Category: career

New Wave of Food

· Leave a comment ·

Deconstructing a known food dish has been very popular in restaurants for years.  You take something, say a carrot cake, and you put apart the components to recreate a new eating experience.  With the carrot cake example, the raisins in the cake would become a purée, the carrot a sorbet, the cake a fluffy microwave cake, the rum a caramel sauce, the brown sugar would be crystallized for a crunch.  The spices would be an aroma.

Why don’t we call it a reconstruction? You are not simply tearing down, you are recreating.  A reconstruction has endless possibilities. In order to create you first must destroy.  This we know.  But after that epic destruction of mayhem and feelings of regret, overwhelmed by everything that must still happen, you must rebuild.  This is twilight hour, let’s reinvent, don’t stop early now.

Is This the One?

· Leave a comment ·

I don’t want to curse myself, but I love my new job. For so many reasons.  I know what you are thinking, you always say that when you always start a new job. You seek the full bounty of establishing your queendom in the kitchen, but it never turns out to be the fairy tale you have devised.  As one of my favorite people said, bore-O.  You are going to get bore-O and the luster will loose its polish.  More than I hope not, I need to remain clear headed about why I go to work everyday: it is my art, and it is for my sake mostly. I do it because eating is as close to divinity that we can get on a routinely daily bases.  Give us this day 3 times hopefully, our daily sustenance.  Since we eat so often, it’s nice to be given a surprise still, to indulge and whole heartedly enjoy food.

This is one: My friends went to dine there.  I was not working, but knew at least they would get dessert on the house.   They sent me a picture of my friend eating the last bite of a chocolate cake with a huge smile on his face.  All I could think of was, they gave them the best table in the house.  Thanks guys, for making my friends, whom you don’t know, so welcome.  I love that.

the poor man’s slow hustle

· Leave a comment ·

Its hard to be creative when you are always tired.  Where is the inspiration when even mundane movements are gruesome?  Where is the hope when the justice of any pay off is not there?

I am afraid of working too hard because it is going to make Marigold dull.

I am afraid of loosing her sharp edge with the dulling intensity of work.

-Me

It’s kind of like loosing your keys.

· 1 Comment ·

Confidence, confidence, confidence, that is the key.  I had it somewhere, I remember feeling it in my fingers.  It has a specific texture and a certain smell.  I mean, I had it just a second ago, but where did it go?  I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

It’s like the favorite sweater.  I want to wear it, it matches my favorite jewelry and goes with my best purse.  I swear I folded it, and put it in the drawer.  But isn’t not there! Where did it go?

Basic Instincts

· 1 Comment ·

Basically I am trying hard to not think too far ahead.  It’s not that I don’t have a plan, well it’s more like a scheme.  A loose draft, if you will.  But the details, the accents, the exact colors, I am not sure.

Basically I am making the rest up as I trod along my flowered path.  I plant a seed and watch it grow up.  Sometimes is it an orchid, sometimes it is crabgrass.

You make your own choices.  You draw the outlines, document the blueprints.  The coloring comes with the wind, the fluidity travels in the motion of today.

Sugar’s Dilemma

· 1 Comment ·

I am a Pastry Chef who doesn’t eat sugar.  It’s more than confusing, it’s a paradox.  My career revolves around a singular subject, one type of ingredient that takes on multiple forms.  Glucose, fructose, maltose, sucrose, lactose, whatever the crystallization, the commonality is the sweet sensation.  Honey, turbinado, jaggery, molasses, confectioners, maple, sugar beet, sugar cane, whatever the source, the building blocks of taste are the same.

My nickname is Sugar, that’s how ingrained this ingredient is in my life. I personally, however, avoid consuming sugar.  I try not to eat it.  Ever.  I do this for health reasons.  As you may have heard, sugar is linked to all kinds of weight and mental issues.  All I know is that I feel better when I avoid it.  I try to eat a very high fat and vegetable diet.  The problem with the Paleo lifestyle is that it is literally impossible to be a Pastry Chef who doesn’t eat sugar.  It makes no sense, it is not logical, professionally unacceptable, a contradiction.

Sugar is a dilemma.  It gets a bad rap, but has a place on the dinner table.  I have carved a career about of the very thing that I try so hard to avoid.  The problem is in the excess.  Sugar is everywhere and in everything.  It is not left to the special birthday cake, a once in a blue moon sweet.  It has gotten so out of control that sugar is even in water.   The singular essential ingredient to human life, and that too has been enhanced with the manufactured syrup of modern eating.

I put it in everything, but that is because I put it in the proper role.  I am a Sugar Fairy that knows what percentage of sweetness is perfect for taste and digestion, how to construct a plate that is balanced with a touch of salt, a sprinkle of acid, and good amount of crunch, a lot of creamy texture, a silky mouthful.  Sugar is important.  Sugar is fun.  Sugar is a life enhancement but it must be used cautiously.  You leave that part up to me.

For now,  I will keep on trying to avoid eating peanut butter bacon cookie dough, mint chocolate chip ice cream, lemon curd, or chocolate mousse for breakfast.  I need to remember to take a hint from myself and save it for the right time.

Eating in America Sucks #1

· 2 Comments ·

Reason number 1: Grocery Shopping.

I am well versed in the art, efficiency, #foodlife, #cheflife, convenience of grocery shopping.  I am basically an all around bad-ass when it comes to grocery shopping, saving money, feeding everyone, being amazing in my personal eating life.  Extracurricular duties consist of bagging and personal transport of product to the house, non-conditional of stairs involved or personal weight limit. I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood where I have an extensive access to ethic and individually owned stores.  But, alas, jewel exists and you do frequent it.  And when you do, you remember…

Food here sucks.  This is one of my many installments “Eating in America Sucks.”

Today’s lesson: Potato, The Lost Staple

Seriously the only options for starchy veg at the Jewel-Osco is the potato.  This classification is further limited to seriously 4 varieties under the exquisite umbrella of potato.  Idaho, Grade B Red, Sweet Potato, Mixed Medley Of Very Small Potato Resembling Thing.

That classic baking potato, the Idaho.  The quintessential Midwestern mashed, the Irish Racism Potato, Idaho no You Da Hoe.  But like honestly, it is the most boring kind of potato ever.  Do no get me wrong, I love, love this potato, but this is number one boring.  More bland than a potato.  Get it?

Moving on to grade B potato.  This is like that golf ball sized red potato, that small red apple resembling thing,  that tastes subtly sweet with a delicately creamy texture.  The grade B red potato is like that, but a step down.  It is larger and it’s silky taste has been genetically modified into the semblance of the hoe from Idaho.

Sweet potato is great but that is the old stand by.  I had sweet potato yesterday.  I came to the store hungry and wanting something slightly different that the same thing I eat everyday.  Been there, done that sweet thing.

Alright are you bored yet? Drink some coffee because this dissertation on the cooking grade potato found at the chain, corporate grocery store in not yet over. Rounding up our potato misadventure is that small, almost rotten bag of medley potatoes that are you last choice, your life saver, the possible one!  First of all, the potatoes are so small that there is no way the potato had time to develop any flavor.  It looks like it would taste like a green strawberry.  Secondly, this potato is too tiny to have any flesh beneath the circumference of the skin’s orbit.  The skin makes up the just about the entirety of the miniature potato.  I am not entirely certain, but I do not think that the peel is commonly preferred as the favorite part of the potato.  In fact, I think that it is common practice in the USA to peel the potato and throw the outermost layer away.  Garbage.  Since most potatoes are peeled, and most peels are garbage, the fate of our skin potato is, how shall we say? Compromised? Delicate? Uncertain? Not me of course, I like the skin, but I still do not want a potato consisting mostly of skin.

Yeah that’s it.  Those are the only potatoes offered, sorry for the lack luster list.  Out of the 5,oo0 cultivated variety of potatoes agriculturally grown, our most influential food retailer offers up a humbling 4. (Seriously 5,000, ask Wikipedia). OMG boring.  But really more than uninspiring it is insulting.  Dear lord I am not paying $3 a pound for a shitty baking potato.  The Tiny Skin Potato Medley of Sorrows is a dismaying $4 a bag.  Are you out of your mind??

Anyway, no other options for a starch element to add tonight’s dinner.  There were no parsnips, turnips, plantains, god forbid a celery root, or rutabaga.  What the hell do you do with that?   I dunno, ask the damn Oracle and use it in place of the uniformly bland white guy.

I must imagine how foreigners and visitors and immigrants and travelers must feel.  Do they feel bad for us?  I mean if they do I understand.  I am an American and have lived exclusively in the Midwest and I still feel like I am missing out.  Missing out on variety. Missing out on freshness.  Missing out on spontaneity.