When I left the Bank it was to 1) go to cooking school and then 2) spend some time working on the line before 3) finding a job that would marry my intellectual disposition with my interest in food, drink and hospitality, all on the way to 4) opening the Old Stove tavern.

I expected to spend about a year working on the line, but as it turns out, I will only spend 6 months, as today I accepted an offer from The Astor Center to direct their growth strategy.

I’m really excited - it will give me the opportunity to shape a very worthwhile startup, will expose me to all manner of ideas and people in food-related industries, and will give me health insurance. Heaven!

I’ll miss the line and there is no doubt I’m leaving before I’ve learned everything about cooking that I need to in order to open the Tavern, but I’ll have to rely on my curiousity to fill in my gaps in knowledge about cooking food. Finding a happy place where I can get paid enough to live for work I might otherwise do for free is something I’m lucky to get to choose. Before the Tavern happens, there are ideas behind the running of an event space that I need to master, and a world of knowledge about wine that I want to get at least a little more familiar with, and this job affords both.

I’m attending an event tonight on France’s grape brandies in the Center’s Study . It will not only be my first time visiting the space as a student, it will also be my first time visiting as an employee. I’m very excited about this new identity of mine!

A week ago I went to the doctor because I was harboring some kind of illness. A basic understanding of cause and effect would lead one to think that I was playing host to something nasty from Mexico, but as the cook crush seems fine and we ate all the same foods, drank all the same beverages and played in the same environment, I am clinging to the idea that the trip and the violent illness are unrelated.

Regardless, Dr. D put me on Cipro. I remember Cipro from the Anthrax scare of fall 2001. Years before that time that I disavowed antibiotics as a pervasive threat to my overall health, but Cipro hoarding/Cipro resistance as reported in the media really set me against them somewhat actively. To an extent this was a healthy choice, but there was certainly some post-9/11 dismissal of weakness and dependency, expressed through contempt for antibiotic use and abuse.

In September of last year I began feeling as though I was awake for the first time in years, feeling more like myself, remembering notions I’d buried under a sense of nihilism (well predating but definitely exaggerated by 9/11). I vowed to put momentum behind this feeling, to be be fearless even - especially - if that meant confronting scary things. My best friend was having similar declouding experiences; maybe it was a coincidence or maybe 6 years is exactly how long it takes to start breathing again after you hold your breath for a few months.

Regardless, I have been on Cipro for a week and although I don’t embrace my temporary identity as a person requiring pharmaceutical help, the shit has worked. Within 24 hours I felt like a new woman, and each day I feel better. It is killing off illnesses I didn’t even know I had. 

Being willing to receive assistance, albeit in pill form, is like pressing a restart button, and is like taking off shoes that are a half a size too small and putting on sneakers, and is a total relief.

I’m generally a healthy person and can’t remember the last time I had to take a day off of work for legitimate illness - allergies, maybe, or the always delightful “mental health day”, even the occasional Irish flu, but never too coldy or fluey to go in. Until now. I was sick last week, feverish and dizzy. Just a cold, and a brief one at that, although for about 36 hours, I felt terrible. But I’m paid by the shift and so couldn’t afford to take the day off. 

This means that I spent my sick time in full body extremes of hot (over the stove) and cold (in the walk-in), resulting in swoons and shivers. I also had to taste things I really couldn’t taste to see if they were good, and taste things I really didn’t want to taste because they seemed gross at the time.

An example of this taste reluctance is our anchovy butter. I make this right before service and hold it warm to use to order on charred, grilled prawns and milk-simmered brussels sprouts. It is creamy and rich, not at all fishy but instead sweet and salty and for me, embodying umami. It is a really elegant sauce.

Not only did making this while with cold make me feel completely nauseated, smelling each time I ladled it out made me feel pretty bad, and even now that I’m all better, the process of making, tasting and serving this sauce makes me wince, pull back my head, and crave a bitters and soda.

The cook crush thinks that these aversions are not cold related but are the natural course of losing interest in foods you make every day. All I know is that the marrow bones, formerly so luscious to me, now smell like hot dog food.

We curently offer a 24 oz boneless ribeye for two on our menu. For my money, ribeye is the best steak: densely marbled, flavorful and tender, when it is grilled with a salty, peppery crust each bite is the marriage of the simple and the refined in the mouth.

We get in a primal cut of beef and butcher it ourselves. I was excited to have an opportunity to improve my butchering and terrified of creating unnecessary waste off of this expensive slab of meat - I hadn’t done any real butchering since the first module of school, almost a year ago. So I angle to take on butchering whenever it is on our prep list. 

From the outset, I was clean at cutting, working close to the bone and without a lot of excess trim, but at first was slow. After working through 5 or six over the past couple of weeks, however, I’ve become quite adept at breaking down the large slab of animal. (Although I still sweat an awful lot for undertaking a basically stationary activity.) Yesterday I cleaned and portioned two primals in 30 minutes. Aside from my sous chef, I’m the fastest and cleanest butcher in the house.

Like all things, you get better at butchering with practice. On some lizard level I must know this or I wouldn’t ever take anything challenging on, but despite experiencing this revelation with business math, distance running, bikram yoga, being patient and knitting, it is a surprise with each success.

If I could remember day-to-day that getting better with practice is inevitable, I would be less likely to procrastinate, more confident in my undertakings and less frustrated by the process of learning, but would experience less delight when improvement sneaks up on me.

Better to have it be a surprise.

I’m just realizing how much of a procrastinator I had become while I had the temp gig. Having too much to do usually makes me perform with a high degree of efficiency, but lately all I’ve wanted to do is pull covers over head and watch Buffy episodes. Happily, having the 20 or so hours a week spent temping and worrying about temping back at my disposal has left me feeling less pressure and so much more productive.

I’ve been spending more time in Brooklyn lately and that means getting to run in Prospect Park. In doing so for the first time in several years, I felt as though I was visiting with a fond, final, long lost love or rereading Great Expectations for the zillionth time or listening today to the album that mattered most when I was 15. 

Trees near the concert grove with roots pushing above ground are still pushing out their roots, breaking my stride into hops and jumps. The perma-puddle at the base of the carriage path still makes for a wet entry onto the lake path. The battle pass marker is still the hardest part of the run.

I’ve changed, but the challenge, determination and satisfaction are the same.

It is so rare to find everything exactly where you left it, and so comforting to know you can appreciate difference layered over the familiar.

I’ve been dead air for a week because I can’t justify blogging when I have a raft of freelance stuff to attend to, but was a doing some weird procrastination thing where I refused to start my freelance work.

But the freelance work is just about to dry up, so I’ve gotten a wiggle on it. And while relying on my cooking salary is a ludicrous prospect, I’ll be glad to have a few hours to myself over the next few weeks in which to write (and run and cook and read). And after the holidays I’ll see about next steps.

In the meantime, I’ll be back on regular posting. Look forward to such topics as:

• Paul Newman Limeade causing phleghm
• When a burger is so off temp that you need to send it back
• Why society continues to morally prioritize a diurnal schedule like some Puritanical flashback despite the flexibility of schedule our modern world affords us
• Getting to actually prepare food in the actually full-sized kitchen at the Cook Crush’s new apartment
• What I want for Christmas dinner

After Thanksgiving we changed our menu over at the restaurant. Some of the “new” additions are our restaurant’s classics and I had the intimidating pleasure of being trained to make the pan sauce for our fried sweetbreads by the Big Boss Lady herself. This dish is the essence of the place - challenging (briny right to the edge of what is delicious), soul-satisfying (creamy offal), rich (butter, butter everywhere), a little bit naughty (breaded and deep fried! bacon sauce!), and laden with ritual and superstition.

The sauce is an emulsification involving acidic liquids reduced in bacony fat and fortified with butter.  Getting the butter to mount into a sauce without breaking is tricky. As the BBL herself said, sometimes for no apparent reason it breaks, even though you’ve followed the same steps and the same proportions and given it the same care.

It involves lots of swirling a pan off of the heat and adding butter a chunk at a time. I’m clever enough to know within a couple of chunks whether we have a winner or a heartbreaking broken sauce, slightly separated, pooling oil at the top, heavy milk solids settling into the pan like silt. Tonight was the first night I made it, and by the end of the evening my success rate was perfect. Part of my success was due to my ability to constantly move the pan while being onslaught by other tickets (thanks to my newly discovered ambidexterity, I can rely on lefty while righty grabs other pans, stirs other sauces, cracks eggs). But my success had much to do with ritual.

I know in this that I belong in the Prune kitchen.

Several dishes have an occult aspect around what specific tools to use, how to approach the food, and several other cooks have their “routines”, which amount to ritual, which amount to superstition. When I was talking about the sweetbread sauce with one of the other cooks this afternoon, she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, “you have to use the one ounce ladle with the ding in the cup. No other ladle will work.” Another mentioned a “ride the sauce” dance that had been passed down from one cook to another, a few gyrations as though you are riding a mechanical bull in slow motion executed while you swirl in the first knobs of butter, ensuring a glossy, creamy sauce.

I dismissed all of this as ridiculous - especially under the watch of BBL, who saw her own ticky suggestion (run your index finger over the hottest part of the pan when you have added all your liquid, show it you aren’t afraid) as science in the face of all other hokum that her recipes hath wrought.

I did run my finger through the sauce each time - mostly because I liked that I could stand the heat of it but also because it felt like I was doing the BBL’s bidding - and I didn’t use the dinged ladle or do the goofy dance, but after breaking the sauce on the first two orders and having to start anew, on the third order I started singing to it.

“Shake it, don’t break it.” I incanted this line with a six count of inaudible jazz riff after, amounting to an eight count repeated three times.  It felt right. And it worked.

And it worked for the rest of the orders for this wildly popular dish. Why would I ever stop? It is clearly the way to make the sauce.

There is a great deal I’m thankful for this year, and much of it has been logged here: an expansive feeling of opportunities, being interested in my work, finding stimulation and comfort in the people I love, eating a lot of varied and delectable foods. I’m also very thankful to be a mostly sane and generally very healthy individual. I’m thankful my best friend has found her date for life. I’m thankful my other friends have found professional growth and have started happy families. I’m thankful that I crossed paths with such a clever, handsome devil as the cook crush.

I’m also thankful for Thanksgiving, a holiday without too much god or any presents, that celebrates good eating and appreciation of blessings.

This year promises to be a new kind of Thanksgiving. I’m neither traveling abroad nor at home with the family. I’m working tomorrow, and after we serve a cozy meal to three seatings of families and stray dogs, we will open the doors to our dearest and have a late-night, restaurant-folk dinner of salted tomato juice, oyster pan-roast, brined capon with cornbread stuffing, creamed chestnuts, roasted pear and butternut squash with candied bacon, braised escarole, bitter green salad, and Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce. And at least one bottle of Brillcarte-Salmon Brut Rose Champagne, borne by the cook crush himself. Come 11 o’clock we will be the merriest bunch of epicures in the East Village.

And while this will be a satisfying Thanksgiving, it will also leave me excited to have my own mini-Thanksgiving sometime in the next weeks, in which I will make all of the things I eat at home: turkey with sausage and sage stuffing, mashed rutabegas, brussels sprouts and homemade cranberry sauce.

I love Ocean Spray for its New England roots and its jiggly body replete with ridges, but at home we feature both the canned jelly and my tart concoction. I make cranberry sauce all winter long because it makes a regular turkey sandwich something truly satisfying, is good on toast or greek yogurt, and can be eaten by the spoonful as a late night treat. 

To make it, put the cranberries from a small bag in a small pot, add a 1/2 teaspoon salt and enough apple cider to let the berries float around, and simmer until the berries pop. Add maple syrup to make it sweet enough for your taste (I like mine pretty puckeringly tart and start with 1/4 cup), and if you have any around, mix in some dried fruits such as apricots or golden raisins. By the time it cools to room temperature it is thick and complex and the perfect compliment to sweet dark turkey meat.

Happy Thankgiving!

I was trained on a new station last night, sauté, in which I am responsible for cooking food with sauces in pans on burners. Lots and lots of food, especially at our prime time push, when I had about a thousand orders for spicy zucchini batons come in at once.

It has much higher volume and pace than the grill station does. It is hotter, the potential for burning oneself is high, and there is nowhere to put a drink. It also feels like real cooking, makes hours pass in minutes as though stepping back into the station takes you into some wormhole not governed by our earthly laws of time and space, and is wildly fun.

I realized at one frenzied point that I was doing that spinny, rotate-the-pan thing unconsciously and with great finesse with my left as well as my right hand. I have consciously tried to do this with my left hand many times and have failed. And of course, once I started paying attention to it last night I stopped being able to do it fluidly and instead was all herky-jerky about it. But it gives me hope. Being a righty has always seemed so boring.

I’m going to start brushing my teeth with my left hand.

What is most remarkable about cooking food with care for 10 hours at a stretch is the flood of sense memories you encounter just doing the series of tasks expected of you in exchange for your paycheck.

I was hit in the face with apples and vanilla and brandy when I walked into the kitchen this afternoon. We were cranking out miniature pies for a fundraiser. Hundreds of them. The smell was like something in Normandy when I was hitchhiking 12 years ago and scraped together enough money for a dinner of cream and apples. Like the first time I took my little brother apple picking, sweet breath of a five year old mixed with Macintosh. Like the first time I tasted apple cider, carsick after a drive into the country, grateful for the heavy gravity of the drink.

I made sofrito today. Peeled and seeded pounds of plum tomatoes. Squeezed their guts out, wrist deep in acidic juice, like my early memory of eating backyard tomato at my paternal grandparent’s house, the juice leaving a trail of welts on my hand and my chin. It smells metallic and burns but I want more.

I made pork stew, gallons of which we crank through everyday as we get busier with winter’s approach. I chopped a mix of mint and tarragon. I’m back mowing my expansive lawn upstate, tearing over a brush of herbs without care because of their promiscuity, knowing there is more in the woods behind the house. Always more, true abundance.

I can tell from the moment I walk in the door upstairs when it is a day that the dishwashers are shucking and breading oysters for me to fry during service. The smell is like the moment when the running on the greenbelt around Manhattan I veer towards the shore, like a rainy day in Cape Cod, like learning about minerals.

The aroma of roux, flour cooking in fat, transports me to some unidentifiable moment when everything was safe. I get that, almost every day, at work. A moment of feeling safe just from the smell of the work in front of me.

Even if I say nothing of the false memories (the Istrian seashore I’ve never seen but live in when I grill a branzino to a char and douse it with sweet fennel oil),I am flooded by my senses when I cook.

The hours are weird and the pay is shit and I may not cook on someone else’s line for long, but while I do, I’m lucky. And lucky to do it late enough to have experience to be evoked with every task.