Where are we, and why are we here?

My first job, the summer in-between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, was as a baker at a small, trying-to-be-French restaurant in coastal Connecticut. I was one of a team of two; the head baker and I produced muffins, scones, sticky buns, croissant and brioche for the restaurant’s weekend brunch, and all sorts of cakes, tarts and puddings for the dessert and catering menus. That a fifteen-year-old with no  professional cooking experience got such a job says more about the restaurant’s odd priorities than about my ability, but I got it, and thrived in it, and came back to it the next summer.

I learned a great deal about the adult world at that job--all sorts of facts and responsibilities my parents never taught me. Prior to working there, the head baker had made a living decorating pornographic cakes. His portfolio, which he kept on the rack above our baking station, offered a wealth of information, some of which I didn't fully understand until years later. The restaurant’s owner spent a good portion of his time devising ways to smuggle marijuana (“If you put it in the kid’s diaper—they never look in the diaper…”) and evading the local health inspectors. He had plenty of reasons to evade the inspectors. It took me several years to be able to eat out in restaurants again, after what went on in that place.

It seemed a completely different world than the one I lived in at home. I liked it much better. For one thing, these adults seemed happier. I lived with my father, a physician who hated his work, and with my mother, a classical musician whose stage fright and perfectionism rendered her completely unable to perform. No one at the restaurant seemed quite as stuck in misery. (And if they did feel stuck, there was always pot.) At home, my mother practiced the harpsichord for hours each day, stopping at every tiny mistake and yelling at herself. In the restaurant kitchen, we listened to a pop radio station most of the time, or, when the head baker took charge of the music, to the local classic rock station. I was thrilled by the lighter tone and harder rhythms of the songs we heard, but a few of them--"Tangled up in Blue," "Can't Find My Way Home"--made the head baker teary-eyed. At those moments, and at times when the restaurant owner's illegal activities got particularly in the way of the food production, the head baker would look at me, shake his head resignedly, and say something I would never, ever have heard at home. "Sometimes, you just gotta say fuck 'em all, Amanda. Fuck 'em all." He'd put his head down and keep working, muttering, in a pleasant and friendly tone, "Fuck 'em all. Fuck 'em all." Always eager to learn, I internalized that lesson, too. It has helped me enormously.

I also learned something about professional baking at that job—enough to hold other restaurant jobs, later. I learned that, fundamentally, professional cooking is about rhythm as much as it’s about food. When I baked a cake at home, I focused on the cake, attending to the creation and transformations of that one thing. In restaurant baking, I focused on pacing and sequencing.  I made many different things at once, and timed my work so that the sugar for the sticky buns caramelized while I unwrapped six two-pound blocks of cream cheese, put them in the mixer bowl to soften, then scooped and squeezed muffin batter out of a bowl with my hand—a handful and a half for each of four dozen muffins per batch. Then back to the caramelizing sugar and the sticky buns while the muffins baked. Then, the cheesecake batter with the softened cream cheese.

That job changed the way I think about food. I began to realize that food, food prep and food enjoyment have all sorts of rhythms. Ingredients vary by season. Some foods cook quickly, others need long, slow cooking, and some change, drastically, depending on whether they're cooked quickly or slowly. 

Rhythm is a starting point. Mine is the type of brain to connect disparate things, and this blog, in part, explores the connections between seemingly distant worlds--how different means of expression may not be all that different. It's a place to talk about things I love: eating  seasonally and locally, growing things to eat on an urban windowsill, cooking interesting and nutritious food even if you cook only for yourself. It allows me to share my delight in cooking for other people. It's a kind of melding of worlds, but, hopefully, more.

Although I didn't see all of it at the time, there was considerable misery in both of those two worlds I knew in high school.  Food has rhythms, sure. But food and music have other, perhaps sneakier relationships. Each on its own, and also together, they can keep us stuck in misery, or help us get past it. This is a blog about making dinner and getting out of ruts. Some of the ruts are actual food ruts--cooking or eating the same thing, week after week. Some ruts are more about rhythm--breaking free of old rhythms, or rediscovering ones that we've forgotten. Hopefully, there will be some good things to eat, and some good music, along the way.

Can't Find My Way Home