A Theoretically Life-Changing Event

My niece and namesake was born at the time this bread was being baked, on April 9th.

If you don't know what TED talks are, basically there is a conference (now international) where people are invited to talk about something that matters to them. The results are fascinating, educational, and, as intended, worth sharing.

Peter Reinhart does this talk about the cycle of life as manifested in bread. Now, personally, I don't think about my doughs this deeply, philosophically. But somehow, at this time, I felt this was a good thing to share.

I look at this every day

There are two of these notices on my sheeter. One of my coworkers pointed out how elegant the hand looked. This is why I note all those Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery warnings on my allergy meds.

why the recalls scare the bejeesus out of me

In today's news: Health care vote, injustice, war, harassment, celebrity gossip and then a tiny, tiny little note: oh by the way, some food is bad. And then I walk in the grocery store and see the recall signs. All. over. the. store.

I don't consider myself a righteous foodie. I can't afford to be... I work on a cook's wages. I eat things out of boxes, love me some gummi bears dipped in bad chocolate and have been known to succumb to the lure of cheese food. I am not a locavore, vegetarian or vegan, don't spend my ducats on organic bananas and I know that my chocolate is imported from far away lands and I am ok with that. I won't go to someone else's house as a guest and criticize them for the same things. That is just bad manners, as I understand them.

But I'm noticing that it is harder for me to buy meat from the store. I'm more likely to pick from the fruits and vegetables that are in season, or, even better, from my local farmer's market. I find myself planning on spending more on food, and buying less. Some of this is the natural result of educating myself, but mostly, its a cross between fear and revulsion.

Pepper: one of the oldest known spices, and at one time considered a medicine for among other things heart disease, toothaches, (ironically) indigestion and diarrhea. Black pepper is the unripe pepper berry which is cooked(!) and dried into what we know as the peppercorn. So how the hell can it be tainted with salmonella? How can a food additive, HVP, (once again made from a cooked product, and used in processed products) cause so many things all over the country to be pulled from the shelf and yet receive so little attention from the media? Oh yeah, no one died. And yet there are such crazy rules and regulations surrounding things like raw milk cheese production that if I wanted to make my own cheese from my own milk in my own home for myself, I would be doing something illegal in some states.

Our food system is completely messed up. And somehow, I feel like this has happened in my lifetime. Sure, the roots were there before I was born, and there are things (read: chocolate) that I benefit from in the current system, but somehow food has become dangerous. Food has become Unhealthy.

Crazy.

So how do we fix it? I don't know. It's too large a problem, on too large a scale. I have a hard time figuring out how to deal with it in just my household alone, living with someone who is a classic soda and junk food-fueled geek. He still gets his soda, I don't drink it. I try for a higher quality of junk food, or try and find healthy options that fit the bill. But it is hard. And I'm saying this as someone who knows how to cook, knows what to look for to ensure I'm getting good food and is willing to put in the effort to do so.

What are the options for everyone else?

That's what scares me.

What you can find at the market in winter

It's not complete desolation....

Normal, for a given value of normal

January. Things... slow... down. People are still fancifully admiring their new year's resolutions and delicious, rich, happy pastry is usually not a high priority. This lull is not unexpected. It is the kind of thing you can plan for, and many kitchens use the time to consider, ponder, plan, test and start prepping. It's also a time where the job gets easier. It's a time where the needs get scaled back. When you're used to running on all cylinders to just keep up with the holidays, you find inexplicable pockets of dead time. You can look around a bit more, take the time to notice the people around you.

So who is around me? Who cooks? It's a question I find interesting because, quite simply, this is a weird industry. We work, for the most part, inconvenient hours. We expect to not take holidays off. It is blue collar, hard labor, and has long term physical effects. According to one BBC article chefs take the lead as far as unhealthy lifestyles go. Can't say I've seen too many examples to the contrary. Little money, little chance of greatness, celebrity or even serious recognition. So what gives?

Only one possible conclusion. We are all batshit crazy.

Oh, there are different types of crazy: chemically induced, DSM-IV recognized, food obsessed, lost... but every one of us is tweaked out in some way. This doesn't make us necessarily bad people (although some are). It just means that if we were forced to sit at some desk, move around numbers and speak cheerfully to strangers, lots of people would get a first hand opportunity to see how crazy we are. Somehow, though, the kitchen is an outlet, a direction. The food gives us a connection to the world, grounding. People who cannot manage a coherent sentence in a party situation can be a social butterfly in this safe place of fire and water and flour and eggs.

I've never met a cook who bored me. Yes, I've met plenty who I wouldn't want to meet up with outside of a kitchen, but all of them had a story behind their eyes. What is interesting is that there is no coherent link, no absolute shared anything. Educated or not, ambitious or not, even skilled or not. Race, color, creed, sexual orientation, family history, religious affiliation, dietary considerations, gender, allergies, whathaveyou doesn't matter. There's a kitchen for you somewhere.

If you're crazy enough.

The Evolution of Flaky Pie Crust

I kinda feel like I have made pie crust for a statistically significant portion of Portland area households having Thanksgiving dinner. This is hyperbole, but what I have done still surprises me given Pies I Have Known.

My first experiences with pie crust were not, of course, my own, but my family's crusts. My mom made pies often, her apple crumb pie a vivid, mountainous memory and the crusts were distinctly undercooked. I loved them that way, soft, pale, laden with apple goo. They did not hold up well on their own, and she never made pies with a top crust. I wonder why.

When I was in college I had a cooking buddy, Amanda. We were a good match because she baked, and I cooked, and neither of us was exceptionally good at the other. Both of us were convinced we had found our specialties. I don't know how her cooking is now, but my baking has improved. She would talk about flaky pie crust, offering suggestions about the importance of cold, refrigerating the bowl. I tried this, and found some improvement, but not enough to warrant regular pie baking.

As I started exploring cooking, I went through a quiche phase. Why quiche? I love eggs, I love stuff mixed with eggs, and had not yet heard of the existence of a frittata. The Silver Palate books suggested pate brisee, my first all butter crust. Holy crap that was good. Having grown up with salt free crisco crusts, it was nice to see the crust could have a flavor unrelated to the filling.

When I started getting serious about cooking, I picked up Harold McGee's masterwork On Food and Cooking. In the continuing efforts to avoid gluten formation, he detailed how to add the ice water, and the importance of letting the dough rest. Now I was getting somewhere.

I didn't make a properly cooked pie crust until I went to pastry school. School, for me, was a great deal of relearning the things I already knew but knew wrong. I learned where pie was concerned, you shouldn't taste raw flour in the crust. That it should have real deep color, because the color also will indicate flavor. Oddly revelatory.

Then came real production. I stopped looking for a perfect homogenous mixture knowing that was the worst thing that could happen. I actually could see how marbling of the butter in the top crust made for beautiful browning, and how a little too much mixing could make a crust shrink and deform. My crust mix looked a lot like my rough puff pastry and in some ways acted like it as well, water creating steam in the bake, causing those sought after layers.

I'm still learning pie crust with each batch. I've made about thirty batches this month, which works out to somewhere around 400 pies. Just me. Scaling, mixing, rolling out and cutting. It's all butter, with salt, kept cold, mixed just enough, rested before rolling. I don't do the baking, but the folks who do know what it means to bake it all the way.

While I've been busy with the crusts, our sous chef has been busy with the filling and forming, perfectly crimping crusts, piling fruit high. I asked her if she ever made pie at home. She said yes, but she never made crust, she just took home some from the bakery.

Not bad for someone who didn't manage to mix a decent crust until she was in her 30s.

something to think about

Second, third, fourth, how ever many hands this passed through, I found it in this post on Alinea at Home, and she got it from a friend who read it from an interview with fashion designer Isabel Toledo:

"Craft takes time, and therefore it is luxury. You cannot do an amazingly well-made garment without taking time—not just the time it takes to make something but also the time it took the maker to come up with the idea. That is all luxury, and that has been lost because we're trying to make things faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper. The consumer tends to lose track of what luxury is."

A quick Shout Out

My sweet friend SisterDiane (Diane Gilleland) does a podcast and blog about all things crafty, particularly if it involves building community through social networking, supporting independent crafting or the joys of plastic canvas. She is not a cook, which makes her a nice conversational change of pace in my world, but she does appreciate cooking as a craft.

She decided she wanted to do a podcast on cooking and interviewed me about things like finding inspiration for cooking after doing it all day and how to avoid burnout; I'll probably explore some of those ideas here more later, because they are interesting topics. For now, though, I'm just going to mention this and go back to finishing the next video post.

Coming soon, upsidedown cake!

What Gourmet Magazine did for me

I started putting together a list of memories tied to the magazine- a long list - to try and portray just how important it has been in my life. Thing is, if I had to say just one thing about this magazine, there is really only one story I could tell.

My mother was dying from cancer. We all knew it. Brain surgery had just revealed more tumors, it was in her bones, it was a matter of time. Not much time. I was spending my days in a regular pattern. In the mornings, I would go to work. I couldn't skip out due to a project deadline. My boss, being a decent human being, gave me my afternoons. I would leave work, drive the hour to the hospital, sit with my mom, my dad, and various other grieving friends and family, get in my car and drive back.

But I wouldn't go home necessarily. Sometimes at home, sometimes at the home of good friends, I would cook. I grabbed various copies of Gourmet, flipped through for anything that sounded interesting, and cooked. Pork tenderloin? Now was the time to try it. Gratins? Sure. Crazy, elaborate over the top dishes using ingredients I had never dared to buy before was exactly what I needed.

I wasn't hungry. I tasted what I made but I don't remember eating much. That was not the reason I cooked. What I needed through those long days was that moment when I served dinner. When we gathered to eat those meals I put together, that was where I found that food isn't just about sustenance. It was then about finding good, constant things, the comfort of friends, and just knowing that there was more to the world than just the job, the drive, the hospital.

It's not everyone would have done. Indeed, it was probably one more reason that when I did decide to change careers, my family was completely unsurprised. But at the time it was how I got through each day. One could say that I could have found that with some other task, some other magazine. All I know is that when I realized that I needed to cook, to keep my world in focus, that was the magazine I grabbed from my shelves. It could have been something else, yes, but I'm glad it was Gourmet.

the giant annoying brick wall that is looking ahead

The first kitchen I worked in, I was paired up with Bill, who, in addition to being the oldest guy in our kitchen, was a career prep cook. Not a sous, not a chef, but certainly a prep guy that could be relied upon to cover for an overly enthusiastic kitchen puppy like I was. I never asked him, then, why he stayed at the level he did, I was too busy trying to learn, trying to keep up. I didn't know that was the kind of thing I should be trying to learn, too.

I imagine that military folks, coming to the end of their enlisted time and suddenly considering they may want to go career may go through something similar, but I could just be making this up.

So the question of the day is "Where is this taking me?" or, better perhaps, "Where do I want to go with this?" (See, passive vs active voice, I get it.)

This would be easier if I were younger. I could take the time to work some really terrific places, enduring less than ideal living situations. I could work a lot, 36/8. Really build up a resume, a repuation and then take it to wherever. The reality is, I'm not. I don't want to dorm up with three other people. Yes, as odd and far reaching a dream as my $14 saving account may suggest, I would like to own rather than rent. Of course, I have some aches and pains and things that tell me that physically 36/8 just isn't an option (or at least not one for the long term) I have more than just me to consider, too; my sweetheart has endured two multiple time zone moves now, I think I've used up that get out of jail free card.

Stability is not what you come for in this industry. Sure, there are varying degrees of slippery slope but things can slide at any time. All tied up in the question of what do you want in your career is the bigger question of what are you willing to risk? And don't kid yourself that it's just professional risk. How important is that house to me? Important enough that I should give up the idea of my own shop? What do I save up for?

Stepping up my game at work is all well and good, but I'd like to know what I am stepping up to do.