafel with greens, beets, tahini
crispy zaatar-lemon chicken with turkish cheese pancake, greens
swordfish with eggplant-macaroni timbale
goat's milk ice cream (made with sahleb!!) with blueberry jellies, blueberry sauce, rose petal jam
umm ali with peaches and peach jam, honey pot de creme


and Aziza:

grilled flatbreads with mediterannean spreads
giant lima beans with roasted tomatoes, feta, fresh zaatar
chicken basteeya


There were so many familiar taste memories in those desserts. Not surprising-many of the components I'd tasted before, or at least variations on a theme.


I'm nervous about everything that happens when I get back to San Francisco, but that is another list to be made. It's easy to be here and it's easy to slip into things.Being back here is so emotional. Every street corner in Somerville is the scene of secrets, fights, attraction, breakups, longing. It's so marked in so many ways that diminish the abstractions I seek in SF. I moved away for food? I start to think...and it all seems so trite.

cookies to go places with

Ai, miho, there are so many things I want to tell you right now.

Today (and tomorrow as well) I pull on the old battered checks and drive somewhere in Marin and pretend to be a prep cook. It's daunting at times but more educational and at times amusing. I know the savory rhythms are so different from the sweet world and I know why that is supposed to be so, but I've never worked that way.

I won't tell you about the rest of today just yet, but I will say this: there was a little lesson. And it represents just about every possible difference between my world and that world as I have experienced them. What happened was this: the chef handed me a list of ingredients and asked me to make a BBQ sauce. The list was simple: honey mustard cider vinegar soy sauce salt sugar onion chili powder. First I diced and sauteed the onion, rounded up the dry goods from storage, and because he knew I was a baker he said we could make it together, so he poured a good amount of mustard in a pot and showed me how much honey he wanted, and then told me to add the rest of the seasonings. I dumped in some chili powder, then more. I heaped salt, pinched sugar, lightly sloughed soy sauce from the bottle. I was overly cautious.

Everything is measured in pastry and precise. Cups of dry goods (if you are even using cups and not metric) are leveled off with a knife or other flat edge. There is a precision most people liked to call scientific, as if every baker's mind works tha way. Mine doesn't.

So the chef let me play with the sauce and then I went back to prepping some vegetables. He called me over to taste it, and we tasted it together and it was nasty, nothing bland. So he started adding huge quantities of the things I'd meekly put in, instructing me not to be afraid of the salt, or the heat from the chili. He wanted me to understand that because we weren't going to be shoveling spoonfuls of sauce in our mouth, that because of the nature of its end use, it could take such large amounts of these things.

It was interesting for me to be in a place where I knew so little, and to have to ask for so much. Because in pastry if I'm in a position of acquiring information it's usually about something I'm already familiar with, so I can contextualize my knowledge. I can ask intelligent questions. I have a past, my hands have a history.

More on savory cooking tomorrow. To taste memories now, and cookies...I'm making molasses cookies right now. I just put the first batch in the oven. I should be doing other things bow like sleeping, but we are...oh...six days through a nine day stretch of work and well, no longer ill, so whatever. I would give you the recipe for these cookies if it were mine to give, and I suppose I could, since it was given to me freely.

These cookies were made for me right before I left Boston, on the last day of my Oleana stage. I'm not sure why we decided to make them, only that Maura, who thought if you were going to make cookies they needed to be perfect, loved them. At the end of the day she packed me a large sack of cookies, which I stuck in the freezer until the end of February. I took them with me, and Brandon and I munched those, plus my mother's chocolate chip cookies, through snowstorms, hail, traffic, loneliness, darkness, the night of utter freezing hardcore-ness in Ohio. And in the spirit of giving, I gave them to a friend when I arrived here {or, in Oakland}. I was so betwixt when I left Oleana. Finally I had found someone I could learn so much from, and someone I wanted to work beside, and I was just skipping town (although, she knew that when I began). Working at Oleana made me believe I could do restaurant work from a good place in my heart. The cookies were a comfort line into the abyss.

I've been melancholy lately, what with all the coughing and taking-to-bed of Saturday till Monday. And the questions. The things I want. The various routes that have me all confused. I feel I'm at a crossroads and it scares me. I don't want to have reached that crossroads yet. So, the cookies. Keep my hands busy and my mind occupied, and focus me back on the little things, like the taste memory of perfection on a bright wintry day, and all of those deep traits that pull you through the fear.

And this too, the cookies: I am not alone. I think that I am and sometimes I act like I am, but I'm not. Not even out here in SF. Good timing for the cookies, since Leah's coming to town again Friday. And for the Thursday trip to Oakland, to pawn off some cookies on some friends I may not see again before their travels take them away from this place.

What with all these cookies, though, I really like CMON MAN want some malted vanilla ice cream. Ummm. Maybe I just want it regardless of the cookies, but I think it would pair well. Malted vanilla, you're nowhere in this town and I know it, ok, maybe on someone's menu somewhere conceivably, but you are not getting in my mouth unless I make you up, and sigh, I was kinda saving that freezer space for honey-rosemary, and I'm not quite sure where to buy malt powder, but...I just want you so bad.

sunday rant

Oh yum, there are 12 cups of real Maine blueberries waiting for me to get back to Boston and make pies! Xmas duck and blueberry pie anyone? I'll be back home before then...October sometime, for leaves and apples and Burdick's hot chocolate. Dunkin Donuts. Oleana. Herrell's, Toscanini's, Hi Rise toast with maple butter MMMh.

What I really wanna know is HOW we went through an entire batch of vanilla buttercream today, almost. Which is to say three pounds of egg whites twelve pounds of butter just over three pounds of sugar. I don't think there's enough left for much after tomorrow morning, which means we've got to make some fresh off the bat, and tomorrow is our most understated day. It's up to me and one other baker to get out 28 times 24 cupcakes frosted fourteen different ways. Plus the orders decorated. With no help for the first two hours of our shift and after our one lone helper comes, we've got to get into batters for the day. I made vanilla buttercream yesterday, that was part of me running around like a zoo monkey. I made a whole batch. How did we not notice it disappearing so fast? I'm so tired of being fucked before I even begin to pick up a pastry bag two days out of five in my work week. And I'm tired of certain people getting preferential treatment in their scheduling and others getting not enough respect for putting out 1,440 cupcakes on a day that's our third busiest and least staffed and for having to do it again tomorrow. I'm going to crawl into bed with the pizza I'm making when it's finished (green zebras, spinach, mushrooms), watch reruns of the L Word and Sex in the City, and work on my knitting.

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?

local eating part 1

Wow. To my newest reader and oldest friend {like, ever, seriously}, welcome! Zaatar, wicked addictive, so tell me where do you get yours and what do you do with it? I live in California now...my accent blends right in.

My oldest friend and I used to make cookies at my house, and answer the phone as if we were the only bakery we knew in the next town over {Quincy} making cookie orders for people. And we used to write books together too. And here I am, still baking and still writing, though not as much {of the latter} as I should be doing. Holding off for one more week until the visitors leave.

Today my mother and I went to the Tuesday Berkeley market and got fresh whole wheat pasta made with Vital Vittles flour, crimini mushrooms from the mushroom people, and a whole of of vegetables (summer squash, zucchini, salad greens, tomatoes, shallots, parsley and garlic) from the farmers (including Dirty Girl and Full Belly, though I'm not sure who else because we were in a foodie haze).

We were actually looking for that new heartthrob of mine, lemon verbena. In the July Gourmet there's a special section on ice cream and it features lemon verbena, and my mother became enamored with the idea of making lemon verbena ice cream...which of course I supported because lemon verbena is my new reason for getting up in the morning, and because this meant I'd have some birthday ice cream, which is half of the ice cream + pie equation. So after we stalked the market unsuccessfully for lemon verbena, I discovered she actually thought we were looking only for verbena leaves to blend with lemon flavored ice cream! Which made sense, after all, because she was seriously after this taste experience she'd never encountered and I wasn't sure how to react to that. How do you decide to want something you've never had? How does the initial obsession take root, and is it really worth the bother? Like foie, for me, or now, like the idea of making violet ice cream (which in reality would probably not taste like much of anything at all unless mixed with other ingredients, or would probably just taste flowery in that lavender sort of way, but which right now has got me craving).

After the veggie explosion, we went to the Berkeley Bowl for some Acme bread, morel mushrooms and more unsuccesful attempts to get some lemon verbena (the produce guy we asked had actually never HEARD of it and wanted to know if it was the same as lemon thyme).

We made a salad with the salad greens, shallots, parsley and carrots from an earlier Berkeley market trip and used some of that Stonehouse aged Balsamic and olive oil to dress it...their Balsamic doesn't have that syrupy pine tree taste that,come to think of it, mastic has. So I like it. Then we sauteed up the veggies, added some red wine from an earlier Napa trip and read about the farm bill while we waited for the whole thing to come together. It was tasty. Not very adventurous or unusual, but local and quite seasonal and easy.

Ici this afternoon was crowded. I got one scoop of the Santa Rosa plum sorbet and a scoop of the rose pistachio. The pistachios were candied, which was a nice touch, and the ice cream was very much rosewater...but were there actual roses, and if not, what made it pink? That one evoked a comparison, of course, to the Oleana days and the mastic ice cream, and the nougat glace. The Santa Rosa plum sorbet was a little tart, perfectly plummish, and the ideal consistency. The kind of sorbet I am never able to make myself. I made my happy ice cream eating face for a very long time, on the way there, and on the way home. I think I'm beginning to accept that ice cream is my thing. Perhaps at times I wish chocolate were my thing, or cakes (and I always thought cakes were more my thing than they seem to be),but I'm okay with it. Cookies are not my thing. Muffins, no. Pie, sort of,although fruit is not my thing. Ice cream, though? It always inspires.

notes on eggs

How do you crack your eggs? Do you think about it? Do you notice when the yolk is whole or runny, if it is yellow like marigolds or buttercups, yellow like Easter dresses, if it is golden? Do you feel when the white is thicker close to the yolk? Do you know what that means? Do you know all of the names of the parts of an egg? Are you especially good at cooking eggs? When you separate eggs, do you do it like your mother first showed you, back when you were just a girl who still wore dresses, and if it wasn't your mother who showed you, then who?

What does it say about you, how you crack your eggs?

In school we separated our eggs slowly into plastic measuring cups, not having been taught any tricks. In school we talked, worked sometimes in pairs, marveled at double yolks. We were not taught to be good egg cooks.

On my first job I cracked flats of eggs into large metal pitchers eighty or ninety at a time. The grumpy baker told me to take one in each hand and smash them together lightly, letting the egg crack the egg. He was always sighing as he pulled out eggshells, but then again, he was always sighing over something.

At Temple Bar I cracked my eggs slowly, slowly, and always before I ran upstairs to the stove to boil cream for custard bases or ice cream. I was a ghost in a grey basement, just passing through.

At Sonsie however I cracked my eggs it wasn't good enough. When separating I was supposed to crack them open with one hand, letting the egg fall into my other hand and gently hold the yolk. This was hard for me to manage and my hands did a one-two waltz as the left never trusted the right to do anything properly.

At Oleana, I cracked eggs rarely, but always composted the shells.

At Miette we were taught to lay the eggs in dozen boxes twelve or so at a time with flaps interlocking. We broke eggs six at a time into a bowl and scooped out the yolks with one hand, sliding the yolks on our palms. The whites we dumped into buckets for someone to make something out of, most likely buttercream.

Now I crack my eggs with parchment underneath the flat and one egg in each hand. A sharp rap and then I pull it open. Deposit the shell back in the flat, trade the free egg into the left hand, reach underneath for another egg, and in between find the space to rap, crack, slip. I am light on my feet and sway, letting my hands lead my body where it falls best as I get through the eggs, doing a little egg dance unobserved in my cramped kitchens.

boston bites

What?!? Susan Regis left Pava? In these parts if she's known at all, it's only as sister of Lori Regis, the front-house person at Boulette's and ex-Stars. But on the East Coast Susan Regis has done Biba's, worked at Upstairs on the Square, and Pava, which was briefly mentioned a few issues of Gourmet back. Now she's gone, doesn't know where she's going. I did mean to try Pava before I left town.

The Beehive opened. Wish wish wish I could go. Also to the outdoor patio at Oleana. Hell if I could just have some zaatar flatbread, Chef Ana's falafel and some excellent dessert Fed-exed to me right now I might not be so sad about commuting away the best hours of my life across the Bay Bridge.

Somehow I've got to get to Boston for a few days while it's still humid and I can go swimming at Nantasket, eat some Redbones, and gleefully complain about it being so hot my clothes are sticking to my body nevermind trying to bake in this sort of weather.

You'd think bribing people with cupcakes would lead to a nice apartment for you, but nooo, not in this town. I will find one, yet, I will!

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?

yes, those are checks!

Walking past this thrift store tonight on the neverending apartment hunt, I found a male mannequin dressed in a blue vest and the regulation houndstooth. When i saw the checks I thought a uniform store, maybe, so maybe I could get new duds, but it was no such thing. I would seriously love to see some dude sporting the checks as part of a fashionable ensemble. I do, weirdy enough though, see many uniformed chefs swarming around the Civic Center BART. 4 total in a week. What do they do there? Will they take me with them in my baker-regulation jeans and dirty black clogs?

Today at Frog Hollow we scooped free samples of cherry granita, and I told them I'd sell it at Market if they got me an ice cream cart. Actually, my first suggestion was that they approach Ciao Bella about carrying granita +/or sorbet under the Frog Hollow name. There isn't enough collaboration in the FB and I think it could do better that way. Of course, I did almost deck my supervisor when she suggested we serve ice cream every week, but before I had to grit my teeth and explain how I wasn't going to be able to bake if I was spending Saturdays scooping, she reassured me it wouldn't be my job.

I made custard for bread pudding today, and vanilla simple syrup to lighten it. I bought pan de mie from Acme

Amazing how much easier it is to make bread pudding when you're not dealing with a custard base of 8 quarts cream, 2 c. milk, 90 yolks plus chocolate, making 96 servings at a time. Considering a peach leaf bavarian with peach gelee and peach compote. But the goal for tomorrow is pared down, nothing to finish or Saturday. Simplicity. I am not going to worry about not having enough, because I really can't count on finishing things on Saturday anymore. I'm going minimal for a few weeks, at least to figure out the rhythm of market days now that there's actually fruit.

I'm nervous about the bread pudding. I want it to be creamy, vanilla-laden, tossed with cherries and manybe something else. But I so rarely like bread pudding. In fact there are two I like: the brown butter milk jam + mulberry concoction from Oleana, which should one day appear in a national foodie magazine or else Sara Moulton's cookbook, and the white chocolate challah from Figs, even though I'm not into Todd English. And I know that it will be fine--really good, in fact--whether or not I like it, but I so want to like it.

pear sorbet

Just prepped for a pear sorbet using the Bouchonrecipe, which is to cook 1 3/4 # red comice pears in a simple syrup/wine solution, flavored with I believe vanilla and lemon zest. Since I had some star anise in the spice tub I threw one in as well.

There's something very reassuring about the familiarity of poaching fruit. It was something I had to do every now and then at Temple Bar with pears, and then at Sonsie we'd blanch citrus, mostly, and candy blood oranges at Oleana. (The bizarre thing about the Bouchon recipe is that the amount of liquid given is nothing near enough to cover three pears in any sort of pot, and there are no instructions given to dice the pears. Given the specificity of my dehydrated-pepper blini recipe, I would have expected more. ) I prepared my syrup, then peeled the pear, dropped them in, crumpled up some parchment to rest on top (it helps the entire pear to poach evenly rather than have a crusty, hard side sticking out.

I felt very connected to a history--to my own history and development as a pastry cook, and to the little sphere of people who make sorbets and poach fruit and cook. My first time ever poaching pears was for the midterm in culinary school, when I grabbed a pear frangipane tart and had to revisit the first week of class when we were all still befuddled, while everyone else was jamming on the more recent cakes and mousses. I didn't poach the pears long enough, pulling them out when they were still a little crunchy because I assumed they'd cook and soften in the oven (and my chef instructor said they would).

I really love sorbet when it's done right. Maybe I love it most when it's somewhat bitter--the green apple, or prickly pear.

I think my poaching syrup needs a touch of salt, and citrus zest, if I can find some lemons. And I think I need some sleep. 12 hour workday, it's fine, but I don't really feel like doing anything afterward.

It's rare that I feel connected to other chefs-in-general. Mostly when I'm taking to the guys about how we're all pulling doubles, or on our way to second jobs, or whatnot...Usually I feel that cooking is an act done alone, but done with great love and care.

I'm a little nervous, of course, because it's sorbet and sorbet's always so difficult for me...Maybe it's only ever perfect if it's churned fresh each day. If it comes out well I'll take it to work.


A friend of mine also had an interesting experience at boulette's. Which is all I'm going to say about that.

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.

beard awards

Ana Sortun's Spice cookbook is nominated for a Beard! I didn't realize that...I hope they get it because I really love that cookbook. But it's up against Claudia Roden's book Arabesque and it's sort of weird, they have one category for Asian food and then a whole other category that's just International.

I'm going to make reservations at one of the local nominated places for when my mother comes out, and I think I'm going to take my friend to Delfina when she comes in June. The chef at A16's nominated for Rising Star (and is up against David Chang, and Patrick Connolly from Radius and the guy from Eleven Madison Park). So we could go there or Jardiniere (has Traci des Jardins really not won a Beard yet?), or Quince, or Delfina which I'm saving for Leah because I think she'd like to go there and then go to the Lex afterward. Still want to go to Boulevard and Slanted Door and...and...

I made this weirdly disappointing strawberry ice milk yesterday. I made a giant base which only called for 4 yolks per 4.6 c. milk (which I boosted up to 6 yolks), and 1 c. sugar. Split the base in half, made half strawberry with some sugared and pureed strawberry and it came out kind of grainy. So, was it the liquid in the strawberries that made it grainy, or was the base not fat enough or was it not sweet enough, because one cup of sugar seems low for all that dairy plus there isn't a lot of fat from the eggs. The rest of the batch is going to be peppermint cookies and cream and I have some peppermint schnapps here, so the alcohol could help make it not come out grainy, or there's some rosemary simple syrup kicking around the fridge. Double checked my baking book and it could be any of those things--not enough sugar, milk fat or yolks, but which one? Oh, ice milk. According to wikipedia, it has the same sugar content as ice cream but less dairy fat. But I assume ice milk is not supposed to be grainy. The Gourmet recipe also called for 2 T cornstarch which I guess is what, a preservative to keep it from turning grainy? Maybe the containers are just really not airtight and so ice crystals are getting in. All I know is Claudia Fleming's ratios work just fine for me, so maybe this is my first and last experimentation with ice milk and I'll just go back to my 3/4 milk and one dozen yolks, and one of these days buy the Gramercy Tavern cookbook (along with the Tartine cookbook, and the Citizen Cake cookbook whenever it comes out).

Hopefully the schnapps will boost up the second batch but if not I'll be on hand with the simple syrup and with any luck it's be smooth thin mint ice cream!

Tomorrow at work I'm rolling out the David Lebovitz orange poppy cookies, and making strawberry meringues with lemon marmelade, doing more strawberry lavender tart prep and pastry cream and new upside down cakes, and working with tart shells.

strawberry meringues

Just made strawberry meringues this afternoon. Aside from being a good way to make sure I never leave the house (takes a long time for meringue to dry), they were wicked good.

Whip:
3 whites
1 1/4 c. 10x

to stiff, shiny peaks. Fold in 2 mashed up strawberries. Plop out in tiny cookie-cups. Bake.

I tested them to see if I want to make them for Frog Hollow and fill them with lemon marmelade. I think I do. I think the marmelade will be tangy enough to counteract the sweet, saccharine meringue taste.

It also brought back Oleana for me. I never liked meringue cookies (macaroons, exception, though so similar in texture and taste). Mostly because they're always cooked to the point of being brittle and crackly and then they taste like dust. The chocolate chip vacherins that we made at Sonsie were that way. Dusty chocolate fingers with an ugly, cracked texture. But when you make them with confectioners' sugar, and if you don't overbake them as I did just slightly, they taste like cotton candy clouds when you bite down on them, the sugar all hot and caramely, and they don't turn dusty and dry. So, mine somewhat dry, but still way better than most meringues, and upon my roommates' suggestion, I dipped the bottoms in chocolate, which ended up being really yummy. That's the good thing about living with people who tell you: we have this discolored, white-streaked chocolate you can totally use.

This weekend went really well at the market. I made strawberry lavender tarts with giant quenelles of lavender whipped cream, all luscious on top. Cute kiwi strawberry fresh fruit tarts. And the quince rhubarb upside down cakes sold really well also. Do I want to find a moister cake for those, or do I just want to soak them in a brown sugary syrup? Both maybe, Cake is so difficult. It's so rarely moist and good. Why I always end up making the 1234 cake from Joy. I think Gourmet just had an upside down cake recipe though, maybe I'll look it at. Or just try subbing half cake flour in my recipe.

I miss Maura

I really miss Maura. From a story I'm writing about food and girls:

Maura gave me shredded phyllo dough for the kunefe. She knew I was trying to impress this girl, and another also, and my car had gotten stuck in a massive snowbank on the street outside my house. We’re not paying you, so here, she said, rummaging in the walk-in for a box of phyllo. It was the next-to-last time I’d be in her kitchen, and I knew it then, so I was stuck on trying to memorize every detail of what we did in the hopes that one day I too would be able to put together dessert half as complex, flavorful and heartfelt as everything she did. In one week, she’d finished putting together two new desserts for the menu, and she fed me samples: a brown sugar frozen chiboust with black walnut strudel, and tiny profiteroles with Arabic ice cream made from ground gum mastic and rosewater. The ice cream was minty and warm in my mouth, with the rose flavor. Another thing I’d come to crave. I lingered, offered to bring things downstairs, tried to stay with her, because she was the only person I’d worked for in the industry I liked and admired, and because I still thought she had so much to teach me.
I made other Lindsey’s kunefe the night before our date, shredding the phyllo in my roommate’s under-powered baby Cuisinart and soaking it in milk and butter. I opened a bottle of French champagne I’d had from New Year’s, popped my old cardamom pods in a baby mortar and pestle, and tore strips of lemon zest with my paring knife. The syrup simmered. The phyllo concoction baked, two layers of dough swaddling a mascarpone center, a sandwich I’d soak with syrup when it finished baking. Hungry, I read Chef Ana’s introduction to the recipe in the restaurant cookbook. Chef Ana described the perfect kunefe as a caramely, hot toasted cheesecake, and I thought I knew how it would taste just from reading her words. I could barely wait to cut myself a slice of kunefe, after I’d doused it with the syrup.
Mine wasn’t crunchy. The syrup was lemony, with the aftertaste of cardamom rolling around my mouth. Cardamom was a spice I knew I didn’t understand. I could describe it, I could taste it, but I knew that I had no control over how to use it. I could only mimic other’s suggestions, the mark of a weak chef. My kunefe was limp, and the mascarpone center no more than a schmear of cream cheese. I’d baked the dish for the time listed, and having worked with Maura to batch test recipes for food magazines I knew her process was perfect, but there was no crunch. The caramelization wasn’t as deep as I expected. I wrapped my sad kunefe in plastic. I’d wanted to give Lindsey more.

Learning by myself is fun. Having a boss who says, go, do whatever, just use the fruit, it's amazing. Especially less than a year out of culinary school. But I miss being inspired by someone I'm working with. Miette, not so inspirational. Interesting. Frustrating. Useful, I hope. Fun at times. It's very realistic. But I need to be in some kitchens for a while. Maybe Alice's kitchen (if Alice ever is in there), zesting fruit for the Chez Panisse kids. Or Elizabeth Falkner's artier-than-thou, tongue in cheek mecca of perfect lemon squares. Somewhere in this city I'm just getting to know. Maybe I just need someone to talk about food with.