It's my week off, though really it's only a few precious days off because I worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday last weekend and I'll do the same this coming weekend (plus 4th of July Monday!). I don't really know what I expected because I (willingly) hadn't made any plans to do anything, but I guess I hoped I'd be more pro-active? or something. There's stuff to be done! But I'm not doing it.
What I am doing, I'm not even sure. The hours seem to pass quickly enough, but I can't honestly account for them. I think I may have fallen too far down the internet rabbit hole.
What am I supposed to be doing? Well, for school I should be reading up on the properties of chocolate, putting together my resume, and finding someplace that will let me extern. At home I should be cleaning and (hopefully) unearthing things to sell on ebay because I have reached a level of fiscal irresponsibility I affectionately refer to as No Joke Broke. It is still illegal to sell a kidney, isn't it?
In the meantime, I have at least gotten some reading done. So far Cleave by Julie Powell, Heat by Bill Buford, and Service Included by Phoebe Damrosch have all been conquered. I've moved on to the fiction aspect of my list and am currently lost on the Yorkshire moors with Catherine and Heathcliff, which is an interesting leap from butchery and modern day restaurant service. But at the moment, Wuthering Heights seems like the perfect partner in my currently bleak mood. I only wish I had a stormy moor to wander aimlessly around.
I think what I want more than anything is to feel excited about all this stuff again, and to feel reassured. The looming prospect of the externship and all of the hopes I had pinned on it are currently suffocating me. Full confession: I was really hoping to use the externship as an excuse to get out of the country for six weeks. Lest you think I'm a slacker in want of an extended vacation, rest assured, I understand and was excited to work for it. I've never lived outside of the country and thought it would be as good chance as any to experience it and when in my life will I again have the opportunity to pack up and head off for six weeks?
And, as embarrassing as it is, I think I'm done with Los Angeles but I don't know where to go. I feel like when I moved to LA from DC I was fleeing something. For once in my life I was hoping to be running to something instead of from something. Externing aboard felt like a way to try out a future.
But you know that part I wrote about being No Joke Broke? Yeah. Externing out of the country would mean not getting paid and having to pay for transport for room and board. So as that happy prospect gets dimmer and dimmer, I'm trying to find something hopeful to rally around. Suggestions?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
O.V.E.R.
People, it is DONE. The class from hell is over. Just like that.
And I have a week off. It's my "summer". I plan to enjoy it: reading and swimming in the ocean, here I come.
It's a brief reprieve; after next week is up, it's back to the grind: same chefs, same despicable room, same horrifying polyester pants. Same almost having to shiv someone for a mixer and an outlet.
And with that terrifyingly piped monstrosity (go ahead and hate on it, it is not my proudest accomplishment but getting graded on that thing meant the class was OVER), I was done. At 6:30 in the morning, no less.. I had to stay in class till nine, cleaning and pretending to be busy, which is something I'm getting really good at.
There's no point in dreading what comes next, it's better to just enjoy what's here now.
(The Final Part 1 - Strassburger Cookies
Why yes the class was International Cakes,
so why I had to make cookies is a mystery of the universe)
And I have a week off. It's my "summer". I plan to enjoy it: reading and swimming in the ocean, here I come.
(The Final Part 2 - Macarons
Which are, yes, a cookie but I love them.
And stuffed with Chocolate French Buttercream?
Heaven.)
It's a brief reprieve; after next week is up, it's back to the grind: same chefs, same despicable room, same horrifying polyester pants. Same almost having to shiv someone for a mixer and an outlet.
(The Final Part 3 - 3 Chocolate Bavarios
Hey look! An actual cake.)
There's no point in dreading what comes next, it's better to just enjoy what's here now.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Aural Fixation / Summer Berry Sour Cream Pancakes
Aural Fixation / Summer Berry Sour Cream Pancakes
As if you needed a reason to eat pancakes and dance your ass off.
As if you needed a reason to eat pancakes and dance your ass off.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Cake is Great! I (heart) Cake!!!!
Giant Corporate Cooking School Rotation 3, Week 4, Day 2
This is called reverse psychology. I have spent so much time reveling in my hatred and loathing of this class that it's probably poisoning me against what's good about it. So as of right now, I lovelovelove it!
Or not. But I'm trying.
One thing I do love unabashedly is iRip, a program that lets you take music from iPods and rip them onto your computer. Before you compose your strongly worded letters telling me what a terrible person I am, how musicians are going to starve and all the good ones will stop making music and pretty soon the only choices anyone will have will be between Taylor Swift and American Idol finalists - hear me out. I actually buy music through legitimate sources and up until two years ago had a huge CD collection dating from my nascent Pearl Jam heavy formative years.
But having moved multiple times - including having to pay to ship all of them cross country once - I decided enough! Everything was in my iTunes anyway, so why not just sell the hard copies for profit and delight in having less shit to care about. And I did.
Then my hard drive gave me an early birthday present this year by deciding I should start over from go and went to that Apple graveyard in the, well wherever the my computer geek guru decides it is.
You would think a complete loss of my digital life would be traumatic, but surprisingly I took it in stride. (I say surprisingly because I'm still surprised how easily I took the news. I expect I will have a complete breakdown about it at some point, complete with gnashing of teeth, sobbing, and tearing of flesh.) The only thing that really broke my heart was losing all of the music. Except I had most of it on my old PC laptop and I figured eventually I would figure out how to get it from the PC to my freshly purchased Mac hard drive.
And iRip is how I'm doing it. I'm sure there are easier and quicker ways to go about this, but I'm never gonna be hired by the geek squad and I've always liked hitting my head against a wall to make sure it's solid. So away I go!
The benefit so far is rediscovering albums that had been put on the back burner behind newer, shinier albums - albums I would listen to on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis back when I had idle time to do such things. Albums that are specific to phases, years, people, places. It's like going to a high school reunion but I genuinely love everyone and no one got fat. I'm currently listening to the Rushmore soundtrack, and while I think Wes Anderson can be a too precious, self-important weinie, the man does know how to put together a soundtrack.
In fact, I think the class would be much improved if Wes Anderson made a soundtrack for it. (Sidenote: Almost everyone I know loves and owns the Rushmore soundtrack, but while most people like the Royal Tenenbaums, I don't know a single person who owns that soundtrack. Why is that?) Maybe if I spend the next 12 weekdays pretending I'm in a Wes Anderson movie, I will actually end up liking the class.
I'm guess I'm going to have to start wearing thick, black eyeliner and perfecting my deadpan.
This is called reverse psychology. I have spent so much time reveling in my hatred and loathing of this class that it's probably poisoning me against what's good about it. So as of right now, I lovelovelove it!
Or not. But I'm trying.
One thing I do love unabashedly is iRip, a program that lets you take music from iPods and rip them onto your computer. Before you compose your strongly worded letters telling me what a terrible person I am, how musicians are going to starve and all the good ones will stop making music and pretty soon the only choices anyone will have will be between Taylor Swift and American Idol finalists - hear me out. I actually buy music through legitimate sources and up until two years ago had a huge CD collection dating from my nascent Pearl Jam heavy formative years.
But having moved multiple times - including having to pay to ship all of them cross country once - I decided enough! Everything was in my iTunes anyway, so why not just sell the hard copies for profit and delight in having less shit to care about. And I did.
Then my hard drive gave me an early birthday present this year by deciding I should start over from go and went to that Apple graveyard in the, well wherever the my computer geek guru decides it is.
You would think a complete loss of my digital life would be traumatic, but surprisingly I took it in stride. (I say surprisingly because I'm still surprised how easily I took the news. I expect I will have a complete breakdown about it at some point, complete with gnashing of teeth, sobbing, and tearing of flesh.) The only thing that really broke my heart was losing all of the music. Except I had most of it on my old PC laptop and I figured eventually I would figure out how to get it from the PC to my freshly purchased Mac hard drive.
And iRip is how I'm doing it. I'm sure there are easier and quicker ways to go about this, but I'm never gonna be hired by the geek squad and I've always liked hitting my head against a wall to make sure it's solid. So away I go!
The benefit so far is rediscovering albums that had been put on the back burner behind newer, shinier albums - albums I would listen to on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis back when I had idle time to do such things. Albums that are specific to phases, years, people, places. It's like going to a high school reunion but I genuinely love everyone and no one got fat. I'm currently listening to the Rushmore soundtrack, and while I think Wes Anderson can be a too precious, self-important weinie, the man does know how to put together a soundtrack.
In fact, I think the class would be much improved if Wes Anderson made a soundtrack for it. (Sidenote: Almost everyone I know loves and owns the Rushmore soundtrack, but while most people like the Royal Tenenbaums, I don't know a single person who owns that soundtrack. Why is that?) Maybe if I spend the next 12 weekdays pretending I'm in a Wes Anderson movie, I will actually end up liking the class.
I'm guess I'm going to have to start wearing thick, black eyeliner and perfecting my deadpan.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Who wants cake?
Giant Corporate Cooking School: Rotation 3, Week 3, Day 4:
Cakes. Gateaus. Tortens. Whatever you want to call them, I am three weeks into a pretty serious study of them. Don't get me wrong, I like cake and the class is very informative. It's the whole decorating thing that I'm not too sure about. Fortunately, it's mostly been French style gateaus, so I have not had to break out my mad rosette piping skillz yet. Yet.
I'll admit, I'm having a hard time with the class. I'm okay with the product, and I think I'm fine on the written exams and the homework. The real problem is the lab we're working in - I hate it. Detest it. Loathe it. Abhor it. It is currently the bane of my existence, an anathema, my bete noire. (What? I've been making French cakes, why not break out the Francais?) But don't think I've come to this rancorous reaction lightly, I've thought long and hard about what I find so grievous about it.
BEEF #1: It's crowded. Waaaay back in February when this adventure began, there were about 30 of us. So timid, so shy, so unsure of mixing methods. Then for the second rotation, we were halved. For this rotation, we've all been stitched back together like the big, dysfunctional family we are and then some. So now there are now 40+ people crammed in a single lab. Which leads directly to
BEEF #2: There's not enough equipment. It's early. I've rarely had a cup of coffee or breakfast prior to class starting. Being there on time means that I have scraped myself out of a warm, comfortable bed, stuffed myself into polyester pants, and driven across LA county; I don't want to shiv someone for a freaking mixer. Not that it would matter if I could get one of the precious few, because THERE AREN'T ENOUGH OUTLETS TO SUPPORT THEM ALL. I know what anyone at the school would say if I whined (and yes, I know I'm whining) about this: "In a professional environment, you may not have all the tools you need..." In a professional environment there won't be forty sleep deprived sugar junkies using kitchen aids ALL AT THE SAME TIME. That's why industrial mixers exist, duh.
BEEF #3: The layout sucks. Maybe I got spoiled, my first two rotations were in the new building. Convection ovens as far as the eye could see. In this lab (in the, shall we say, less new building), there are four convection ovens and I stand next to two of them. Now, there are plenty of conventional ovens - you know, the kind you have in your kitchen - but for some reason my classmates seem to believe that the convects have magical cake fortifying powers because they all want to cram themselves in the narrow walkway between the prep table and the oven and shove their cakes in those two particular ovens. I don't know why either*, I use the conventional ovens.
BEEF #4: It's either 100 degrees or 40. And I'm wearing polyester pants, people, which manage to retain the heat when it's hot and lose it the millisecond the temperature drops. They're magical.
And finally, BEEF #5: The hood. Professional ranges have hoods which are giant vents to keep the air circulation going. Not only does it drop the temperature 40 degrees when it's turned on, but it's like standing next to an airplane ready for take off. The scary thing is how quickly I stop noticing the noise. In fact, after the initial jolt of it, I don't notice it until it's not there anymore and the quiet that follows it being shut off is so huge, it's deafening. There's almost no point in complaining about it, it's a fucking fact of life for anyone in a professional kitchen.
And the real problem I have with the class? All the reasons above are really just convenient excuses to hide behind. I just don't like it and I haven't figured out why yet. I dread going to school. As hard as it is to believe, I used to happily get up at 3:30 in the morning to study before class and now I'm bargaining with time at 4:45 to slow down. No one wins bargaining with time. It's making me question if I've made a huge mistake. Aren't pastry chefs supposed to love cake? Isn't that the first thing you think of when you hear someone say they're a pastry chef/baker? Because you know who wants cake? THEY ALL DO. They all want cake.
I think I may have fucked myself. Again.
*Okay, okay I admit I know why people fight for the convection ovens: convention ovens have fans, so the heat is evenly dispersed throughout the oven which does make for more even baking. Conventional ovens generally have a hot spot, which can cause uneven baking. But it's really not that serious.
Cakes. Gateaus. Tortens. Whatever you want to call them, I am three weeks into a pretty serious study of them. Don't get me wrong, I like cake and the class is very informative. It's the whole decorating thing that I'm not too sure about. Fortunately, it's mostly been French style gateaus, so I have not had to break out my mad rosette piping skillz yet. Yet.
I'll admit, I'm having a hard time with the class. I'm okay with the product, and I think I'm fine on the written exams and the homework. The real problem is the lab we're working in - I hate it. Detest it. Loathe it. Abhor it. It is currently the bane of my existence, an anathema, my bete noire. (What? I've been making French cakes, why not break out the Francais?) But don't think I've come to this rancorous reaction lightly, I've thought long and hard about what I find so grievous about it.
BEEF #1: It's crowded. Waaaay back in February when this adventure began, there were about 30 of us. So timid, so shy, so unsure of mixing methods. Then for the second rotation, we were halved. For this rotation, we've all been stitched back together like the big, dysfunctional family we are and then some. So now there are now 40+ people crammed in a single lab. Which leads directly to
BEEF #2: There's not enough equipment. It's early. I've rarely had a cup of coffee or breakfast prior to class starting. Being there on time means that I have scraped myself out of a warm, comfortable bed, stuffed myself into polyester pants, and driven across LA county; I don't want to shiv someone for a freaking mixer. Not that it would matter if I could get one of the precious few, because THERE AREN'T ENOUGH OUTLETS TO SUPPORT THEM ALL. I know what anyone at the school would say if I whined (and yes, I know I'm whining) about this: "In a professional environment, you may not have all the tools you need..." In a professional environment there won't be forty sleep deprived sugar junkies using kitchen aids ALL AT THE SAME TIME. That's why industrial mixers exist, duh.
BEEF #3: The layout sucks. Maybe I got spoiled, my first two rotations were in the new building. Convection ovens as far as the eye could see. In this lab (in the, shall we say, less new building), there are four convection ovens and I stand next to two of them. Now, there are plenty of conventional ovens - you know, the kind you have in your kitchen - but for some reason my classmates seem to believe that the convects have magical cake fortifying powers because they all want to cram themselves in the narrow walkway between the prep table and the oven and shove their cakes in those two particular ovens. I don't know why either*, I use the conventional ovens.
BEEF #4: It's either 100 degrees or 40. And I'm wearing polyester pants, people, which manage to retain the heat when it's hot and lose it the millisecond the temperature drops. They're magical.
And finally, BEEF #5: The hood. Professional ranges have hoods which are giant vents to keep the air circulation going. Not only does it drop the temperature 40 degrees when it's turned on, but it's like standing next to an airplane ready for take off. The scary thing is how quickly I stop noticing the noise. In fact, after the initial jolt of it, I don't notice it until it's not there anymore and the quiet that follows it being shut off is so huge, it's deafening. There's almost no point in complaining about it, it's a fucking fact of life for anyone in a professional kitchen.
And the real problem I have with the class? All the reasons above are really just convenient excuses to hide behind. I just don't like it and I haven't figured out why yet. I dread going to school. As hard as it is to believe, I used to happily get up at 3:30 in the morning to study before class and now I'm bargaining with time at 4:45 to slow down. No one wins bargaining with time. It's making me question if I've made a huge mistake. Aren't pastry chefs supposed to love cake? Isn't that the first thing you think of when you hear someone say they're a pastry chef/baker? Because you know who wants cake? THEY ALL DO. They all want cake.
I think I may have fucked myself. Again.
*Okay, okay I admit I know why people fight for the convection ovens: convention ovens have fans, so the heat is evenly dispersed throughout the oven which does make for more even baking. Conventional ovens generally have a hot spot, which can cause uneven baking. But it's really not that serious.
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