one down one to go

one holiday down, one more to go. today was not that bad, at least for me. i was on the dessert station, so while i could get some huge batches of cafe items ready to go (and did), my main responsibility was to prep the station and plate desserts. I worked my ass of for two days straight to ensure I wouldn't be screwed this morning, so I had relatively little to do for service...bake some cakes and tart tatins, respin my sorbets, bake tuiles and other cookies, make a couple of easy sauces. The most popular item of the day, and I have no idea why...coconut sorbet. The meyer lemon was fairly popular, too, but most of my tickets included some kind of ice cream and usually it was that one.

we're running out of the major component of two desserts, so it's time to get creative about changing them...soon-ish.

i'm not working new year's eve or new year's day....luck of the schedule but i'll take it.

lists.

1.
persimmon budino
chocolate torte
spiced espresso truffles
cocoa nib iced milk
brown butter-chestnut filling
chestnut crepe batter/make crepes
sage sable breton
huckleberry sauce
frozen white chocolate
chocolate sformato
migniardise: orange cardamom truffles, marmalade financier, orange-rosemary pdf, amaretto macarons, chocolate fleur de sel cookies

2.
am bake off
focaccia
vacherin almonds
coffee ice cream base
vacherin meringues
mango & coconut tapioca pudding
chocolate pot de creme
b/o anise biscotti

3.
blossom bluff hachiya & fuyu persimmon
fhf quince
foraged huckleberries
pears
pink lady apples
meyer lemons
buddha's hand
kishu tangerines
satsuma mandarins
navel oranges
pomegranates
first crop walnuts
chestnuts
///

i've been hearing rumors

I came across some disturbing rumors that my old college is going to make significant cute to its creative writing department. My first reaction was to google it to see if there was any truth behind the rumors and it appears there is. like every other school, vassar is losing endowment money due to the economy. (i'm sure even harvard is having to cut back, but hey, i'd probably endorse that). My second reaction was to email an old favorite professor, now co-chair of the english department, to see if he could tell me a bit of what is going on. Most of all I'm shocked that the English Dept. did not notify alumnae...at least, I am pretty certain they did not, though I do sometimes miss an email.

Vassar is the place that formed me as a writer. Not the school where I received my masters. Not the countless days and hours writing in cafes or with fellow writers or alone at home. Sure, all of it helps. All of it forms the writer and all of it feeds the writer.

I chose to attend Vassar because I wanted to go to a school with a strong focus on English and writing. I was a high school geek. I worked on the lit mag. In college I built strong relationships with several faculty members, and I began to take my craft seriously. From there my life followed on its plan: spend a year or so working, go somewhere and get an MFA. That is what I did, and though there is nothing more invigorating than talking about writing in a room full of writers, it does not pay the bills or change the oil in the car, so I found myself having to get a career. Hence the cooking gig.

I'm researching the truth behind these rumors in the hopes I'll be proven wrong, but I doubt it. Times are tough everywhere. Academics is a luxury lifestyle, wherein each generation creates the next generation so the academy can be self sustaining. The trouble with writing, though, is that the classroom isn't our only classroom. Every face, every darkened door, every half-heard conversation is our classroom and in order to contribute to the growth of ourselves or of the next generation we have to go off alone and discover what we know, what we can say, and how we can share it.

I'll be blogging on here and at Fringe on what I discover.

i heart david chang

scoping out places to go in new york, and i see chang now has a bakery in his momofuku empire. cakes, shakes, cookes, pretty normal things, but his list of ice cream toppings?

brown butter solids

he's also got a cookie called compost cookie and a pie called crack pie...

anyone out there been to his bakery?

also, aside from old favorites doughnut plant (which is so close to il laboratorio del gelato i might as well show my mom), dean and deluca, broadway panhandler, and birdbath, where to go?

i have a reservation at per se for my trip to nyc in january! there is a slight chance my mom will say she's not paying THAT much money to eat lunch, and we won't go after all, but i hope not because she basically said if i could get us a resy, we could go.

they were actually the sweetest, nicest people to talk to on the phone. the reservationist i got was so happy i lived in sf, which led to to confess, "yeah i work in the industry, actually at {the restaurant} and all you guys have been coming in lately, jonathan was in a while back, hollingsworth was just in, etc, etc"

they asked up front about any dietary restrictions, etc. i said we might get the vegetables menu, because we're both picky about meat, and that was it. it's great that they ask. i don't think they ask at my restaurant. some people overprepare and tell the reservationist, but then we get lactose-intolerant vegetarians who claim to be vegan and then ask to have the chocolate dessert with ice cream (dairy + eggs).

the big question, though...what am i gonna wear?

UPDATE: the mom says yes. i'm going to per se! ::does little dance around kitchen while banging out another round of marshmallows::

walking sleep

so michael laiskonis just wrote

I've often said that the day you don't feel that pit in your stomach as you walk into work, that's the day to start looking for a new job.

and it seems that several of us are taking such stock lately.

where am i? what am i doing here? is this the right time? how exactly did i get here anyway? what can i do next? how could i have made this better? how can i make [this person] do [this necessary thing]? these are the questions that plague us while we dice, saute, roast, bake, hunt for the chinois.

is it best to cook wholly focused on that one thing. or five things, should you be capable of managing cookies and custards in the oven, a pot of dairy infusing and a caramel at the same time. {this of course implies that you have oven space and working burners for multiple projects, nevermind pots} when you are not focused you make mistakes. your pot of milk boils over and while cleaning up the spill you burn your tuiles in the oven. i find myself working with some people who can only do one thing at a time and it reminds me of when i used to work that way.

and i am so glad that i do not work that way any longer.
and i am so glad that i have the presence of mind to multitask and still hold it down (not only the what/where but the what/now).
and, yes, i still do stupid things but i admit them freely. today my pot of cream boiled over while I was organizing my jars for pot de cremes, and i was pissed that it boiled over, because i had been keeping my eye on it, but i had the presence of mind to taste the cream (was it scalded? did it taste burned in any way? no, so continue) and then measure it (7.5 cups is no longer 8 cups, so correct and proceed).

in a way i'm glad my cream boiled over a bit. i'm somehow in the position currently of trying to teach several people lots of things. it's challenging enough to be mindful of what their backgrounds all are and their skill sets, and then temper my tone or advice accordingly (like, please don't ruin that dessert for service, k thx). if i can see where i came from (yes and sometimes we need a reminder) then i can hopefully be compassionate with these people i am guiding.

because i want to be compassionate. underneath the crusty exterior. and it's hard when service is coming on or when someone commits to making a mistake and fesses up afterward (because there's that moment when you're looking your your mise, and you're thinking something isn't right, and you can decide to go ahead or you can decide to ask a question, and you don't wanna ask a question cause you made this yesterday and you've asked 20 questions today already, and so what are you sposed to do?).

it's hard when you want someone to tell you your impulse is right. it's hard when you have to tell someone their impulse is wrong, that you know they thought about it but they could have made a more informed choice. because you know they can't just think like you. because you know the reason they ask the 21st question is that they want to think like you. i've been the one so many times, saying but...but...but as if my logic, wrong though it be, is going to win me brownie points for having given a second's thought to the matter at hand.

i'm not saying i don't get it wrong any more. no, not at all. but i am glad to be where i am.

thanksgiving prep

listening to selected shorts and spending the day off prepping for thanksgiving. What's on my list this year?

Cornbread for stuffing
Candied hazelnuts
Pumpkin clafouti
Homemade marshmallows
Sweet potato casserole
Tart do
Quince apple tart
Spiced cider zabaglione
Quince syrup redux
Mashed potatoes

Happy cooking to all

ganaches, may-november

i remember the first time i was asked to make a ganache flavor for the handmolds we do at work. i perseverated over it. should i just make some basic ganache, a 1:1 part cream and chocolate emulsion? should i add some butter to enrich it and how much? what sorts of fillings did we do in culinary school? i dutifully looked through my notebooks, copied out a recipe for some earl grey ganache (we're not allowed to use in-house tea) and substituted chicory for a honey-chicory ganache. i keep track of what we do at work and developed the following list of ganaches for handmolds or for truffles that i have made over the last six months. of course i don't make all the ganache so this is merely a sample of what's been offered. i have always enjoyed the process--i usually like anything where i have an ounce of choice--but lately i've been getting tired of the process as i don't like to repeat something, though i do and have. we're pretty low on liquor options and don't necessarily get a lot of new spices, and certainly are not special ordering something only for this purpose. i was originally going to post this and ask for suggestions of new flavors. recently i found out we're cutting back on our chocolate migniardise selection (is it the economy? is it too time consuming? ). so i guess this is in remembrance of its frequency. unless otherwise noted, ganache was made with 62, 6 or 70% valrhona. jivara lactee or ivoire otherwise.

molasses-pecan
white chocolate nepotella
white chocolate lavender
espresso
salted almond
white chocolate cardamom rose
candied pistachio
milk chocolate rosemary
white chocolate pink peppercorn
rum
orange-lavender
hazelnut
malted milk chocolate
honey
honey-chicory
white chocolate vanilla-verbena
star anise
cinnamon
milk chocolate peanut butter
rum-ginger
cardamom
vanilla-coffee
vanilla-rum
amaretto
milk chocolate lavender
grapefruit lavender
chili orange
vanilla fleur de sel

mistakes

i accidentally made granola bars today.

i accidentally made granola bars because i was mixing the granola dries with the melted butter/maple syrup in the hobart, because boss 2 prefers it that way rather than by hand. everything incorporated and then she told me to let it hang out, keep paddling. we were commiserating over the color of my meringues (still figuring out the new ovens at job 2,) when she all of a sudden yelled STOP. apparently we'd started creaming the melted butter and the brown sugar in the granola, in the process crushing the oat bits and making something too broken-down to be called granola.

i pouted. she laughed. they've actually been after us to make granola bars, she said. roll it out on sheet pans, we'll bake it. it'll be great, you'll see.

It Will Be Great Tonight When I'm Not Here Anymore, I said. Yeah I'll Laugh About It Then.

we didn't have oven space to bake them off till right before i left, so i'll see them in a couple days. it was that sort of a day. the sort of day when every diner decides to order the same dessert that you have, oh, eleven of, because you have thirteen ramekins all day. the sort of day when you're baking extra cookies in the middle of service, when you're peering at meringues that have spent all of ten minutes in the oven saying are they brown? do these looks brown to you? how could they, how could they possibly, the oven is BEYOND low it's basically OFF.

i ping pong between a restaurant with a weekly rotating menu and a new (like, bauer-spotting time) restaurant and so every day is a new calibration of what/where. it has been an interesting if thoroughly exhausting couple of weeks thus far.

things to look forward to:
doughnuts. soon-ish.
day off!
actually having time to go return my library books at the library
delicious banana bread for breakfast

peaceful protest to overturn prop 8

it was not like this. there were certainly more than several hundred of us, and we were only blocking traffic insofar as we were continuing our legal protest down the street, from the civic center to the castro, and down to dolores park. see for yourself, if you'd like. along the way, people leaned out of houses to wave no on 8 signs, and of those stuck in traffic, several beeped in support or waved signs of their own.

we were of all ages, abilities, races, genders, identities. we were in drag and we were in work clothes. we texted, tweeted, snapped pictures, updated our facebook status, cheered, yelled, sang, marched, played brass instruments. you might have thought we were happy, oh yes, because we queers, we like to dance.

we weren't happy. having rights of yours stripped away is something we've all suffered through for the last eight years, and though our country voted for change, and our country said yes we can, we still bump up against others' discomfort at our lifestyle choice, or whatever they're calling it these days. i cried when obama was elected and i saw a democratic majority in congress, because i thought we finally were ready to take back our country and to finally end racial discrimination in all of its small, pervasive ways.

tonight we said it again, yes we can. yes we can, yes we will get there. we will get there because it is the right thing. we will get there through the hard work of changing people's minds. we will get there, one day. we will get there because we are not going away, and this is not going away, and even though we live in sf and can feel so snugly protected, we still have a lot of work to do.

start a conversation at work, if you're out at work. (if you're not out, why?) tell your friends, your roommates, your neighbors. tell them because they care about you. because you can't know who they'll tell in turn. tell them so that they can come along next time, because we can't do this alone. we need your support.

i am sure that everyone who voted yes on 8 knows a queer person, even if they're unaware that they actually do. how many votes could we have changed by letting them know their discrimination affects real people?

list

financier batter
raspberry truffles
bake off custards
chocolate bread pudding
chocolate sformato
yogurt and pomegranate bombes
roasted pears
olive oil cake
cheesecakes
elderberry sorbet
orange-vanilla ice cream
banana ice cream
tart do
lemon verbena semifreddo

prop 8

i'm nervous about prop 8. i think a lot of us are. there's a momentum in the air like the fog, with that same mysterious ebb and flow. i lull into not thinking about it, which is probably the worst, because those bigots out there are spending so much time and money thinking about it.

sure, i could say i don't ever envision myself getting married or that marriage doesn't mean the same thing to someone like me as it does to all those straight people undertaking that commitment, but who am i to presume to know what marriage means to any two people at any one point in time? maybe one day i'll wanna get married. maybe i'll decide instead i'd rather have some rad commitment ceremony in an exotic locale. maybe as we keep living our lives and acquiring kids and moving into your neighborhoods, they'll see we're not a threat.

it's easy to get comfortable with a lot of things (like compost, my fave) here in sf. it's easy to presume that everyone, but everyone, is comfortable with who you are. it's easy to think that the hard work is over. in a week i suppose we'll find out. how far we've come/how far we have yet to go. i hope for the best. really, i do.

Making dinner tonight for some friends. I haven't cooked dinner in a couple of weeks and by that I mean something more elaborate than eggs and toast and more than a takeout meal eaten at an odd hour. I've been paging through the wonderful small mezze dishes in Claudia Roden's Arabesque and found a couple to try out...I'll be substituting squash for potato in the potato-tomato pancakes since we've got a squash st home. I'm also making up some goat cheese-black olive boreks, and if I've got the time am planning to make some apple-rosemary caramel ones with the extra phyllo, since we've still got a lot of apples. At the moment I'm in Peet's drinking Earl Grey Lavender tea and working on some writing, since my original plan to go writing in Hayes Valley got derailed by the bulge of library books in my bag. I'm in the middle of a lot of things right now, or at least it feels that way. I'd like to get back to blogging semi regularly, it's just that things have been hectic as usual. I believe we're also having bread pudding which I'm not making...for once I'm making dinner and not dessert. I'm finished procrastinatic. Back to writing.

review

Review of Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse up here

canning sundays

The last of the Apple Farm apples (and pears) made their way into a pear-apple chutney today after a lazy Sunday spent walking on Ocean Beach with the dogs.

Finally checked out my closest convenient local farmers market, on Divis near Alamo Square. It was tiny, but they did have some organic growers, a flower guy, some boutique olives and spreads, and a bread stand. I came home with some extremely aromatic basil, tomatoes, snapdragons and poblano peppers. The basil (and tomato) made their way into basil simple syrup and into bruschetta as part of an improptu dinner with chicken salad. As much as I adore the big markets, like Berkeley and the FPFM, lately there's a part of me that feels like I really need to get to know my community markets to the extent that my schedule allows. Sometimes I feel like certain growers get this huge rep around town cause their on everybody's menu and every time I automatically nab a peach from this guy or that guy, there's some newer farmer or equally worthy farmer getting ignored because his stuff isn't on the menu at Chez Panisse or wherever. And it's hard because there's so many great farmers, and I'm not about to trip over myself buying hard stone fruit from some random orchard just to go against the grain. There are always products not worth buying (and a particular example sticks heavy in my mind) from the most established and most obscure vendors. I am also ridiculously spoiled in getting my hands on excellent produce. I may not be able to make it to the FPFM Saturday market for some Knoll figs, but I'm eating the occasional fig at work...am I splitting hairs? Am I alone in this issue?

Anyway, after the market, and after the beach, and after a trillion loads of laundry, C convinced me we needed to make the chutney we'd discussed. So she peled and sliced apples and pears while I mised the brown sugar, garlic, lemon, ginger (fresh and crystallized) and golden raisins. Having never made chutney before we were going by a pretty basic recipe. When everything barely fit in the stockpot we added some of the Apple Farm's extremely potent cider vinegar, and a dash of water, and let it cook. We tasted it halfway through for seasoning and added a touch more vinegar and a couple handful more salt but otherwise it was delicious. When the chutney finally cooked down it was this amazing combination of caramelization-sugary and vinegar-spicy that I don't know I've ever appreciated in chutney when it's service temp. Pretty much the first thing I thought was, damn, this would be really good with apricots.

too many apples

I have so many apples I just don't know what to do. They're a mixture of Gravensteins, Ashmead's Kernels, Pink Pearls and a couple other varieties, all from the Philo Apple Farm. We have already made two separate batches of applesauce. C showed me how she learned to do hers from her Polish relatives, by boiling the apples till tender, then draining and mashing them. At that point, you sugar, season and continue to reduce the sauce. We're planning a pierogi-making fest so we can eat the applesauce with something yummy, dreaming of crazy nontraditional pierogi fillings like caramelized onion-winter squash. Personally I think parsnips would be nice.

My next apple creation was a spiced sour cream cake with sauteed apples that's perfect for breakfast munching. Goodbye to another six or so apples.

That said the bottom drawer in our refrigerator is still packed with apples. We were thinking of making some chutney. I'm sure I could make a tart of pie or even some flaky turnovers.

It did occur to me yesterday that I could just eat the apples. As in, not cook them. Enjoy them raw. What at idea that would be.

mystery box

someone sent me a box of fruit.

ripe cal red peaches and flavor king pluots from brentwood's frog hollow farm, a place i know very well. at first i thought it was from my old employers themselves...who else would send me such a gift?...or else from my mom, just being nice, or from my dad and stepmom thanking me for entertaining them on their visit. there was no card inside to clue me in. tomorrow i'll call up the farm and see if they can shed some light on it for me, but in the meantime...

here in california it's easy to play the ant. stone fruit season starts in what, may? continues through till october thereabout, at least september. when you get delicious fruit at work every day (and it's not convenient to your schedule to go to a farmers market), you snack on scraps of what you get at work and you use the fruit to make what is on your menu, and unless you are very diligent, that is about it. then the apples show up and, if you're me, you're kind of confused. like, it's apple season already? and there's only apples (pears, pomegranates, persimmons) to hold us til winter? in new england, where you don't get a good nine months of strawberries, everyone is anticipating the local harvest so much that in some ways it's easier to appreciate it. the peaches are here! this month! hurry, hurry...cause you know the cali peaches the store's been stocking all summer were picked way too early to ripen well should you decide to take them home.

this year for some reason my mom's been really awakened to local produce and what it means, tastewise. it's finally come together for her that when you buy something out of season, or when you buy something that's been trucked or flown up from south america or across this country, you are losing out on flavor for the nominal joy of having raspberries in your cereal. only they don't taste like what you remember a berry tasting like.

so in the meantime...maybe i'll take some peaches camping with me. maybe i'll can them in verbena butter, make a plum rose compote. i have been meaning to buy some cans and do some canning, especially with our yard tomatoes fast approaching. i have at last found one white peach worthy of eating. the snow king (ours are from blossom bluff). white peaches (white fruit in general) tend to be high in sugar and low in acid, which means that all you taste is sugar and texture, and any indigenous flavor is pretty much lost. these snow king have a subtle perfumy flavor that's really kind of nice. i thought of them immediately for desert candy's white peach cardamom conserves.

time to play grasshopper kids.

i also got another present today. a genuine pasta king pasta bracelet. oh no, not the one in sonoma. sf's very own bicycle-riding pasta king.

this is just to say

I am entirely guilty of eating plum crisp for breakfast today. Made with delicate italian prune plums purchased from Blossom Bluff. The man at the market noted my beat-up arms and wanted to know, was I a cook? This of course led to an interesting conversation about where I work and what is going on there. Such a small town, this is. The fruit vendors try to engage you in gossip. Also at last week's market I picked up some of my favorite discovery from last year, Alfieri's Summer Royal grapes. Deliciousness. Of course, once I decide I can manage stopping by the Tuesday market once a week for some produce I'll want to eat and some reconnecting with my favorite farms...ye olde schedule changes again. I can still stop by in the early morning for a manageable load-up, I spose, and carry my goods with me to work. Or I can just start commuting outside the city Sundays to a non-SF market. I do have lots of choices, sometimes I just need to be reminded of that fact.

puttering

I know that I haven't been posting. It would make me sad if I weren't so happy to keep my time to myself. We've been living in a state of permanent houseguests, some more and some less grateful and courteous, for at least three weeks although it feels like longer, since C's mom was out here for a week shortly before that. Our washing machine's been broken so dirty laundry is piled up everywhere, making the space seem smaller. I've been not very chatty on the phone with people, cause I have had no time to myself! Luckily it's almost over.

I've been slowly working on clearing up the garden for a fall planting of chard, brussels sprouts, carrots, beets, and the like. Meanwhile I've polished off the first arugula crop and should be able to get a second planting in. It's hard to want to garden when the fog swarms in and it feels like an east coast November, but I've got to get the seeds in the ground soon.

C and I, and maybe some friends, are going camping in the Anderson Valley over Labor Day. We're going to hit up The Apple Farm folks as well as the Navarro winery and the disc golf course at the Anderson Valley Brewing Co. Hopefully this time around Buster will be a better camper. I'm hoping it'll be warm up there. If anyone's got any other fabulous suggestions, we'll try to check them out, in between hiking and thrift store searching and campfire-making.

#300 /why oscar wao

Trying to get back to the simple things in life now that my company's gone. Like cooking dinner at least once a week, calling up those I haven't seen in a long time, continuing to turn our Sunset house into a den of fabulous (or frivolous) decoration. And writing, and reading.

What I loved about Oscar Wao was that it was so different from Drown. Drown, though beautifully written, embraced at times a sort of ghetto chic perspective of difference. In writing that sometimes bordered on romanticism Diaz brought for slices of life (the Jersey/Washington Heights DR diaspora, the realities of growing up on food stamps not knowing your father, the clannish intensities of (im)migrant neighborhoods) that were, yes, missing from "contemporary fiction." Over and over, tough-boy narrator Yunior held forth that you could look through the window but you would not know, in a manuscript that held difference over assimilation or non-assimilation, in a way of speaking that made space for otherness/queerness/difference apart from (not of nor in).

Wao, though, is the nerd-chic fatboy younger brother of Drown-era Diaz. It's Diaz's Corrections, his Caramelo, his Middlesex. Wao takes on the language of RPGs and fantasy books, movies, D&D as much as it draws on Spanish-inflected English and Dominican history. The books is so round, and so real, that reading it I forgive the tired genre it stems from...the old family history stretching back in time, that so masculine snapshot-of-three-generations, this is the key, the thread, the connection. This sort of grand family planning seems to be the archetype of our time, that and memoir, and even David Sedaris bridges the gap (both archetypes! one book!) For as much as I love so many of those books I'm ready for something else to capture our collective literary imagination, but until it does, I'll hope it doesn't take 11 more years of nationwide literary-geek snickering til Diaz produces another piece, and I'm hoping that those of us on the margins will continue to take on the constructs of the center to break apart more open spaces.