Keep it minimal, what can you take out instead of what can you add?

This is a new mantra for me, a concept in which I do not have many practice hours logged.  If anything, my default is the opposite, to add as many things as possible.  What else does this need?  Not just in cooking, but in my fashion, in my decorating, in my personal goals.  More more more is better and more impressive.  But I need to consider the simpler task, the monk’s perspective, the basic blocks. Tone is down, keep it sharp, focus on the specifics.

What else is there in the world besides eating and the act of getting the food into your belly?  If you ask me, nothing.  There is nothing except worrying about bananas, and the possibility of running out of bananas in the dead of winter.  Almost spring, dead of winter, the ground has been frozen for so long that it seems impossible that anything can come alive again.  Nothing is growing here in this time, so we must rely on imported products such as those pesky bananas that keep disappearing right after breakfast time for an exciting source of consumable calories.

Cooking is not only my ends to the meat, cooking is my joy, cooking is my love.  I hope that this love is felt through perhaps a meal, perhaps through a manipulated banana dish, perhaps through a humble creation made by these two tiny and usually cold hands.

I want to continue to think about highlighting the elements as factors in desserts.  This goes beyond flavor, it creates a consumer connection to food in the most primal way.

I have been playing around with fire with the new year’s eve dessert and the Fuego de Guimauve, but what about the more subtle counterpart to the rambunctious flames, that of capturing the elusive air?

To represent the intangible element of air, I thought about solidifying foamed bubbles, stabilized with gelatin and dehydrated to form a rigid structure, to represent air as an element.  It would be a thin disk, light as cotton candy, crisp enough to then dissolve on the tongue just as quickly as does the spun fun-fair confection.

What percentage of fat stabilizes the foam the best?  Think how whole milk foams the better than skim or cream.  Is this true?  Add lecithin to enhance the bubbles, to make a plethora of encased air pockets, to skim off and quickly to dry, maintaining the outside structure.  This would be flavored with a highly aromatic scent, like orange zest.

Coconut oil foam/ Cocoa butter foam

Carbonation as representing air, but this is a purely wet sensation, not dry like the foam.

Reading about how Google studied why some groups work well together and why some don’t.  They put together a t team of researchers to unravel the big question, poured in millions of useless dollars answering a question that does not need to be answered.  Seriously, this Project was equipped with a silly name and all, thought up but company that currently runs the country in terms of all of our access to all the information we currently use.  Who even knows how to operate the late Dewey Decimal, RIP?

It’s chemistry, basic human interaction, that’s why groups function well together.  It’s that unseen force of connection, it basically boils down to magic.

You can’t study magic.

This sounds like a start to a satirical movie, more then an article in New York Times- a team of researches sent out to answer that great question of why some people get along and others don’t.  It’s like your parents picking out your friends for you- it’s never going to work. That is not how creativity and new ideas get sparked.  It sounds like a computer came up with the question instead of a person.

It pains my sore body to hear of so much unnecessary work.  There is too much to do already, without such a cumbersome study on how a groups can create synergy.

Not every group is going to  change the world Google, so if you relaxed more about what you demand out of mere humans- we are not robots and since you can’t replicate human chemistry we are safe for the time being- for if you did, you would have saved enough money many times over to make up for the inefficient system of creativity.  Let’s have focus groups dedicated to fostering imagination, not trying to give it straight lines.

What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Goodness does it feel good to be at home.  It has been a whirlwind of adventure lately, with travels across the country followed by touring destinations close to home, sprinkled with catching up and story telling.   Nonstop fun and new experiences have been the theme for this mild Chicago winter.  Never did I think that this cold season would be so full of life, so full of color, exploding with inspiration and colored with love.  Work, also, has been a choo choo ride resembling a rollercoaster more than the daily drudge routine.

It’s been an amazing start to the year, an amazing attempt at remembering about those new year’s resolutions high, an amazing beginning of the year of the monkey.

Yet, after seeing the world, and fostering irreplaceable connections with people, it feels damn good to be home, to be surrounded by the life that I have chosen, to be in that space where the one person’s opinion who matter’s the most is mine.

Sometimes solitude is the best company, sometimes all you need is nothing.

Savory pastries.  I take my background from savory cooking, where you have more flexibility when it comes to creating something delicious, and apply that mindset to pastry.  Desserts are very rigid in their structure- they are based on chemistry, they are based on formulas and percentages, and these regulations do not allow for a lot of wiggle room.  That’s why it is so hard to do both savory and pastry at the same time- why top chefs, no matter how masterful their are, need to outsource the dessert program.  It is near impossible to do because the two approaches to creating food cancel each other out.  Savory is about improvisation, pastry is about following the rules like a religious fanatic.

Having a strong savory background has allowed me to see outside of the boundaries of the regulations.  I still follow the rules to the gram, but I can switch up the methods, I can add that creative flare without drawing outside of the lines.  Maybe it’s substituting an ingredients, sometimes it’s adding another step, but I strongly consider adding to desserts that same flavor steps used in savory cooking.

People often look at me strange, those who are unfamiliar with the fine dining world, when I say I specialize in just one course, the last one.  Why is it necessary to have a whole new chef for a few dishes?  This is a valid question, one that I have to hard time answering to the wide world without a long preamble.

A small Midwestern city certainly has a made lasting impression not just on the local culture, but on a national level.

German immigrants flocked to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in search of cheap farmland in the early 1900’s.  With this desire to escape the problems in the homeland, they brought with them delicious food, highly refined beer, language, and more importantly cultural standards that leaked out of the small town and into the mainstream ways of America.  Their influence goes beyond bratwurst, mustard, pretzels, hefeweizen- it has changed the school system, impacting every single American.  This culture insisted on kindergarten for young children, sports programs at all levels of schooling, and the inclusion of music and art curriculum again for all levels of schooling.  These influences, which were incubated in the large amount of German immigrants who settled in Milwaukee, are largely taken for granted, assumed that this is the way this it always has been.  A small city, and a small movement, creates vibrations that goes far beyond the initial intent.

I am my own harshest critic, and I will have it no other way.  I don’t care what the chefs’ say, I don’t care about what the magazines think, I don’t care about competing with the rest of the culinary crowd.  None of these people hold a candle to my own thoughts, to my own critiques, to my own desires to make the best food possible.  I am perfectionist through and through and for whatever reason I have set the bar very high for myself.

The problem with this mindset is that nothing is ever good enough for me.  When I reach my high goals, I feel meh.  When I fall short, which happens daily because I set myself up for failure, I feel depressed and I get really down on myself.

This cycle does not work well for creativity or motivation, but regardless I am doing ok in both sectors.  Although I do wish I was doing better, I wish I was a machine of artistic creation, I wish that my magnetic fingertips were instead filled with golden talent, with shimmering iridescent paint that turns the ugly to the symmetric, the ordinary into something memorable.

I know that it all boils down to me, and that makes it more stressful/ depressing.

So, true to the diary of an optimist form, I want to focus on the positives of the day, instead of beating myself up over how I could be better.

I got to work at 8:30 and I felt like that was too late.  Silly lazy girl, you could have done better.  But fuck that.  A year ago even this feat would have been nearly impossible, it would have been a special occasion, a true self motivational feat.  I have been working second shift my whole adult life, and changing to a whole new time zone is difficult.  They talk about jet lag, but that hardly affects me after years of working at any given time, for unimaginable stretches.

For one day in my life, I am going to be proud of myself.  I am proud of the fit I threw getting out of bed, I am proud of how difficult and how defeated I felt this morning, I am proud that punching in at 8:30 was too late.  I am proud that I was brought to tears with how much I need to do at work so that I can have an enriching personal life.  Cheers and happy nonconformist weekend.

Dessert trend predictions from the mind of Marigold:

Return to simplicity to focus on a singular ingredient.  Where is it from, specifically who grew it?  Let’s explore the many varieties of ingredients, the nuances of nature’s creativity.  This is taking the farm to table a step further, respecting the beauty of the ingredient as much as the sourcing. I think Chef’s will embrace the innate flavors and textures of the raw ingredients, transforming nature’s creation it into many new forms.

Why?  Because of all the additives in food, these manufactured flavors are distracting our taste buds.  By mimicking the natural flavor profile and textures, we are creating new ones.  I see a return to the origin, a respect for the principal ingredient.

How?  Through multiple ways of representation, to showcase the diversity found in a singular item.  To explore all the varieties of one species, to not stop with the one thing offered at the supermarket.  A main driving factor in dining out is to get something that you can’t get at home.  If we find a way to source alternative varieties of ingredients, it will be another pull for the consumer, another way to make what we have to offer special and memorable.  Different colored carrots have broken through, what’s next?

Adding surprising flavor combinations and savory ingredients to compensate for the simple approach.  Well thought out flavor additions as to not distract the tongue from what you want it to taste primarily.

Bringing in elemental forces to reconnect the diner with the origins of food, cooking, and mimic the weather outside.  I think that Chef’s will embrace seasonal textures and elemental forces to highlight origin of ingredients, and reaffirm a consumer connection with food.