Exit wounds.

I read something somewhere that when it comes to kitchen injuries, burns are sexy, cuts are when something stupid goes wrong. It was probably Tony Bourdain.

I was sitting in front of an endless pot of chocolate pastry cream one day (guest chef insisted that the recipe could not be increased and so to feed the event I had to make the same batch 16 times). Event cook of reasonable aptitude totally gets me with the oil he's using to pan sear his tuna. I flinch (I've named the scar after him) and keep stirring. "Oh did I get you?" he inquires. I flash the blistered skin. "Yeah, you pastry cooks don't know about burns."

Ahem, what?

When I interviewed for this job, as things were winding down we noticed that all three of us - owner, manager, and me, had identical marks. I told them of the wisdom of hot side event cooks. There was laughter. Sheet pans are hot. Pastry cream is hot. Water baths suck and I hate them. Anyone who suggests that pastry cooks don't know from injuries can go suck an egg. Just not the farm ones because those are expensive and better for the custards and Oh you don't know how to tell them apart? Snort.

I have a knife cut on my hand. Our butter comes in beautiful 44 pound blocks and my croissant detrempe does not need quite that much. So in cutting it down with the machete my hand slipped across the top edge the wrong way. Yes that is right I cut myself cutting butter, and I did it with the non-sharp side of a machete.

Tony Bourdain may have been right.

The Epic Battle between Man and Machine

A new home kitchen is a living beast. Relationships are often established quickly, and can only be reshaped through constant, repeated effort. You do your best to set up familiar territory, to make sure your arsenal is ready when the unexpected strikes, but the fact remains the place is different. Outlets on different walls. Cabinets in different configurations. Worse still, in the case of the rental, different appliances.

A pizza box does not fit in my new oven, but thankfully, the half sheet pans do. There are only two outlets in the whole kitchen, and in order to plug in the mixer, I have to unplug and move the toaster oven. It has tiny, narrow cabinets and a single sink rather than the double I used to have.

There is a window, looking out into our patio and the hill with the hazelnut tree and the murder of crows that our landlord feeds. An open set of shelves gives me easy access to pantry items, and the general setup feels airy even though I know with absolute certainty the space is small.

I've made lovely cookies so far. That torte and a cherry clafoutis. Some terrific, farmer's market inspired dinners. Chili cheeseburgers. Udon. Eggs. Chocolate Marionberry jam.

I think we'll be ok together.

Rustic or refined?

I'm in the honeymoon phase. I'm feeling slightly awkward, slightly off kilter... the order of things is just different enough to keep me on my toes. My confidence level is weird, and I find myself asking for assurances in such a way that I find it annoying.

I'm working on that.

But the work itself is fun, interesting, the atmosphere a gazillion times better from what I left. (Sometimes I think that is part of the problem. I'm waiting for abuse that doesn't happen so I'm all confused. Human beings can be so ridiculous.)

The product we put out is lovely - small batch, artisan care, and serious commitment to the local. Our flour is locally milled. That is just crazy, and couldn't happen just anywhere. The style of the work is rustic.

Rustic is interesting. It doesn't mean careless, sloppy. There is a level of concern over the quality of our goods that I haven't seen in a long time. Indeed, sometimes the concern is a bit mystifying, given what I've been doing. What I have been doing, professionally, would not be called rustic. It would be considered a more finished style, more artful and stylized. Indeed, that's the kind of thing I tend to do at home as well, maybe even more so.

Now, I'm being asked to forget that. But still, there is finely detailed piping on those plain cut cakes. Deliberately placed currants among rough curled chocolate. Carefully cut and scaled laminated doughs filled with a local seasonal fruit mix. So I'm looking at a different style at home, too, for practice. The most perfect fresh prunes I have ever seen (The farmer told me they would be best baked, and then smiled and said considering where I worked, I would know what to do with them) become a rough torte. Monsieur le chef would have approved of this one.

Even if it is rustic.

Notebooks

In my past existence, I had a notebook fetish. I did a lot of project based traveling, and each trip had its own notebook - a lifeline of everything from expenses and coworkers' hotel room numbers to daily lists of necessary tasks. I still find these notebooks, tucked in corners. They are virtually useless now, but each time I find one, bent and broken from being shoved in pockets, I find it difficult to get rid of it. For a month, each one was my life. I may not remember the faces of those people, or the meanings behind my own shorthand mutterings, but there it is, that month of my life.

Notebooks have a different meaning in my life now. They are no less crucial. Perhaps they mean even more because now they live on, potentially long after me. Now, they are my recipes. Each job has had a different notebook, and what I put in them was a direct reflection not only of me, but of the person I worked for.

Monsieur Le Chef never required that I have a notebook, he gave me free range of his own. I made one anyway, pocket sized. The cover is gone from repeated use. The recipes we used all the time were at the front, strange seasonal and experimental ideas were at the back. The recipes themselves are just lists, the barest notes on process. I refer to them regularly.

My most recent notebook is in pristine condition. It did not fit in my pocket. Each recipe is categorized by type, and lists not only the ingredients but also extraordinarily detailed ("Three sheet pans, lined with paper, pan spray around edges") notes. The chef would check our notebooks regularly to see if we were writing down each detail, and even told my coworkers that my promotion had been in part based on the quality of my notebook. I care about maybe three of the recipes in this book.

Then there is my home book. It is not pocket sized. I've copied over all the important recipes, and have that first notebook tucked in the side pocket. It has my own recipes in it, sketches, plating notes, notes of inspiration. Inside the cover I tucked a photograph. It's not my own, and one of a series of three showing a flowering branch with varying levels of focus. A standard to reach for.

I started a new book this week. It's pocket sized. I'm trying to figure out how to balance the characteristics of the other notebooks. If I can do that, it will really mean something.

New

Auto-complete is a funny thing. You start typing a title and get a little jolt from the past. I typed with word "new" in this title and my computer wanted it to be "New Beginnings, Same old mistakes."

What the hell is that??

I have no idea when I said that. It wasn't, in fact, here ( I checked). It is also, for me, ridiculously pessimistic and negative. Change may not be my favorite thing to cope with, but it has to happen. Make it the best possible, try and get something new from it. Or at least, that is how I think I think I am. Stuff like auto-complete tends to bash my head about a little.

So I got a new job. We're moving away from our life with this step. I am, in fact, scared. Not as to whether or not I can do the job - I am confident that I can. I am scared about my judgment. And that is a devastating thing to be scared about. I have been told many times that my judgment is flawed. It was always in the context of doing exactly what someone else told me to do, rather than following my own instincts, so you would think that would make me want to stick to my guns more. Apparently not. And it gets tangled up with authority figures and roles of responsibility. Basically, it makes the people who said I have crappy judgment correct. Screw that.

This is a different kind of job for me. Not in terms of work, but in terms of structure, culture. Attitude. I can learn all the things I was hoping to learn from my last position and more I would never be able to learn here. New things. New Beginnings. Maybe some new mistakes, sure, but new mistakes are a lot more interesting than the same old ones. And if I do make old mistakes, well, maybe they will look different in the new place, and I can learn to stop making them.

All the wonderfulness of an apricot, just with a new skin.

What you take with you.

I hate last days. I've moved around a lot, had a number of last days and given my general state of mind, I give those last hugs listening to the little voice in my head say, "I won't remember your name in two months."

Well, I am kinda bad with names.

I'm good with personalities, though. This team will set types in my head for many moons to come - the ambitious production guy, the batshit bipolar cook, the seriously mellow dishpit king, the cake girl. Some people will be beyond recasting, like the handicapped drug dealer prep cook who wants to get it on with my little sister. I won't find another one like him. But those roles will be how they live on in my head.

There's some practical lessons gained, too. Some, I will work hard to overcome almost immediately. Others I will write down, or don't even need to write down, because they are mine now, incorporated into the whole. A few recipes, too. Like that flan. Without the cockroach. Don't ask.

There is still a little part that wonders what would be if I stayed. And what all of those people would become. But they will, in their own time and place, leave as well. I'm going on my terms, and that makes it worth the wondering.

Next!

Broken.

Things do that, you know. Break. You can call it planned obsolescence. You can call it a bad emulsion. Or you can just fix it and go on with the important things.

The praline paste was broken, and was going to get thrown away. Like half a bucket's worth. I snagged it from an untimely demise and brought it home to fix it. Fix it, I did, now I have exquisite praline paste. Of course, I burned out the motor on my immersion blender doing it. Broken. So I ordered a new one. It arrived today. Fixed.

It made me think about broken things. Broken things are important in a way that whole things are not. Whole things are lovely and accomplished and get crossed off the to do list. They fall away like something memorized by rote. Broken things frustrate, challenge, teach. They become the whys and hows.

"Why is the stupid a/c broken the first week of 90 degree weather? How am I going to temper chocolate when tempered chocolate is just melting from being in here?"

It is a shame that we are such a disposable culture. Sometimes, yes, a broken thing needs to be discarded. Corporations, among others, plan it that way. But the worst possible method of teaching, to me, is the "start over" method. That may be what is required, but figuring out what went wrong first, exploring how to fix it, or why it cannot be fixed, that is where confidence begins.

It isn't just about doing it over and over again. It is about understanding what it is you are doing in the first place.

But you'll still have to throw away all that ice cream if your walk-in freezer dies over the weekend.

Play

People are surprised to find out I make pastry items at home. I'm not sure why this is, really. Home is my lab, library, playground and comfort zone. At home I can make mistakes and call them innovations, failures can be called learning experiences. No one is waiting for my work but me, and I enjoy my own breathless enthusiasm. I can create silly, exotic, fun without worrying about it fitting with the style of someone else. At home there is not a single god damn pecan tassie, prescooped cookie and sweetened condensed milk is kept at an absolute minimum. That stuff really creeps me out.

And, if I do show someone something from home and am asked, "Why would you make dessert caviar?", "Why not?" is a perfectly reasonable answer.

Black cherry caviar, honeyed yogurt, vanilla pancake and fennel.

My sister, on why I should just apply for that thing...

"it turns out disappointment isn't so bad that it is worth missing out on enthusiasm."

You're Laborers; you should be laboring.

I'm smart, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

I spent years working though all the psychological baggage that led me to believe this was a bad thing and I know that, in fact, it's a damn good thing. It's not that I am a prodigy of any sort. I'm not a wizard or some superhuman thingamabob. Just good and smart. And yes, I have an education.

You would think this would make my life easier.

Instead I chose to work in an industry that has a highly skeptical if not cynical view of the value of classwork. And why shouldn't they? They have earned their education in a very real and practical sense - apprentices were around long before the idea of a professor - and have all seen some of the lesser examples of education without practical knowledge. And it is not simply my job that has this viewpoint. Some of the best chefs out there scoff at the skills of the culinary school graduate.

I am very conscious of not waving my brains about at work. In particular, my immediate supervisor is not educated and is very sensitive about it. I have actually had to ask him to stop dismissing the skills of the instructors at my school because of things he felt I should know. I have never corrected his science when it is flat out wrong, because he is not the kind to respond to that well. I am tolerant that when asked what six times nine is, someone is going to check my math on a calculator. But dammit, I AM going to say something about that butter cookie they want to send as a lactose intolerant dessert. And it is really hard to not react strongly when the response is "So? Only milk has lactose."

I had great teachers in culinary school. Intelligent individuals who were perfectly comfortable with letting me know how much I wouldn't know when I got that piece of paper, even while they fed my brain. They encouraged me to get out there while going to classes to see what is really like, and I did. They understood, and helped me to understand, that what I was getting from them was a vocabulary. They gave me the freedom to fail. That freedom gave me confidence to try again, and try different, and question how and why and what. To learn. To be educated.

Is it any wonder that of all the options available to me for the long term, I want to be like those that valued my brain, challenged me even while letting me know that I was working in an idealized, sheltered environment? Could you blame me for wanting nothing more for the immediate future than a chef that is, if not as smart as I am, cognizant of what to do with someone who is smart?