I've been in Edmonton for two years now, and I've been to WEM twice...once to an Asian grocery (they have a little mock-Chinatown at one end of the mall), and once going to the wrong restaurant (long story). Funny bit...there was a little gift store in the mock-Chinatown section. Their door was in the middle of the two display windows. One window was, logically enough, full of Buddhas in all shapes and sizes...the other was full of Anne of Green Gables dolls. Filed that under "T" for "Things that make you go hmmmmmm..."
Still haven't actually gone
into the mall (excuse me...MALL), but after 10 years in retail I think I've got the idea.
So, back to our work in progress...
A TALE OF TWO KITCHENS
Well, three really...but then I'd lose that whole Dickens allusion, and I really wanted that...
Okay, so to recap, I work in two very different establishments which give me two very different sets of duties. Since I don't know what's going to come up in the next several days, I'm going to give you a bit of a rundown on how things *normally* go.
My day begins at 6:50 AM. I am the furthest thing from a morning person, but I have gotten to the point of being reasonably functional even when half-awake. This is important for me, because as a naturally nocturnal creature I find it exceptionally difficult to fall asleep before 12:00 or 12:30. If I let myself get overtired it doesn't help; if anything that spells a bout of "wound-too-tight" insomnia.
As you may guess from the foregoing, breakfast on weekdays is a hit-or-miss affair. I may grab a piece of fruit, or a bit of toast, or maybe a piece of bread and cheese. Often I'll go entirely without, except for a glass of water and my morning tablets (glucosamine & ASA for the arthritic joints, and a vitamin supplement that I've reluctantly become reconciled to since my career change). My wife nannies her sister's two-year-old twins (that's why we moved here to Edmonton...I know someone would have asked eventually); so often in the morning I'm scurrying around getting everything kid-ready. Depending how tired we were the night before, that sometimes takes up all the time I have to get ready. My sister-in-law also works downtown, so she gives me a lift most mornings.
Mornings are super busy at my day job. As the team leader in the bakery, I have a number of obligations to fulfill. About the first thing I do when I arrive in the morning is to take a look at the new day's product and see that everything is up to standard. We make the majority of our product fresh from scratch on a daily basis, so consistency is always a priority issue. At present I have a new graveyard-shift baker, so I'm scrutinizing things a little more closely, but he's working out very well.
Muffins and cookies are my bread and butter, so to speak, and we sell several hundred of each in an ordinary day. My wiry little early baker makes up anywhere from 250-350kg of doughs in an ordinary day, and can go well in excess of that if we have a lot of catering orders. That would include scones and cinnamon buns, as well as the muffins and cookies. We have a fiercely loyal clientele; even the proprietors of a rival chain outlet in our food court will come and buy our baked goods. We have seven core cookies (peanut butter, pb & chocolate, chocolate chip, ginger, double chocolate, oatmeal raisin, and oatmeal chocolate), and a newer lemon-currant cookie that we're about to work into the daily production. We make anywhere from 12-14 kinds of muffins on a given day; 11 core recipes and then various features depending what we need to use up. We often have berries, for example, which go unsold on our produce display and end up in our fruit-based muffins. We also have a double-chocolate muffin we make when there is past-dated chocolate milk to use up; that's a big seller.
We bake all of these items in the wee small hours of the morning, and have the showcase loaded up with them when we open at 6:30 AM. We sell Starbucks coffees and teas to accompany them. We also have plain and almond croissants (proof & bake for labour-cost and consistency reasons), danishes (ditto), cakes and cheesecakes whole and by the slice (baked at our south-end sister store), pies (ditto), and a variety of homestyle squares (ditto). All are baked fresh, like yer granny would, and make heavy use of fresh or quality IQF fruit. We use callets of Callebaut couverture in all of our baking (in lieu of chocolate chips), and Callebaut coating chocolate for dipping and drizzling. This is not super high-end, but it sets us a distinct notch above our local competition. The double chocolate cookie, for example, takes 13kg of dark and white couverture per batch; roughly 35-40% by weight.
I make a variety of additional items to go into the showcases. The most popular to date has been the apple strudel; over the winter I'd sell as many as 30 portions, but with the onset of the warm weather it's tailed off to about 12. I used to scratch-make a ham & cheese croissant, but my bakers never really got the hang of proofing it properly and it was too time-consuming to be throwing out half of my production. Now I make a ham & cheese pocket with frozen puff pastry sheets. They give me a similar product on a fraction of the time. At various times I also make Nova Scotia-style oatcakes (lightly sweetened and with rolled oats; where the old-country Scots style would be with fine oatmeal and no sugar); skillet cornbread, dipped "cigarette" cookies, cream puffs and eclairs, shortbreads, sugar cookies, palmiers, mini-strudels for the coffee bar, and any number of things with the sweet brioche-style dough we make the cinnamon buns out of.
So...on a normal day I'll check the quality of our night's production, and waste off anything that's not saleable (we have a variety of ways to utilize those). Then I'll dedicate an hour or two to production of the items that I make, while my daytime production person makes up catering trays and fills the other showcase with pecan-ganache tarts, lemon curd tarts, mini fruit flans, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. That same case gets my butter tarts, eclairs, and cream puffs as well.
Between 10:30 and 11:30, depending how dire our staffing scenario is on a given day, I may or may not be required to cover a till while my cashiers take their lunch breaks (except for my two morning cashiers, most of ours are quite young...we get a lot of turnover despite our best efforts). Usually I'm covering at least one of those breaks. At 11:30 I put my apple strudels into the oven, and begin heating the skillets for the corn bread. At noon the cornbread goes in; at 12:30 or thereabouts the strudels come out. I make my strudels on puff pastry rather than phyllo or (God help us) actual strudel dough. Real strudel dough I can't budget the time for, and I find that puff stays crisp a lot better than phyllo. Also it bakes best from frozen, which coincides nicely with my need to advance-prep in bulk. I par-cook the filling (fresh hand-cut apples, of course) so that the juices do not make my strudel soggy.
At noon, the deluge hits. We'll do about a thousand transactions, most days, between 12 and 1. I spend that hour fetching and bagging for one of my cashiers, and my day person helps at the other till. There is always a tension between customer service and production, and balancing these two necessities is a big part of my day.
After the lunch rush is over my day person and I take our breaks. I spend the time between 1 and 1:30, while she's gone for lunch, by replenishing our showcase and cutting and traying up the strudels and cornbreads. I try to have a few trays of cookies or chocolates or something of that nature to throw into the showcase if we've been wiped out over lunch. When I'm really hard up, I'll go to my other displays and pull out things like pies to fill in the empty spaces. That's how it is in retail...half of your time you're trying to make everything fit; half of your time you're trying to make it look full.
During the afternoons I have only one cashier, so I try to fit in any additional production around customer flow. Once the line gets to four people, I drop what I'm doing (grudgingly, sometimes) and open the second till. A lot of places pay lip service to that kind of policy, but we take it very seriously. If I take thirty seconds to finish, say, making my caramel sauce, I can count on getting told off by a manager. And rightly so, though the result is that some days getting anything made can be an exercise in frustration.
In among all of this I'm fielding phone calls, taking catering orders, tweaking my daily orders of breads and bagels, monitoring my inventory of ingredients and finished product, tweaking recipes, helping at other stations, ensuring that I have the various specialty products for our catering menu (I make mini pizza doughs from scratch, and produce a variety of mini pastries for one of the breakfast trays). It makes for a full day.
By 4:30 I have finished any production chores that I've taken on and cleaned down my area for the early night baker. I make any necessary changes to my bread order, communicate anything that my night bakers need to know (verbally for the early baker, in writing for the graveyard baker), write off any late-day waste, check the next day's catering orders one more time, and (theoretically) leave at 5:00.
This is the "broad strokes" outline of my day; there are some other things that I'll touch on as the days go by.
My part-time job, at the fine-dining restaurant, is very different. On any given day, I may be at one of three stations: the dessert bench; "#2" (second line cook, ie veg/sauce/garnish responsible for some appetizers); or "#1" (first line cook, ie entree items, some appetizers, various miscellaneous duties). Each position involves some prep, though if I go there from my day job the prep is normally done by the time I get there. If it's slow on the dessert bench in the early part of the night, I may dot a few metaphorical I's and cross some T's, but that's all the prep I'll see on an evening. If anything, I may haul down the stone and sharpen knives for a while; help the dishwasher; or replenish supplies for the cooks on the hot side of the kitchen.
I've already discussed the details of the hot side and the dessert bench in last year's work blog, so I won't go over that again. The menu's changed, but the rhythm hasn't.
The only time things are different is when I work my one Sunday out of four. On Sundays there'll be just myself and the owner/chef in the kitchen, and the dishwasher. The chef mostly expedites and does appetizers unless it's super-quiet, in which case she catches up on her paperwork and just lets me run on my own. On Sundays, therefore, I do all the various prep duties (prep veg, meat, sauces, salad ingredients, bake dessert items, whatever); then set up the hot side, and cover all of the hot-side items for the day. If we get a busy Sunday sometimes another cook will be called in, but usually I can handle things all right. The chef will jump in if we get too many covers happening at once, as we did on my last Sunday.
I haven't been working the line a whole lot since before Christmas, so my rhythm isn't what it should be/has been. For a while there, every time I worked a Sunday the menu would be different...makes things a bit challenging when you're already rusty.
Anyway...that's what a normal day looks like in each job. On with the actual blogging, now!
Today was the last of my wife's days off for this month, so I didn't have to clean up for the twins today. Breakfast was a couple slices of buttered toast and my pills, as mentioned above. I popped a small slab of short ribs into an ovenproof pan with some tomato "water" reserved from earlier in the week, a bay leaf, a dash of soy, two cloves of garlic, and some salt and pepper. I put that into a 300F oven, and left instructions for my wife to turn the oven off at the appropriate time. That's supper tonight (it's been cool and rainy here all week). Then I re-set the alarm for her, woke the kids, and headed off to the bus.
I was amused by a small piece of serendipity when I got to the bus stop. Yesterday I'd picked up a supply of kefir grains (more about that later), and the woman who gave them to me told me about a local food blogger she enjoyed (a lawyer transplanted from Oz). Today's newspaper had a front-page article about the boom in foodblogging, and who did they choose to profile? Right. I seldom buy a paper, but I was amused enough to grab one today.
Her blog is pretty good. One of my classmates works at Wild Tangerine, the restaurant she's currently reviewing.
Wednesdays are when I place one of my two main orders for the week. I order most of my own ingredients, except for dairy and produce which are looked after by two of the managers. So, the first thing I did on arrival today was to pull out my clipboard and order sheets and get to it. After that comes writing off a few trays of overbaked cookies and setting them aside for later; bagging and displaying some coffee cakes; and topping up the cakes and cake slices in my showcase. I also found time to call up my bread/bagel supplier and bitch about some problems with my order. Y'know. Normal stuff.
I make up my eclairs and cream puffs in quantity and freeze them; then each day I pull some, re-crisp them in the oven, and fill them. I use a combination of fresh whipped cream and commercial "Bavarian Creme" for the filling; it sells better than just whipped cream. Personally, I'd rather just the real cream, but hey! It's their money. I came in today wanting to get a new batch of choux made up, but it wasn't to be. After sorting out my orders, getting today's product into the showcases, fetching up some produce from the downstairs cooler and making a batch of cornbread batter, it was already time to hop onto the cash register.
At 1:30, when the rush was over, I took my own break. The pasta special today was farfalle with seafood in tomato sauce, so that's what I had. We use a commercial seafood mix (squid, clams, mussels, etc) and there was also a good quantity of salmon in it. It was pretty good, and I got to gross out some of my prairie-raised colleagues by ostentatiously slurping up some squid tentacles. I never get tired of that...
In the course of the morning we sold a ton of cookies, so when the lunch rush was over I baked off an extra five dozen just to get us through the afternoon. We got killed on muffins, as well, but I didn't have time enough to make extra product to fill the shelves. I just brought out my trusty tray of almond bark to fill some of the empty space, and one of the managers brought me some pies to put in there and make it look full. I also made up a batch of caramel sauce, at management's request, so that they could cost out trays of apples-and-dip. That should sell well for us, our clientele appreciate a relatively virtuous treat.
We also got a late order for one of our mini-pastry trays, which I was concerned about. I haven't taken the time lately to replenish our stock of those in a big way, so I had to run to the back and count what I had. Fortunately the only one I was short of was the mini almond croissants, so I made up a couple dozen of those for tonight. I'll have to find time in the next few days to stock up properly on those and the mini pizza doughs, as well as some mini-strudels and ham & cheese pockets. Fortunately I'm closing tomorrow, which will give me an extra hour or so to play with.
After the usual cleaning and some discussion with my baker, I got out pretty much on time.
Arriving at home in an intermittent rain, I set about making supper for my own clan. I took out the now-cooled short ribs and checked them out. They'd cooked nicely, but unfortunately the braising liquid had all cooked away and was slightly scorched. That killed Plan A where sauce was concerned. I put on a pot of long-grain rice and set some onions to caramelize in the cast-iron skillet; then I went out to my garden for some salad makin's. I'll talk more about my garden later on; for tonight I'll just say that the salad was "garden babies;" several varieties of new lettuces, a bit of arugula, some dandelions (hey, I'm not gonna turn down some baby greens just 'cause I didn't plant them), a scallion, and a few pretty little radishes. This, plus a cuke and a tomato from the store, constituted our veg for tonight.
When I came in I left the greens in a bowl in the sink to shed some dirt; and added a bit of water and soy to the caramelized onions. Then I cut the short ribs into four portions and added them to the pan and let them reheat (and let the liquid reduce) while I finished rinsing the greens and making the salad. The ribs were beautiful, thankfully they hadn't absorbed any "scorchy" flavour from the braising liquid. They were tender on the inside and a little crusty on the outside, without being cooked to mush. I dressed my salad with white wine vinegar and some walnut oil, my wife opted for walnut oil and a squeeze of lemon, and my kids...well, they don't acknowledge any dressing except ranch. Oh well.
I took some pictures of the food before I tucked in, which I will scan and post here within a day or so (see above). Then, since the sun had come out, I nipped out and got some pictures of my garden and the river valley.
Now, in the past people have asked me how I manage to cook all day and then come home and cook and bake for my family. The obvious answer is that I try to prep ahead as much as possible, as with the braise today. Last night I started a batch of sourdough bread, which I left to rise slowly overnight. After getting back from my little excursion, I divided the dough into two rough loaves (picture to follow) which I later baked on my pizza stone. Then, since I'll be closing tomorrow and won't be here in time to make supper, I started a batch of chicken soup.
The carcass was frozen after I broke down the last whole bird I bought. I thawed that and threw it into the pot with onions, garlic, salt, pepper, a bay leaf, and a bit of coriander (I put coriander into the grinder with my pepper, I like the way those flavours combine). Before bed I'll add the potatoes and carrots, maybe some barley or kamut, and a pinch of saffron. After I've tasted it for seasoning, I'll put it in the fridge overnight and my wife can simmer it tomorrow for an hour or so until it's ready.
Last night we made fudge and brownies (my wife had a hankering, so I made her some brownies with butter-tart filling baked on top...mmmmm). My daughter (12) is on a baking kick, and wants to make fudge for her class now that the school year is almost over. My son (16), who as recently as last year refused to eat eggs, is now an impassioned experimenter with omelettes and souffles. In all likelihood, both kids will figure into this blog in the next day or two.
So that was my day, such as it was. I had a lot of fiddly interruptions and annoyances at work today, which meant that I didn't get nearly as much done as I would like. Tomorrow, with the extra hour, I'll try to get through the majority of my "not-yet-urgent-but-could-be-real-soon" list. I'll also take my camera to work and snap as many things as I can (at least to the degree that it's consistent with getting my stuff done). I want to try and burn off a whole roll of film so I can get it developed tomorrow and start posting up the "illustrations" to go with all of this.
Wendy, I don't do a whole lot in the line of specifically "Canadian" baked goods. I mean, I do things with maple syrup occasionally, but that's about it (unless you count the maple-shaped sugar cookies I'll be making for Canada Day). I guess the Nova Scotia-style oatcakes would be a bit of a novelty, though...hmmm. I make the same oatcakes at home and at work, so I'll probably fit those in somewhere along the way.
And with that, it's now midnight. I'm about to turn into a pumpkin and my glass slipper is about to turn back into a frog prince...or something like that. So with that, I'll leave you until tomorrow.
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), but her work photos are a LOT more interesting than mine will be. Still and all, this is what it looks like. I cook for my family, and they get what I have the time and energy to make.
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Like I said, I'm not at my best in the morning.
See "budget restrictions," upthread.
So, almost at the beginning of our relationship (eighteen years ago next month) the pancake breakfast became an institution. Some mornings I'll fry up a mess of bacon or sausages to go along with them, or prep a large bowl of fruit and whip some cream. Some mornings I'll make plain pancakes for the kids, then load ours with onions and ham and cheese and serve them with sour cream. My daughter is a big fan of cinnamon sugar on hers. This morning, it'll be basic pancakes with maple syrup, Rogers Golden Syrup (a Western favourite), and molasses (an Eastern favourite). 
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