Chefs and Cooks on the Internet

Back when I was cooking professionally (actually, even before then, when I was studying cooking) my husband gave me his old computer and we shortly thereafter got connected to a local ISP. While poking around on the very young Internet, I discovered a newly formed listserve for food professionals. It was very early days for the list. I lurked and just read for some while, fascinated just to follow the discussions.

It was a fascinating place for a newbie to the industry to be, and some of the discussion was rather heady: great discussions on kitchen and personnel management, resolving problems (like the cracking cheesecakes that was making me crazy), sharing tips and sources for equipment, pointers to articles and news stories that affected food producers and purveyors, or bone-chilling stories about a newer set of yet lower standards for foods to served in schools to our children. There was a lot about behaviour in kitchen (was the arrogant chefs who abused all around him becoming more of a cliché than a reality?), food safety, pricing, tipping, salaries.

One list member runs a placement agency for food professionals, and her insights were wonderful and helpful, and her semi-regular posts of resumes (names deleted to protect) from new CIA or some other culinary institute graduates with grandiose expectations, appalling grammar and more 'what not to say if you want a job' items in their resumes than any of us could possibly imagine. (And the covering letters were even worse.)

I eventually graduated to contributing to the discussions. At times people would get shirty. In the early days of the list, we had some real knock-down-drag-out flame wars over some highly volatile topics like food irradiation, transgenic food plants and milk. The list owner eventually had to set up 'rules of conduct' and a rota of volunteer 'moderators' was established. The list required authorization to join once the housewives wanting a new recipe for jello-mould salads with carrots had finally found us.

During the busy seasons (harvest time for the farmers, Christmas for almost everybody), postings were few and far between. In the slower seasons, there were often more than I had time to read. Shortly after my business was well in hand I was asked to be one of the chocolate experts in an 'ask the expert' section of a San Francisco newspaper's bulletin board. I made some friends on the list, and lost some too (rest well, Pastorio).

I am still a member of the list, although I no longer cook professionally (MS and the attendant stamina issues made continuing in that line of work impossible). I don't read everything that comes through the list, but I read a lot of it, and I find out about things I did not even know existed, get annoyed at the latest thing some government or the WTO is doing to our food, or discover an approach to handling something that I had never considered. Unless they kick me off, I will stick around. I get a lot of really cool stuff from that list.


See The fall and rise of good bread featuring 2 articles by a favourite writer of mine from my chef's list, David Auerbach (the man who saved my beans cooking). He has other articles there too. Check the archives.

Menopausal mind-funk

I have had a heck of a time concentrating for the past 48 or so hours (not helped by virtually no sleep at all for two nights due to constant waking with hot flashes).

I can think clearly (if somewhat laterally) most of the time, but for the past couple of days I keep reading the same sentence or paragraph over and over again, and cannot make any sense of it, mostly from a complete inability to concentrate for more than 3 seconds on anything. My mind keeps wandering all over the map, and to the most irrelevant and unrelated things.

"You really have to get to work on that garden." "The chicken soup you made yesterday was good...but you needed bread with it. Pity the noodles have soaked up the remaining broth in the soup...it would have made a good lunch." "I wonder how Dad is doing visiting Donna in Italy." "Did I take my shot this morning?" "I really should get myself a kitten. The house is lonely without a cat around."

And so on, and so on ...

All of it is a constant distraction to whatever task is at hand. I am not even going to admit how long it actually took me to get the vegetables ready for the soup, but it was well over 10 times as long as it should have taken. I would notice something on the coffee counter, and stop the chopping to go and clean it. And then would chop two mushrooms more before deciding I needed something from my office (no idea what or why), would go upstairs for it, and forget what it was by the time I reached the top, only to have the idea pop back up the minute I started the chopping again. It has been like that since mid-Monday, and I am truly getting nowhere fast. At the best of times I distract incredibly easily, which drives my sister Donna quite nuts, but these past couple of days seen my distractibility quotient rise to an entirely new level.

There is a set of funny 'prayers' for the Myers-Briggs personality types that a friend found once and passed over to me. I am Myers-Briggs type ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving), and the prayer for my type is "God, help me to keep my mind on one th--Oh, Look...a bird!--ing at a time." That is so-o-o Me, except that I rarely return to the original thought!

Sometimes I can focus quite intently, to the exclusion of everything around me. (When I was renting the second kitchen at a restaurant in Kingston for my small business, the restaurant's head chef used to climb very quietly up the stairs, stand right behind me and, after making sure I didn't have a knife or anything else dangerous in my hand, say 'boo!' right into my ear. I was always caught totally off guard and would jump clear out of my skin. He never tired of that game, saying that he liked my 'finely-tuned flight response'.)

I have a bunch of banked overtime at work, and I am thinking that rather than sit here and try to accomplish things when I am in this state that I should go through all the busy-work I have to do--which should take about half an hour--and then use up some of that banked time getting distracted from household chores rather than my job.

I do not shop

I am not a shopper.

I used to be, up until I was about 22 or 23. Back then I shopped too much. (My mother's almost-funny joke was "If you drop Susan in the middle of a forest, she would find a tree she wanted to buy."). But over the years, especially with the explosion of malls and big-box outlets and the loss of the non-chain neighbourhood stores, I completely lost patience with it.

Clothes were always an issue. I am tall, with very long legs and arms and very broad shoulders. Up until I was 29, I weighed under 115. Finding clothes that both fit and suited me was incredibly difficult. I take a size 10 shoe with a combination last (B foot with AA heel), and those are very hard to find in anything other than bug-ugly.

But it is not just clothes and shoes that I hate to shop for. I hate most shopping. I will go out looking for a piece of furniture, some paint, some good bread or almost anything, usually with a very specific idea of what I want or a specific requirement to meet. I find nothing even close, and I very soon (about 2 hours) get beyond frustrated and just go home.

Yesterday, inexplicably, I had the shopping mojo. Every place I went had exactly what I was looking for (or not looking for because I had given up). I got some new jeans for my new waist (31, down from 36: I nearly plotzed!) at the first store I went into. Then some decent rolls and a lovely bowl for my fruit and a matching, perfect butter dish, all in the space of about an hour.

I stopped by at a friend's place around noon and was invited to stay for a barbeque, but I did not dare: the shopping gods don't often bestow their favours on me and I did not dare to laugh at them while they were smiling on me. En route to the grocery store I noticed a couple of stores I did not remember, and I stopped at them on a whim. I found a TV stand that totally met the vision I had held onto for over a year (to replace the wobbly microwave stand I have been using), the perfect unit to hold my scanner (currently residing on a chair in my office) and both of my printers (one still in the box) and a lamp for $10 that was exactly what I needed for a particular place.

I am spending my morning getting my TV and stereo into the stand, and setting up the office electronics, while having coffee with my rolls. And, I may even get into shopping again, if I have another day or two like yesterday.

Taxes and Dances

I got my tax refund in the mail yesterday, and when I went to file the papers (before taking the cheque to the bank) I discovered my file cabinet had returns back to 1974 and no room. So, I spent the better part of the morning with my shredder, and I now have room for this year's paper work.

Last night we had yet another dance performance to attend (this has been a very rich month dance-wise), and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Compagnie Marie Chouinard "bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS". Last time we saw this company and this choreographer's work was a couple of years ago, with her version of "Le Sacre du printemps", and we were thrilled by it. Last night's performance was wierder, but it did not disappoint.

Also received yesterday with the 2007/2008 NAC dance season calender (http://nac-cna.ca/en/dance/index_0708.html), so part of this afternoon will be spent pouring over it. We will still get series A, B and C, but I love looking over it and starting the anticipation early.

Off to deposit that cheque.

Things that frost my gourd (Part 2)

I've got two of them (today has been one of those days).

1. People who answer your questions with the answer they want to give, not the answer to the question you asked.
   
   For nearly 3 weeks I have been asking one simple (well, to my mind it was simple) question: what are the rules for naming an 'x' you are building to hold a 'y'. Once the strange looks (I thought I had sprouted horns out of the center of my forehead) had passed, I was told how to do something with 'y', how to write a procedure describing how 'y' is used, how to build an 'm' to hold an 'n', that 'x's did not need names and eventually that 'x's did not even exist. All of that accompanied with a semi-condescending look that said "Every idiot knows that.". Today, I found the rules (which I knew existed, because we had to take a course about the use of 'x's but where we were not told the rules of naming them.).
   
   
2. Businesses who make their employees answer the phone with "How can I give you excellent service today?"
   
   To date I have resisted the urge to say something like "Wow-You really do dare to dream the impossible dream!" or "You can't. I want the same crappy service I have come to expect from ....." or "By tapdancing your answers to me in Morse code.", but some day I will (unless I come up with a better one between now and then, and I am accepting contributions). Being greeted like that (expecially after spending 20 minutes on hold) generally means that the excellent service bird has already flown the coop.

Ciao for now

Curmudgeons-R-Us TM

Recipe for Angel Biscuits

2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 pinch soda
1/8 cup sugar
1/2 cup shortening
1/4 cup warm water
1 pkg dry yeast
1 cup buttermilk

Dissolve yeast in warm water. Set aside. Mix dry ingredients in order and cut in shortening. Stir in buttermilk and dissolved yeast. Blend thoroughly. Can be refrigerated at this point in covered bowl 3 days.

Knead lightly on floured board. Roll out and cut with biscuit cutter. Place on greased baking sheet. Let rise slightly.

Bake in 400 degree oven until brown.

Can also be used for coffee cake and cinnamon rolls.

Things that frost my gourd (Part 1)

One thing that has annoyed me increasingly since they first started appearing in restaurants with pretensions to god-knows-what are the Giant Pepper Mill People.

This insidious species shows up at your table 0.01023 seconds after your plate is placed in front of you with The Giant Pepper Mill, and their signature vocalization "Would you like some fresh pepper on that?".

How am I supposed to know if I want pepper? The aroma from the plate hasn't even had time to reach my nose, so how can I have tasted it yet to see if it is in need of pepper?

Equally annoying are the subspecies of the Giant Pepper Mill People (homo idiotus phalusspapaver); the Parmesan Cheese Shakers (homo idiotus fromagus) and the new to science Giant SeaSalt Grinder Grinders (homo idiotus sel-de-mer-oh-merde).

When I attended the Stratford Chefs School, we were taught the importance of tasting the food we were preparing (always with a clean spoon! and at every stage of the process) to insure that the seasoning was balanced and appropriate. (Which was hard for me to learn: years of low-to-no-salt cooking for someone with blood pressure issues had made me highly sensitive to salt, with the result that I under salted things as a matter or course, and found salting appropriate for the general public taste was highly over-salted to my taste.)

But I digress ...

This pouncing on you, armed with giant condiment dispensers, before you have even tasted a bite and identified what, if any, deficiencies in seasoning exist in the dish, means that these restaurants do not trust the food coming out of the kitchen to taste the way it should (assuming the kitchen staff actually prepares it, which is a subject for a future rant).

Another way to look at the Giant Pepper Mill People (GPMP) is that they know that fresh ground pepper tastes better than anything ground more than 4 hours earlier. And that restaurants were going broke replacing pepper mills that people had swiped. Fine ... I could almost buy that, except that these things are so huge that I cannot imagine them walking out of restaurants in any great number, so why not just leave them on the table until the diner is ready (or not) for extra pepper? It might entail them standing up to pepper their food, but I believe that freshly ground pepper is worth a standing ovation every now and then.

Still, a pepper mill on the table may not be seen as an optimal (from the restauranteur's point of view) solution to the problem of presenting diners with freshly ground pepper. But that still leaves question about why the GPMP pounce on you mere micro seconds after your plate was delivered, and why the GPMPs, or restaurants owners, feel this is appropriate or fitting to 'a fine dining experience'?

I have noticed, though, that restaurants that could or do rate 1-3 Michelin starts rarely, if ever, employ GPMPs (or either of the subspecies). And when they do, these homo idiotus have obviously been through extensive behaviour modification by trained professionals, so that a suitable interval (approximately two mouthfuls worth of time) is allowed to lapse before approaching a diner with the Giant Pepper Mill. This is infinitely preferable to the Pavlovian response most of the species has to seeing a plate go onto the table in front of a customer.