chromedome

It's been a great ride, and thanks for letting us into your life. I know how much commitment it took for you to keep us "in the loop," with everything you had going on. I'm sure this thread represents a whoooooole bunch of sorely-needed lost sleep! Thanks for sharing.

I used to work for an organics delivery business there, called Homegrown Organic Foods. They have a small storefront in a back alley off Allen St, open on Saturdays only, and of course do the "produce box" format as well. Website is at http://www.hgof.ns.ca, boss is Geordie (he's a good egg). Tell him Fred says hi. Basically get the farmer's market delivered to you, and avoid the crush... There is also an organics outlet on Agricola St, just off the Commons, whose name eludes me at the moment. They're a co-op, so membership can get you pretty good pricing. They specialize in grains and legumes. A few blocks further up, where Agricola crosses North, you'll find a couple of good Lebanese groceries. Just past them, heading north, you'll find Brothers Meats, which is a landmark for good reason. Hope this helps, and pardon the shakiness of my tired memory...

Pan: my understanding is that getting a liquor license in most provinces involves a nightmarish stack of forms about an inch high, and any number of provincial functionaries with invoices in their hands. I haven't had occasion yet to be involved personally in such an application. Lori: no, those were green seedless grapes. Saskatoons are smaller and darker (and later in the year).

I have to say, for once the first day of summer wasn't a bitter joke. After a week of mostly rainy skies, today was gorgeously sunny and the hottest day of the year so far, at 28C. When I got home after work, the first thing I did was to run around and open up all the windows to let the breeze blow through. So, after supper I decided that (heat notwithstanding) I was going to fire up the oven. After that discussion of Saskatoons vs blueberries last night, I thought about the frozen blueberries downstairs and had to make a cake. I used a plain version of the quick cake discussed upthread, with some nicely-soured milk and about two cups of frozen berries. I had a piece a few minutes ago, while scanning my second batch of photos (yay!), and I do believe I'll have another momentarily. It's soft and moist and altogether wonderful. By the time supper's cleared away and the cake is out of the oven, it's about 8:45. It occurs to me that I need to go to the nearby pharmacy to get a prescription filled, and I also need to get to Wal-Mart to do the one-hour photo thing. Both stores close at 10:00. Hmmm. I live at just precisely the distance from the mall (where Wal-Mart is) that I can walk there as quickly as ride the bus. Except of course I need to go to the pharmacy, which would mean waiting for a second bus. Never mind the bus, then. So I bootle off to the pharmacy, and drop off the prescription. Then I scuttle along to Wal-Mart, arriving at 9:20. Fortunately, the young lady at the counter assures me that the one-hour photo service actually only takes about 30 minutes. So I drop my film, and hoof it back down to the pharmacy to collect the prescription (and pick up some Pringle's, which were on sale); then back up to Wal-Mart again, arriving at precisely one minute to 10. Oy. On the walk home I stop at one of the local bottle shops and treat myself to a "single" of Morland's "Old Speckled Hen," an English ale which is new to me. This is by way of a reward for my exertions, and also to finish off my week of blogging on a celebratory note. It turns out to be a pretty decent brew, and well-suited for the cooling of a red-faced, sweaty cook/baker. Allllllrighty, then, let's turn back the clock to my Saturday dinner. After getting home from coffee at the mall with my "little" girl (she had hot chocolate), I set about making the pasta. First, two cups of flour with two of the small free-range eggs and one of the regular-sized ones: Then a spot of kneading... ...and when it mostly comes together, form it into a ball. I'm not too concerned if there are a couple of dry floury bits, because I'm going to leave it sit and rest in a plastic bag for a while, as I do the chicken. The moisture will even itself out through the dough, and when I come back to the pasta all will be well. Further down the page, in the chicken photos, you will see a blue spray bottle in the background as I work. That contains a sanitizing bleach solution, which I sprayed onto the table before returning from the chicken to the pasta. Resuming, then, at the point where I come back to the pasta... The rolling process. I've divided the dough into four equal portions for ravioli-making purposes. As described above, I have made a filling of minced chicken, a bread-and-milk panade, some cream, and seasonings. I piped this onto the pasta at a reasonable spacing, since I need to get in between the mounds of chicken to press out the air and seal up the sheets of pasta, like so... The little white cup contains water, for sealing the pasta. I used my little white plastic scraper to cut the individual ravioli (got to be nice to the kitchen table, doncha know), and boiled them in small batches. I tossed each batch with butter as it came out, and when they were finished mounded the bacon & mushrooms over top, and served it with a salad: Then there was the whole process of breaking down the chickens, as described above. First, we have the setup and the victim: I will only be using the steel at the very start, but the knife looked kinda lonely sitting there by itself. In the foreground you will see the plastic bag with the pasta dough resting in it; the mound of non-food in the back is one of my wife's current beading projects. The first step is to remove the wings... ...and then the legs. Then, using the knife's fine tip as an extension of your fingertip, free the breasts from the keelbone and ribs. The carcass and wingtips, as you will see in the next picture, go onto a separate plate to be frozen as soup makings. For the second bird, before breaking it down, I wanted to peel off the skin in one piece to use as the wrapper for a ballotine. The bird is upside down, and I start by making an incision all the way from the neck opening to the tail, running the length of the hen's back. Then, using the knife to help with the recalcitrant parts, I peel the skin off each side of the bird's back. Slide the skin off the leg and drum; just like turning a sock inside out. Moving up to the wings, sever them at the end of the first joint; leaving just the "drumette" attached to the breast. Unroll the skin from the wingbone too, just as you did the drumstick. Use your knife as necessary to free the skin from tendons, membranes, etc. The end result: a chicken to be broken down like the other; and a large, intact chicken skin to be scraped and trimmed and used to wrap all manner of chickeny goodness for later cooking. Finally, my Father's day breakfast...the cheese omelette my son prepared for me. It's a shame this camera can't get a decent closeup of a plated dish, as the omelette was really quite well-executed. ================================================================= This blog has given you a pretty reasonable look into my own life and circumstances, but I haven't done a whole lot of justice to the city or the province. By way of a quick redressing of the balance, here are a few good things to be found locally... Alberta's agricultural base is its biggest single economic engine, even more than the oil & gas sector. In order to foster closer relationships between producers and consumers, we now have an organization called "Growing Alberta" which publishes a pretty decent magazine quarterly, and runs an informative website here. The doyenne of the local foodwriting community is Judy Schultz of the Edmonton Journal; a woman with a national reputation and a nomination for a Governor General's Award under her belt. She and another notable local foodie, Mary Bailey, co-wrote a great book called the "Food Lover's Trail Guide to Alberta." Basically it covers everything from restaurants to farmer's markets; anything the visiting or resident foodie might want to see or do. The Amazon link is here: ...click... That's not the proper eGullet affiliate link thingie, but I'll come back and edit that in as soon as I find the thread that tells how to do it. One of the more interesting local artisanal producers is Emanuela Leoni, who hails from the Parma region of Italy. Having settled in Alberta, she became convinced that the local milk would make a very high quality Parmesan-style cheese; so she formed a relationship with some local dairy farmers and began producing "Leoni Grana" cheese. We used this a lot at my school, and it's a damned fine cheese. We also have a very good artisanal producer of yogurt here, a family-owned operation called Bles-Wold. The proprietors moved here from Holland 11 years ago, and began producing yogurt as a sideline to their dairy business in 1996. It's really good yogurt, especially considering that they've focused their efforts on a reduced-fat product. Finally, although I've resisted all week, I'm also going to put in a plug for my employers as a local artisanal producer. The company started out as a family-owned pig farm (which it still is, among other things), back in the 1960's. In the 70's, when the mantra became "leaner, leaner, leaner," they began breeding lean pork like everyone else. Like everyone else, they discovered that lean pork just didn't taste as good. Most producers left it at that, reasoning that it was another case of "be careful what you wish for." The Price family weren't prepared to do that. They founded a company specifically for the purpose of improving the quality of local pork; importing quality breeding stock from England (where they were ahead of us in the quality of their pork) and combining those genes with the best of their own bloodlines. For the last three decades they've been singlemindedly attempting to breed the best-tasting pork in the world, and they've done a grand job. I have not personally tasted all of the world's best pork, so I can't speak to that, but I can say that it is outstanding in quality. The hogs are raised in family-owned farms, on natural feeds, and only receive antibiotics when they're sick (not with the daily rations). At a certain point along the way, the family began to resent giving up control of their product to the meatpackers, after lavishing all of this care and attention on their animals. So...they bought the packing plant. Around this time, they also branched into ranching beef cattle along similar principles of natural feeds and breeding for flavour. The next step, inevitably, was to open retail outlets to sell the product directly to the public; an example of vertical integration that's rather unique in North America. Rounding out our product line, most of our produce is sourced directly from individual growers in the US; and we've got a tight relationship with a quality meat-curing firm here in the province to make ham, bacon, and cold cuts from our meats. It makes for some seriously loyal clientele, I can assure you. It occurs to me, at this point, that while I've given you a lot of detail on my end of the business, I haven't really put it in context by giving you a store tour. I'll do that now, while wrapping up. Coming in the south end of our store, next to the wine cellar, you'll find a few shelves of dry goods: good EVOO and quality vinegars; preserves of various sorts; and some good-quality nibblies like Lindt chocolate and Lesley Stowe's RainCoast Crisps. Next to this you will find two coolers full of fresh produce, for those who are less interested in lunch and more interested in avoiding a trip to the supermarket on the way home. As you come around the back of the store you will find a section containing two huge (1m) cast-iron pans, imported from Germany, in which we cook stews and stir-fries every day. Fresh soups are also sold out of this section. Continuing around the back of the store you arrive at the deli, which functions as our "a la carte" dining area. Here we keep several meat, fish, and poultry entrees, as well as various starches and salads. Next to the deli is the sandwich area/back display case, where we set out hundreds of sandwiches each day to meet the lunch rush; and also my desserts, pies, and take-away meals. Turning the corner and heading toward the north end of the store, the next cooler contains fresh and cured meats, as well as cheeses and housemade dips and salsas. The remaining refrigerated cases contain dairy (including the Bles-Wold yogurt) and soft drinks of various kinds. Next is my old haunt, the pizza/pasta area, which contains the daily carved item, pizzas, quesadillas, and the daily pasta special. Finally, at the north end, you'll find my bakery, which by now you know pretty well. There are two islands in the store: the north one is the coffee bar, where we sell Starbucks coffees, wine (we're a licensed establishment), and my baked goods; the south island is the salad bar/citrus juicing area. We go through hundreds of litres of fresh-squeezed orange juice in a week. It's very good. Overall, the food here is certainly not fine dining, but for quality and flavour it would compare favourably to most mid-upper range "family" restaurants. We do it well, and are frequently picked as the best place to get a lunch in Downtown Pedway Hell. They're a fine operation, and whatever my day-to-day frustrations I've learned a lot here. [/plug] This wraps up my week of blogging, though I'm sure Soba will keep the thread open tomorrow as usual so that I can respond to any late questions. I know I'll spend the next month or so thinking of things that I'd been keen to discuss, but which have slipped away from me in the course of the week. Thank you all for your feedback, and your enthusiasm!

Abra: Yes, AP flour. I'm too cheap to waste cake flour on a quick-snack cake. Kind of defeats the purpose, yeah? Though the reason I changed the methodology was to avoid toughness in the crumb. I don't remember where the Rombauers lived, but I'm guessing their flour was a bit "softer" than ours up here in Durum-istan. Darcie: As I've said a couple of times, it sounds like more than it really is. If you were to describe your workday in my typically breathless style ( ) it would probably sound pretty impressive, too. The butter tart recipe is pretty simple. For a dozen tarts made in old-style (ie, smaller) muffin tins, use 1c brown sugar 2 tbsp butter 1 tbsp vinegar 1 egg 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract Beat the ingredients together, fill the shells, and bake. No sweat. As I said, I now add just a bit of cinnamon to mine. This size batch would probably fill up a dozen "bought" 3" tart shells, as well. Add pecans or raisins or walnuts or whatever, as desired. You could also add more butter, without hurting anything. Today's breakfast was a small drink of kefir, because I didn't really feel like eating. Got to work at my usual time, and this time I brought my uniform with me... We'd run out of the ham & cheese pockets I make, so that was priority one this morning. It's pretty simple, I just thaw sheets of commercial puff pastry; roll them out from 12"X15" to roughly 16"X16", and cut each sheet into nine squares. A reasonable portion each of sliced deli ham and grated cheese, pinch the edges, and freeze 'em up for later use. I make up enough for a week and a half, while I'm at it. This takes up the bulk of my morning. Mid-morning my reluctance to eat has worn off, and I'm nibbling on the trim (edge) pieces from the tray of caramel squares...a chronic weakness of mine. The rest of my routine (product checks, corn bread, strudels, etc) you've heard often enough already, so I won't repeat myself. For lunch today, I opt for one of our deluxe sandwiches; a thick heap of cold cuts on foccaccia with provolone cheese. Pretty good! I usually go with one of the hot meals, but every once in a while I feel the need for a sandwich or a bowl of soup. Fortunately, we sell both and they're good quality. The breads come from one of the best bakeries in the city, the cold cuts are excellent (and sometimes made from our house-raised pork and beef), and the soups are made from scratch with house-made stocks and fresh ingredients. After lunch I have a few more things to do. We have some apples that are getting tired, so I cut/core/peel half a case. I'm thinking that I'll make up strudel filling today or tomorrow, but it turns out I've got enough strudels already made up to get me through the week. I'll probably leave that until Friday. At any rate, I've got another whole case of apples to get through between now and then, as time and opportunity permit. I also make up some more pastries for the coffee bar, since I hadn't turned out as many as I'd wanted earlier in the week. Finally, I make up more of the mini-almond croissants for the pastry trays, since we've had one of those ordered for tomorrow. What with that, and attending to customer issues, and taking catering orders, and arranging an information package for my cashier who'll be entering the Culinary Arts program in the fall, it adds up to a pretty full afternoon. Amazingly, I'm out in pretty good time today. That's a bonus, because I want to get to the library. I have to drop off Jacques Pepin's La Technique (slightly overdue), and pick up Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast, which I've had reserved and been impatiently awaiting. Having done that, I'm home by 5:45. My wife is not feeling well, so she's already in bed. For supper I follow my nose to the cupboard where I keep the spices, grains, and legumes; and spend a few minutes lost in though. Hmmmm. So I put on a pot of rice, another with wild rice and kamut, and I pull down the quinoa as well. That doesn't need as long, so I keep that back for later. I bring up one of Saturday's chicken breasts and put it in the microwave to thaw. I put on a frying pan and put in some oil, minced ginger, and minced garlic. Once it starts to smell nice I slice up the chicken breast and put it in, a few pieces at a time, until it's all lightly cooked on the outside. Then I crack a can of coconut milk, whisk in a bit of cornstarch, and add it to the chicken. This can simmer for a while, as I fire up the computer and log onto eGullet... I crush one allspice berry, about a teaspoon of whole coriander, one cardamom, and several black peppercorns with my mortar and pestle, using a good pinch of coarse salt for the extra grinding effect. That goes into the simmering pan. I'm not shooting for a specific dish or ethnicity here, I just like the way all these things go together. I'll finish off the chicken with chopped scallions and cilantro. I'm thinking it needs something else, so I soak a bit of tamarind in hot water with a small chunk of jaggery. When it's nicely pasty, I'll force it through a little strainer. We'll use this as a flavour accent, at the table. Now I'm going to go out and pick a bit of salad for an accompaniment, and we'll resume this later on.

Okay, here we go again. Can't believe that tomorrow is the end of the blog; seems like I just got started. I guess that's a good sign, since I plan to eventually write for publication... Okay, q & a time again: Hathor: the gardening routine here is similar to most of Canada. Start things indoors (depending what you like to grow) in April or early May. Victoria Day long weekend (third week of May) is when most Canadians outside of southern BC and the Niagara peninsula will start their direct-seeded plants and transplants (the latter may require cloches, at first). Hardcore gardeners may start pet projects like watermelons or Atlantic Giant pumpkins indoors a bit earlier, but that's the general guideline. Frost generally becomes a significant risk in mid-late September, but there can be sharp variations. Any longtime gardener can remember years when there was frost in, say, late August. Those years are definitely the exception, though, and usually we are able to grow most of the common garden items thanks to the long summer days. Abra: that cake was an adaptation of a quick-cake recipe from the Joy of Cooking that I use quite a bit. In my (1973) edition, it's called a "Hurry Up Cake." I've altered the methodology somewhat. In the original, you sift the sugar and flour together, then dump in the fat, eggs, milk, and remaining dry ingredients and beat the hell out of it until it comes together into a batter. My variation is to combine the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter/margarine/whatever as you would with pastrycrust. At this point, the dry portion may be refrigerated or frozen to use at leisure; and (depending on the fat you use) may also be held at room temperature for up to a month. When I want to bake it off, I add two eggs, an appropriate liquid (usually milk), and bake it. The basic recipe would be: 2 c flour 1/2-3/4 c sugar (depending on the cake) 1/2 c fat of choice 1 tbsp baking powder 2 eggs 1/2 c milk or other liquid This may be scaled more or less indefinitely, though for home use this comes together fast enough to just make individual batches. To make the butterscotch version, use brown sugar instead of white and butter for your fat (or at least, a better-quality margarine). To make a cocoa version, sub out 1/4 cup flour with cocoa. Use it for an upside-down cake, or stir in whatever berries or fruit are seasonal. Heat the milk, soak a quarter-cup of all-bran in it until cool, add molasses/ginger/allspice/cloves and it's a quick-and-dirty gingerbread (the molasses compensates for the milk soaked up in the all-bran). In short, it's a fast and infinitely manipulable cake that's just as quick as a store-bought mix, but better. My bunch aren't keen on icing (neither am I, truthfully), so I'll sometimes dust with icing sugar, sometimes serve with whipped cream or caramel sauce, sometimes drizzle with a fruit puree or compote, and sometimes (a big family favourite) spread with butter-tart filling while the cake's half-baked. The filling gives a lovely rich layer, partly glazing the top and partly sunk into the middle. When I speak of milk "or other suitable liquid," that's because I've made it with various fruit juices and concentrates as well, and they're pretty good. I make the chocolate version with a soured/cultured milk for choice; be it buttermilk, yogurt, or "fridge-curdled." I guess the kefir would now be a strong contender, too. I find that the soured milk gives the chocolate more presence, and I also use brown sugar in that one because it gives a moister, softer, crumb. The specific variation I baked the other night I have no recipe for. I just threw the anise seeds and methi into my spice grinder until it looked good, and added enough ginger for it to play the leading role. When I'm at home I tend to "wing it" a lot, which leads to occasional misfortune but a lot of serendipity. My feeling is that if I like something I've thrown together at random, I have adequate "chops" to re-create it intentionally until I've got it the way I want it. Milagai: I've never had salty lassi. The ones you see here are usually something on the order of a yogurt "smoothy" with a bit of water added (sometimes in the form of crushed ice). Not that these are bad, by any means. Arbuclo: the "saskatoon" berry is a European corruption of the Cree word "misaskwatomin," their word for this important foodstuff. The city is named after the berry, rather than the opposite, because that particular place along the river grew saskatoons (the berry) profusely. The berries look somewhat like blueberries, but only in a general sense. They have a more pronounced "crown" around the blossom end, and range in colour from a deep reddish-pink to a grape-like purple. They grow on a large bush/small tree which can reach 20-30 ft in height (10 m) in sheltered areas. Usually they're only 8-10 ft high...at least where I've seen them. They grow widely in my native Nova Scotia, where they are known as "Indian Pears" (at least the area where I grew up), but are little-used. The flavour is rather different from blueberries, and less pronounced (to my blueberry-trained palate). Raw, they are rather bland; like cranberries they only really come to life when cooked. The first time I was served a Saskatoon pie I was downright shocked! As Safran says, they have a distinct cherry note to them, but with fugitive hints of several other berries and fruits. If you have the persistence to pick only the past-ripe-starting-to-shrivel ones, and freeze them separate from the rest of your crop until you have enough to be worthwhile, you can make a jelly that has an almost port-like character. They do have fairly large seeds (bigger than raspberry, smaller than grape). I don't care to eat those, so once they're cooked I I tend to mash them and strain out the seeds. ===================================================== Joke: two yuppies from Saskatoon like to go somewhere hot every year for their vacation. One year, they settle on Australia; and just for shits and giggles they get onto the plane swathed in their full winter regalia of hand-stitched parka and mukluks. Somewhat inebriated and definitely enjoying the stares, they decide to take things one step further...from Sydney they hop a plain to Alice Springs, and then a bus into the outback...still in their parkas, although the joke is wearing rather thin by now. They finally stop at a "town" consisting of a general store, a pub, and a filling station. As they walk into the pub in their parkas, conversation dies abruptly. Playing their parts to the hilt, they order two pints by pointing and grunting, then sit down at an empty table and put up their mukluk'ed feet. Around them the conversation resumes in a low but agitated buzz. At one table, a group of stockmen are putting up one of their friends to go talk to these alien invaders. Finally, the unwilling victim saunters over to their table and, feigning casual conversation, asks them where they're from. "Saskatoon, Saskatchewan," one replies. The stockman ponders this for a moment, nods, and returns to his table. The others are eagerly awaiting his report. "Where were they from?" "Dunno, mate," shrugged the stockman. "They didn't speak English." ====================================================== (It was on topic...they ordered a beer) As far as perogies/pierogy/piroshki/verenike are concerned, they are a very simple food. Like many others (Yorkshire pudding, for example) they were created as a way for peasant families to fill their bellies inexpensively. Essentially, they are like many other stuffed pastas or dumplings; you have a dough wrapper, and you have a filling. The dough wrapper may have little or no egg in it, depending on whose tradition you're following...my wife's Mennonite grandmother uses one egg for every three cups of flour. The fillings are essentially endless, depending entirely on what you like and what you've got in abundance. Probably the most common filling, in North America, is potatoes. This is perfectly legitimate and authentic, as potatoes rapidly became a staple food when they were introduced to central and eastern Europe. They may be mixed with cream, or egg yolk, or cheese, or butter, or bits of bacon/sausage/onion/whatever, but the ones you find in the supermarkets are almost always potato-based. In many areas of the "old country" (whichever country that happened to be) dairy products were a common food for the poor, especially various versions of fresh cheese or cottage cheese. These are also popular fillings for perogies; my wife's family make their verenike with dry-curd cottage cheese, mashed with egg yolk and salt and pepper. A third staple version would be stuffed with cooked shredded cabbage, or leftover cooked sauerkraut. Richer variations might have a bit of ground meat or sausage or bacon or fish or poultry added. I'm partial to a 50/50 combination of cabbage and sauerkraut, with onions and a bit of crumbled sausage cooked in. In my wife's family, they simply boil the verenike until they're done, then toss them in a sauce of reduced cream and butter. More often, here, they're panfried in a bit of butter or oil along with onions and sausage. Any way you choose to serve them, they're pleasant belly-ballast. That was just a few of the savoury versions. There are many sweet versions, too, filled with pretty much any fruit or berry you have to hand. Common versions in Europe would include cherry or plum-filled, or apricot, or chestnut (not a fruit, I know, but it's a sweet one), or stewed prunes, or apples, or whatever. Here, Saskatoons are a popular choice, as Pam R says. Sweet perogies could be served with cream, whipped cream, fruit coulis, vanilla sauce, caramel sauce, or just a sprinkle of sugar. Whatever appeals to you. The most-traditional shape is little half-moons, made of course by filling cut-out circles of dough. In my wife's family they make larger, rectangular verenike about the size and shape of a supermarket egg roll. That's old-school farm cookin'... Like many other labour-intensive foods, these are best prepped in a large batch in a social context. Gather the whole clan around the table and go hard! One further word before returning to the narrative portion of the blog...I don't want to give the impression that I'm some sort of super-Dad paragon or anything. It so happened that this last couple of weeks have coincided reasonably well with how I *try* to do things. It doesn't always work like that. On one thread a few months ago, I told another prospective career-changer that one of the hardest things to do is come home absolutely whipped, and listen attentively as your youngster prattles at you for an hour. It takes a serious amount of mental toughness to stay engaged with your family in the teeth of fatigue, and it's one of the biggest reasons that restaurant people have relationship problems. My kids know now that Dad needs a bit of time to decompress, most days, and re-adjust to being here. And, having said that, there are some days that I just can't do it...I'll lock into a book, or the computer, and just wall everybody out for a few hours. Over the years my wife has come to understand that, although I'm "on" for hours at a stretch while I'm at work, I'm essentially an introvert. I need time to myself, and time with just one or two people around me that I'm close to. This means that sometimes I'm an unresponsive or uncommunicative husband; and sometimes that means that she's a testy wife. On the whole, though, she's come to understand my need for periodic disengagement, and I've come to understand her need for social time. We have our rough patches, but we're still going strong eighteen years later, so I guess it's working for us. Okay...back to the narrative. Breakfast this morning was toast and a glass of water. I was a bit groggy from the weekend's exertions, and found it hard to get going. My brain was somewhat foggy. How foggy, I discovered when I got to work...I'd left my uniform at home. Fortunately a) I'm just a short bus ride from work; and b) I'm always in 30-40 minutes early. I was back at work, dressed, and on station by 9:00; only a half-hour late. The twins were awfully surprised and pleased to see me walk through the door. "Uncle back!" I got a second set of wee hugs and kisses before I headed back to work, so it wasn't all bad. In spite of that initial setback it was a pretty productive morning. I pulled out my day's eclairs from the freezer and set them in the oven to thaw and re-crisp; then pulled some four-inch tart shells and made up a dozen butter tarts (four each of plain, raisin, and pecan). I use my mom's butter-tart recipe, though in recent years I've started adding a hint of cinnamon to humour my daughter's passion for that spice. I like the way it works, so I've taken to using that variation at work too. I also fetch out a big mixing bowl from the dish room and make up a batch of cornbread. I don't use the Blakeslee for this, because it's just as easy to make by hand and a whole lot less cleaning afterwards. In and around this, btw, I've checked off my Monday order, bagged and labelled product, and all the other usual morning things that I've described to you upthread. I pull out my choux products and leave them to cool; then go to the back to receive my cakes, which have arrived from our south-side sister store. I'm awfully happy to see them, since we'd gotten wiped out completely on Friday as detailed above. Unfortunately, I forgot to set a timer for the butter tarts (I usually bake those by "nose," rather than time) and by the time I come back my poor neglected little darlin's are rather overbaked. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... So, muttering vile things under my breath about dumbasses who think they're too good to need timers, I fill the showcase with cakes, cheesecakes, and slices; then go to the Digi scale/labeller and print off labels for all the pies. I put them into back showcase (sandwich area) with the other desserts, and return to the bakery. I'll bake off more butter tarts during that short interval between the end of cashier breaks and the beginning of the lunch rush. Then I make up my eclairs and puffs. As I have for the last few days, I make half of the eclairs chocolate-dipped, and half with the strawberries and the dusting of icing sugar. The strawberry version is now outselling the chocolate version, but I'm prepared either way: I'm pulling out more than I need to fill my showcase and keeping back some plain ones. That way I can either dip them or berry-fill them, according to what I find in my display case after the lunch rush. By now it's almost 11:00, when I'll have to become a cashier for a while, so I throw two skillets into the oven to get good and hot, and pour myself a mug of coffee, and head over to the till. Initially I'd really resented having to cover the till during my morning production time, but I don't mind it any more. I know I'm good with the customers, and I also have come to grudgingly accept that the store needs me more as a leader than a baker. One of those "careful what you wish for" moments that I was alluding to in the title of my thread. Coming off the cash at 11:30, it's off to the back to retrieve a pair of strudels and get them eggwashed, sprinkled with coarse sugar, and into the oven. Then the hot skillets come out and get their cornbread batter; and back in they go. Looks like I won't have time for the butter tarts, so I'll postpone those until lunch is over. Run a few things back to dish, drink some water/pour some coffee/go to the bathroom/take a deep breath...and it's lunch rush again. After lunch is over I cut the strudels and put them into the now half-empty showcase alongside the cornbread and the remaining scones. Next it's the butter tarts. Once I've replaced my dozen I've only got a little bit of filling left, so I scoop out three more plain ones and add that tub to my stack of things going back to dish. In go the butter tarts, but with a timer this time... Then I get to go for my lunch. Today, instead of using my staff discount and having lunch at work, I go into the food court and head over to the little Indian restaurant there. The owner is a very outgoing, friendly sort; he's built a loyal clientele in a pretty short time. His food is unexceptional, but consistent and well-executed. I get rice, lamb, chickpeas, and lentils; all of it quite tasty. I cook similarly at home during the summer (on weekends, mostly). As mentioned at the beginning of the thread, I love Indian and Mid-East food. Coming back from lunch, I have a fairly set routine. Cover the shorter afternoon breaks on the cash; check tomorrow's catering orders; replenish the showcases. I'll be closing the bakery again today, meaning I'll be on the cash by 5:00 at the latest. That doesn't give me a whole lot of opportunity to start any meaningful projects (considering I have to jump on the till if we get a lineup); so I content myself with peeling a case of bananas for my night baker to use in the muffins. I also sneak out for a few minutes to try and find a maple-leaf shaped cookie cutter, but without success. Canada Day's coming, dammit, I need that cookie cutter! I've been thinking in terms of a few photos of Edmonton sights to round out this next roll of film. When I get off work, I think of a restaurant a block away that's run by a great-nephew of the painter Renoir. That's something not every city can boast, right? Except when I get there, the patio contains two of my favourite classmates from cooking school. So I sit and drink wine with them, instead. One is moving to Victoria in a couple of weeks, the other is moving to Halifax in October. Anybody looking for a good young cook around then? Since I was late tonight, my wife and son had improvised a simple but effective meal: mashed potatoes with grated cheese on them, topped with poached free-range eggs. Nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned, so I poach a couple of eggs myself and set to. After that, well...basically I'm in here typing. Wendy, I didn't know in advance that I'd be working late today, so the oatcakes will have to wait 'til tomorrow. I will fit them in, though. And more pics, to round things out. 'Til then...

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig... Questions first. SushiCat: baking time for the cornbread will vary somewhat, depending on whether you make one thick or two thin; and also how accurate your oven is/how long you preheated your skillet. Within those parameters, 15-20 minutes is a safe bet for a thick cornbread; while the two thin ones can be finished in as little as eight minutes. When the top is domed and begins to show fine cracks, reach in and gently prod it with your fingertip. If it's firm, it's done. Haul it out and serve immediately. I eat the thin ones with butter and honey (or whatever) drizzled over the top; the thick ones I cut or break into individual servings and split open to butter. This recipe, despite the modest amount of sugar, does lend itself well to savoury uses as well. Try a bit of caramelized onion and some browned chorizo in it. Yum. As for gardening, well...the way I garden doesn't take a whole lot of time, that's one of the beauties of the system. A few minutes at suppertime (usually while I'm there anyway to pick scallions or lettuce) is all the maintenance it really needs. Sleep? What's that? Seriously, I run most of the time on about six hours' rest, which is adequate but not more than that. I get my best sleep between the hours of 4AM and noon, and as long as I get to sleep in once or twice a week (ie, Saturday and Sunday) I'm good to go. Blogging has cut into that a little bit but it's only a few days, right? Jamie: thanks for your kind words. Living lightly on the earth is one of my ongoing goals, though I'm not nearly as far along with it as I'd like. As for the comments you and others have made about the "density" of my lifestyle (so much packed in), all I can say is that it's wonderful what you can manage when you don't watch TV. I don't think I've had mine on since Superbowl, in fact. ...not that the 'net in general, and eGullet in particular, are anything but a time sink...but it's a time sink I file under PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT! Overall, this week has cost my wife a bit of "hubby time," but it's short term. I'm the son of a sailor, and she's the daughter of a long-haul trucker, and one of the first things we sorted out all those years ago was that I would be a sleep-at-home husband. However stressed or tired we may be, and for that matter even if we're pissed at each other about something, we always have that time together at the end of the day. It keeps things working. Smithy: panades, in this context, are non-fat binders added to a forcemeat or stuffing to improve moistness and texture. In this particular instance, it was nothing more elaborate than chunks of my homemade bread soaked in milk until soft, then incorporated into the pureed chicken. If you've ever used breadcrumbs in your burger patties, then you've essentially used a panade. When I was a kid in Nova Scotia, rolled oats were often used for the same purpose (that Scottish ancestry "thing"). A panade in this sense could also be cooked rice, a thick Bechamel, or perhaps even choux paste. A ballotine is similar to a galantine: usually the breast meat of a chicken or other fowl laid out in an even layer on the intact skin, which is trimmed to a neat rectangle; then stuffed with a forcemeat usually made from the rest of the bird (but which may also include various garnishes, etc). The whole thing is then rolled up into a nice neat cylinder, and tied with string. A galantine will be wrapped in cheesecloth, then poached and cooled in a suitable stock (ie chicken for chicken stock), and ultimately sliced and served cold. A ballotine, once rolled and tied, will be roasted in a pan containing some mirepoix, which will eventually be deglazed and used to make the sauce. These are served hot. I should interject, at this point, that if I've used a cooking term any of you don't understand, please do ask. One of the hazards of being in the business is that we have that specialized vocabulary, and you tend to forget that other people might not understand what you're trying to convey. As for my stewing hens, I'd planned to elaborate on that if nobody had asked. I have plans to do a few different things, none of which rely on the chicken being young and tender. The breasts which I took off as supremes I will likely braise (and probably stuff). I do a lot of slow-cooked items, because they suit my need for advance preparation. They're not really thought of as summertime dishes, but there's no reason not to serve them during the hot months. I'll typically put them with a hot or cold grain dish (ie rice, or perhaps tabbouleh) and some green salad or marinated fresh vegetables. So, to answer your question, braised slowly for a couple of hours in a suitable poaching liquid, perhaps chicken stock or something wine-based; and with some mirepoix in the liquid to reinforce the flavours. I also have the alternative of slicing the breasts (which are rather large) horizontally into thin layers and pounding them into very thin paillards, which can be marinated and grilled or pan-fried. Because of the thinness and pounding, they will not be tough. And of course, I could dice the breasts and stew them, then use them in chicken pies, pasties, and similar concoctions. The thighs may also be stewed for savoury pastries (or just for stew); or slow-poached and used hot or cold. The wings and carcasses I'll be using for soups and stocks; though I'll probably poach the wings slowly in a stock which will then be sturdy enough to use as an aspic, since the wings have lots of gelatin. The wings I might then sauce and grill, or perhaps take the meat from them for a salad or something. Mainly the stewing hens are all about having stock in my freezer. You can never have too much stock. I use it for sauces and risottos, and it's super-handy for making quick soups. My wife also likes to use it for cooking a pilaf, when she has to make a quick supper. She used one of my carefully-hoarded litres of goose stock for a pilaf last month...I didn't have the heart to tell her that it wasn't chicken. I'm big on thorough utilisation of the things I buy; I don't like to let anything go to waste if I can help it. It offends my East Coast Frugality Gene. Unfortunately, a lot of leftovers and half-used items scurry to the nethermost recesses of the fridge and I only find them when they're too far gone for anything but the composter. This is what happens when four people put things into the fridge, but only one takes things out... So, to resume the narrative: Shortly after writing this morning's post, I hopped a bus up Whyte Ave to my other job; Clifford Wright having kindly volunteered to keep me company. Busing gives me much of my reading time, in fact when I was driving regularly I rather missed that. I got there a bit early this week, and had some time to sit in the sun and read before anyone arrived to unlock the doors and let me in. Typically Sundays are a light prep day. The only time there's a lot to do is if they got absolutely slammed on the previous evening, and it's rare that they're caught unprepared. Usually what it'll be is an unusually high number of people ordering a specific menu item. Of course if you're short of anything, that's what it'll be! Saturday night is the big cleanup night, so my starting point on Sunday is to get out a stepstool and put the cover thingies back inside the vent hoods (the housing that goes over the fan, I mean...they get taken down and run through the dishwasher on Saturday night while the hoods are getting cleaned). Next, check the res book...32 covers, first table at 5:30, last table at 7:00 (yay! early night). Then check the prep list. I'm making up one of our signature desserts (the same one I detailed in last year's blog, so I won't repeat myself), so I turn the oven onto 350F; then start running cold water into one of the prep sinks. Grab a bus pan, go into the cooler, and fetch out four heads of Romaine. Core them, separate the leaves, discard the nasty ones, and dump the works into cold water to rinse and crisp up. Later on I'll drain them, tear them into pieces, and wrap them in an apron. They'll go into the salad cooler. After that, I bring out the makings for the tarts and get them assembled and into the oven. I "silver" two pork tenderloins, in case we get a run on the pork entree (ie, remove the tough "silverskin" membrane that sheaths the muscle); then I French out five lamb racks and season them for the lamb entree. I'm hoarding the trim from several lamb racks in my freezer at home, against the day that I make some sausage, so I bag up today's trim to go home with me later (if I'd been off this weekend, I'd have made sausage to coincide with the blog. Oh well.). Wash up scrupulously, then finish the lettuce; when that's put away finish the pastries and put them on a tray in their designated spot. That's the bulk of the prep out of the way. Now I'll count out enough veg sets for tonight's reservations, with a bit of margin for late bookings or walk-ins; blanch & shock them, and put them aside in small tubs for later. Refill the steam table for the starches to go into, fill it with inserts, and turn it on to heat. Put the big four-basket blanching pot onto the stove, fill it, and turn it on. Place a stack of appetizer plates and a stack of dinner plates on top of the range we use for cooking most of our entrees; the heat venting from the oven serves as a plate warmer. The chef has been doing her own prep and setup during this time; now she's done so she goes upstairs to rest for a little while before service starts. One of the other cooks arrives around this time to be my backup for the night. With our menu 32 covers would be a bit much for just me, but it's a nice mellow night for the two of us plus the chef. I haven't been there much of late, so I'm not letter-perfect on which starches and sauces go with which dish; so we arrange that I'll be #1 for the night (entrees, see upthread) and he'll be #2 (starches, veg, etc). My colleague will finish getting the sauces prepared for the night, and I'll take a look at our entrees. I've just prepped the lamb, so that's good; we've got enough of the bison and caribou tenderloins; I've done pork tenderloins in case we get a run on those...when all is said and done the only thing I need to brown off in advance of service is the beef tenderloin. What with today being Father's Day I'm expecting the carnivores to be out in force; so I brown off lots of beef, season it, and throw it into the lowboy. I'd already started an extra quantity of the sauce we use on the beef and caribou. [NB: If you go back to the beginning of this thread and click on the link to the restaurant's website, you'll find the complete menu online.] As usual it's "hurry up and wait." We have two early tables, then a half-hour break, then everybody else between six and seven o'clock. It's unusual for the last res to be as early as seven (usually seven is the most-desired time slot), but I'm not complaining at all. Most of our clientele order the five-course table d'hote, so a meal here will typically run 2-3 hours. I take advantage of the lull between setup and the first orders to have a couple cups of coffee and to nibble on some bread ("caff up" and "carb up" is my routine before service). I usually butter the bread and spread some chili paste on it (not sambal oelek, but the similar Vietnamese paste with all the garlic in it) to make little sandwiches. With two of us, service goes pretty smoothly. You never get a perfect night (I overcooked one of the beef entrees) but on the whole it was good. In the event, we sold relatively little of the beef and a lot of the various seafood dishes (the jumbo prawns, seafood medley, salmon, and halibut all were popular). Colour me surprised. My wife hates it when I come home smelling of seafood! Guess who's not getting a hug until after he showers? We were able to start breaking down and cleaning up relatively early tonight. Staff meal was chicken breasts and creminis in cream sauce with fettucine and fresh basil. I was able to sit down and eat while we were waiting for the last table to have their entrees. Why is it that the last table on an otherwise-early night is always the slowest? With the bulk of the cleaning done, and only the last table's desserts to go, the other cook calls it a night. I pre-plate the last desserts as far as I can, then put away the sauces I won't need and clean down the dessert bench. I get the floor swept and mopped before they call the last desserts. Of course, the *slow* last table ordered desserts about five minutes too late for me to catch the 9:30 bus, so I help the server haul away the night's dirty linens and help our dishwasher put things away until the 10:00 bus. By 11:00 I'm home, to my wife's pleasant gratification. It wasn't even really dark yet when I left work. Of course, the solstice is only a few days away. I didn't take any pictures at work today. I'll round out the second film tomorrow with a few more pics, and get it developed after supper. The day after tomorrow is the end of my blog already, much to my surprise. I can't think where the time's gone. Tomorrow, Wendy, oatcakes...just for you!

One thing I will say about having a cheapie camera...it makes my jacket look nice and white, and my pants/apron nice and black. I like that! No sign of the pan marks on my sleeves, or the dough on my apron. The black pants and apron are standard-issue storewide, and my bakers and I joke frequently about how they're perfect for baking, since they hide the flour so well. I'm not really bitter about it (laundry notwithstanding), I just find it amusing. I'm coming back now to some things I'd touched on, above. The three books I collected from the library yesterday are Rick Rodgers' "Kaffeehaus," Paula Wolfert's "Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean," and Clifford Wright's "Little Food." The Rodgers has been mentioned frequently on the pastry forum, and Wolfert and Wright of course are frequently-cited authorities here and elsewhere on all things Mediterranean. I will confess that I'd not known about Clifford Wright prior to eGullet, which is one of the reasons I love hanging around this place. Some of you may find interest in knowing what the stack of books on my bedside stand contains, so I'll offer it up here as an aside: from top down, I have the Clifford Wright book, Boccacio's "Decameron" (just finished), a cookbook of tapas by Penelope Casas (just finished), a complete Chaucer (bedtime reading for the rest of the year), my recently-acquired Apicius, the Time/Life volume on Mid-East cooking, the Time/Life volume on Caribbean cooking, James Morier's 19th century best-seller "Hajji Baba of Ispahan," Sandra Mackey's "The Iranians" (recently finished), and a short story anthology that was one of my wife's university textbooks. This is a fairly typical sample of what I'll be reading in any given week. On another recent post, I mentioned having recently acquired some kefir grains. When I was just a sprout, my father began subscribing to a post-hippy homesteading magazine called the Mother Earth News, which at the time was also just a sprout. "Mother" has flourished over the years, and remains an interesting source of tips and techniques on gardening, homesteading, alternative energy, off-grid living, healthy food, and many other useful things. I don't subscribe to the magazine, but I do get it regularly from the library and also visit their website. The kefir grains resulted from a recent article about making yogurt, kefir, and chevre. I'd made yogurt a time or two at home with good results (and will again), though I found the process a bit fussy. Kefir interested me for two reasons: one, the process is much simpler than yogurty; and two, my kids both like it. I used to bring it home as part of my organic box when I worked for this Halifax organic-foods delivery service. Admittedly, the stuff I brought home was blended with fruit for additional palatability, but hey, I can do that too. I have the technology. Anyway, I followed one of the links at the end of the article to a matchmaking site that lets kefir wannabes find donors of starter grains; and after a couple of false starts I hooked up with someone a couple of blocks away from my night job. Yesterday I bought the non-metallic strainer for separating the "grains" from the finished product, so I'm going to go and sample the inaugural batch right now.... Yum. Tart and slightly fizzy on the tongue, like a mixture of yogurt and a very dry sparkling wine. I know that sounds odd, and it certainly wouldn't be for everyone, but I like it a lot. Like yogurt, it's very refreshing in the hot weather. Kefir sites from around the Web give instructions for making fresh cheeses and a variety of other great-sounding recipes from kefir, either "straight" or drained, like yogurt. I plan to explore them all, over the course of the summer. Milk is one of the few things that's cheaper here than Nova Scotia, so I want get back into making yogurt, as well as quark, paneer, and a few other similar little goodies. As an aside, I didn't take any photos of the kefir or kefir grains. Now that I've had a chance to assess the abilities of my new camera, I knew that a) white kefir in a white bowl wasn't going to result in a usable picture; and b) the zoom function doesn't get close enough for the kefir grains to show up. These "grains," btw, are little off-white thingies like lumpy tapioca. They smell not unpleasant, but very very "cultured milk-y." The grains are extremely complex colonies of beneficial bacteria with a few yeasts, and have proven somewhat resistant to analysis. Researchers have identified most of the microflora that make up the grains, but still don't understand the symbiosis involved. Those of you who are lactose-intolerant may want to look into kefir. Not only does the bacterial activity make the milk digestible for many, you can also use the kefir grains in water to make a different beverage with similar health benefits. Use the same kefir grains (you may want to pour away the first batch if you're paranoid about the residual dairy); the only thing that changes is once they've been used for water kefir they can't go back to making milk-based kefir. The kefir-making process couldn't be simpler. Just add milk (or water) to the grains in a non-metallic container. Leave it sit for 24 hours at room temperature. Next day, strain it through a non-metallic strainer, and you're done. To make a large batch, add extra milk after the first day, stir, and leave for a second day. While I was typing that, my son brought me my Father's Day breakfast. He's been on an omelette kick lately, as mentioned upthread, so he made me a cheese omelette with a side of honeydew melon and green grapes. I've got to hand it to the boy, he makes a damned good omelette (photo to follow). He's been taking "foods" as one of his high school electives (one-half of what we used to call "home ec," the other half is now "fashions"). He's getting a big kick out of it. He was one of the few in his class who didn't burn his roux for the cream soup, which he bragged about for days. Last weekend, he woke us up with individual cheese souffles for breakfast. I've picked him up an 8" chef's knife and a boning knife (the short rigid kind) as the start to his own kit (the yellow-handled commercial Henkels). We're doing a sort of "knife skills 101" as time and opportunity permit. Today being a beautifully sunny day (the first since I started blogging) I'm going to spend a bit of time in the garden before I head off to work. The space I'm working with this year is still rather limited, but during this summer the landlord is putting in a new fence, and he's going to move the fence line about 5m (15-16 ft) further back into the alley, which will give me a whole lot more garden! Next year I expect to grow enough potatoes, onions, carrots, peas, beans, beets, etc to fill my basement and freezer, and to be basically self-sufficient on vegetables for about half the year. At present, my garden consists of two sections. One is centred around the apple tree, and is a more-or-less random mixture of flowers, herbs, and a certain quantity of weeds. On the other side of the walkway is the strawberry patch and the rest of the garden. I have planted two types of beets, which will be my main cooking greens all summer, and then storage beets and pickled beets for the winter. The carrot I planted this year is Nantes Express, which is short and sweet and matures quickly. I have both ruby chard and spinach planted as well, though the spinach will be a solitary pleasure; my wife loves it but is allergic, and my kids (like kids everywhere) won't touch the stuff. My salad garden is sown with four kinds of lettuce (butter, romaine, green leaf, and red leaf) plus a commercial mesclun mix given to me by a neighbour who was moving away. This includes things like arugula and escarole. Last year I got very poor germination and little lettuce, so this year I sowed them thickly and of course everything sprouted. [Edit: foreground middle=salad garden, foreground left a bit of the herb bed; background middle chard and spinach; background left tomatoes and radishes, background right carrots and weeds...with all the rain we've been getting, everything you see here has mostly doubled in size in the three days since this pic was taken.] That's okay. I'm harvesting the baby lettuces whole, right now, and slowly but surely leaving the survivors in three distinct rows, which in turn I will thin out to a good spacing. I put the lettuces in a spot where they'll be shaded by the fence for part of the afternoon, which will help keep them from bolting. I'll also be putting in a second planting of lettuces at the beginning of August, which will pop up rapidly in the warm soil but will not bolt, owing to the shortening of the days and cooling of the weather by September. If the new fence is finished in time, I'll probably also plant some late greens there, some mustards and oriental greens and that sort of thing. I'm told that with row covers or a cold frame, those can be nursed along as late as January. I have planted chives, dill, basil, cilantro, chervil, and probably one or two more that escape my pre-coffee recollection (Coffee! That's what's missing! Doh!). I have seeds for rosemary and thyme as well, but I'm going to put those in pots so I can hang them in my kitchen and use them year-round. I've got a few tomato plants started so far, and will add two or three more this week. I've got a couple of early-season slicing tomatoes and a roma (the other one died inexplicably), and I'll complement these with a couple more romas and maybe a couple of cherry tomatoes. I've got lots of onions in, conventional yellows and also multiplier onions. the multipliers keep me in scallions all year, and when mature make a pretty functional substitute for shallots. I've also got two bell peppers in. I'll be planting a couple of hills of squashes this week, not so much for the squashes as for the blossoms. I don't plant zucchini, usually, since everybody I know is trying to offload some when the season rolls around. I have Scarlet Runner beans planted at the base of my apple tree, for the blossoms primarily (though if the beans mature before the frost, this year, I'll be perfectly happy with those, too). I also have regular and oriental (yard-long) beans and snap peas planted down the side of my garage, where they can bask in the afternoon sun (and where I can "stake" them to the garage wall, opportunist that I am). I have gotten seeds for a short-season pickling cucumber, and will take a stab at making my own garlic dills this fall. Short-season cultivars are not really mandatory here, btw, the long summer days provide enough light to largely compensate for our Zone 5 climate. Prudent gardeners look on them as insurance, though, since you never really know... I garden organically, except insofar as my kitchen waste contains peels and trim from non-organic produce. I have two composters behind my apple tree, as you'll see when I add in the pictures, and they provide me with a reasonable degree of compost. I've also bought some organic compost from a fundraiser my daughter's school did, which is not all used up. My next-door neighbour has offered to take me out to his girlfriend's farm for a truckload of well-aged horse manure, and of course I'll have a summer's worth of lawn cuttings and leaves in the fall. I take a laissez-faire approach to gardening. My strawberry patch has lots of daisies growing in it, and I just let them grow. The berries will choke them out all on their own in another year or two. My lettuces leave no room for anything to eke out an existence in between them, and I planted radishes around my tomatoes to perform the same service. As my "intentional" plants grow and mature, and as I thin the rows out, I'll start laying down layers of mulch in between my plantings. These help fertilize the plants, and also help to choke out weeds. A lady named Ruth Stout was writing about this style of gardening back in the 60's, and it's recently come back into style as "lasagne gardening" (ie, you just add on layers). The key is that you never again turn the soil over after you've begun doing this. That means the weed seeds stay buried, and your own seeds are sitting in the nice soft layer of organic matter at the top. After a few years, you've got the effect of the deep-bed method, without all that tedious excavation. And drainage and soil fertility come as an inherent part of the package. So, if I get some persistent dandelions and "quack-grass" in the short term, I don't sweat it too much. I eat the dandelions, and pull quack-grass anytime I happen to be passing by. I've also left a border of "native growth" (ie weeds) at the fence, around the perimeter of my garden. Both the Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening espouse the value of leaving some habitat near your garden for beneficial insects to grow in, as a natural control against insect pests. Having read these magazines avidly throughout my childhood, I've gardened this way as long as I've had a garden. It works pretty well. I'm going to leave off now for the morning, and scan a couple of garden pictures to edit in. Then I'm going to get out there and do that gardening I spoke of, before I got to work. Until tonight...

The cornbread is easy enough to make. Those of you who hail from the southern states will immediately note that I do use a wee bit of sugar; in response to which I can only observe that hey! I'm not a southerner. A pertinent point, while I'm thinking of it...the cornbread is one of my personal recipes which I took in to work, therefore I'm at perfect liberty to share it. That's not the case with company recipes...but if I mention something you're interested in, ask anyway. If I can't give you that particular recipe I'll tell you so. Although many of my recipes are in weights (he says defensively) this one is in volume measures: 1 1/3 c cornmeal 2/3 c flour 1 c buttermilk 1 c milk 2 eggs, separated 2-3 tbsp butter, shortening, or lard 1/2 tsp salt 1 tbsp sugar 1 tbsp baking powder Place cornmeal, buttermilk, salt, and sugar into a mixing bowl. Stir until the cornmeal is well-moistened, and add enough of the milk that the grain is "swimming" in it...there should be enough liquid that after stirring a bit of the milk will sit on top. Leave this sit for at least half an hour, or ideally overnight. Overnight soaking frees up some of the corn's natural sugars, but pre-soaking for at least half an hour allows the corn to absorb lots of moisture from the milk, which in turn guards your finished product against dryness. I do this with anything I bake that includes cornmeal. Preheat your oven to 375F. Once it comes up to temperature (I guess you don't need to worry about this part, do you Jack? Jammy AGA usin' so-and-so... ), put an ungreased 10" cast-iron skillet into the oven to preheat for 20-30 minutes. The longer it preheats, the nicer the crust on the bottom of your cornbread. Whip the egg whites to soft peaks. Add the fat and egg yolks to the cornmeal mixture, and stir until well incorporated. Combine the baking powder and flour, and add to the cornmeal mixture. The mixture should be a soft, slightly loose batter (add as much of the remaining milk as you need). Gently fold in the egg whites. Remove your skillet from the oven and, working quickly, drizzle oil into it and swirl around the pan to coat. Pour off the excess and immediately pour in your cornbread batter and return it to the oven. This will yield one thick, fluffy cornbread; alternately you may wish to make two thinner ones which will be crispier. If you don't have an oven-safe skillet, I find that a Pyrex baking dish will give a reasonably good bottom crust (I don't preheat those in the oven). At work I make a *slightly* larger batch (enough to do me for several days), and do not separate the eggs. This will also give a perfectly acceptable cornbread, though not as light. The milk measurement is slightly variable, depending on your flour and cornmeal, as well as the size of your eggs and whether you opt for separating them. The egg whites, of course, will mean that you probably don't need the whole cup of milk. This recipe also makes very acceptable corn muffins, well adapted to adding savoury ingredients.

Okay...well, I've gone back and re-scanned my pictures at a higher dpi, but the "post preview" function still shows them at thumbnail size. I guess if I was a *really* smart guy, I'd have hammered all this stuff out last week with a few test runs. Live and learn, eh? I'm going to continue on in the hope that when I actually post this, the photos will turn up at actual size. If not, then I'll PM somebody and try to figure things out from there. The first picture is taken from the edge of the river valley, right behind my son's high school (a few blocks from here). The tallest building on the skyline, almost in the centre of the pic, is Manulife Place. Commerce Place, where my store is located, is the shorter building to the immediate left. This cluster of office towers is where we draw our clientele from. This is the view south down the river valley from the same viewpoint. A few blocks in from the ridge at the far end of the valley, somewhere about the midpoint of the picture, is roughly where my night job is. If I had a bicycle, it would be about a 15 minute ride. This is the salad fixin's that I pulled from my garden on Wednesday evening, to open the blog. This is the finished meal. I realize now that if I'd turned the plate so that the salad faced me, I'd have gotten a much better picture. Pretty obvious these were taken with a low-end point & shoot, isn't it? The towel in the background is covering the bowl with my bread dough in it. Okay, the series from work: first, pate a choux step by step. In the first pic, I've just mixed the dough and given it a few minutes over the heat to dry up. Here, the finished dough in the mixer bowl in all its slithery, squidgy glory. I use the recipe from Friberg, but I leave out the chemical leavener which I find unnecessary. The water and the eggs are at 200%. A sheet pan of eclairs, piped and ready for the oven. You'll notice that I pipe 'em in a rickrack sort of pattern with a star tip. No particular reason, I just like the way they look. Yours truly, piping a tray of profiteroles for cream puffs. I'll go back later with a moistened fingertip and push down those little peaks where I pulled the piping bag away. The freshly-baked product, cooling. It will go back onto a speed rack as soon as the picture's taken, of course. The apparent difference in colouration is a trick of the flash, the middle sheet is the closest to the correct colour. Here I've dipped half of the eclair tops in chocolate, the rest will get strawberries. The profiterole have had holes made in the bottom with the tip of a paring knife. I pipe into them, rather than splitting them and piping onto the bottom. ...and the finished product, ready to go into my showcase. You have to look closely to see the chocolate drizzled onto the cream puffs. Future batches of the strawberry eclair will not have the berries sticking out so far, as I find it gives them a buglike appearance. They're selling well. The skillet cornbreads. I cut these into six portions each. Each strudel is six portions, as well. The charred, crusty bits around the edges are just surplus eggwash. Finally, two pictures of this morning's breakfast in progress. =========================================================== So, to resume the narrative... After we'd had brunch my son went off to a friend's house for a movie day, and my daughter asked me out for coffee (since I'll be working on Father's Day). We got out the golf umbrella and strolled up to the mall, with her revelling in having some alone time with Dad (ie, she talked my ear off). Our first stop was at Wal-Mart to drop off the film from the last few days. Then we went to the coffee shop in the mall and sat down to schmooze for a while over our respective beverages (mediocre Mocha Java for me, hot chocolate with lots of cream for her). Having visited for a while, we set about strolling through the mall. Her first stop of choice was the clearance bookstore (that's my girl!) where she picked up a Jack London book. Then we went to the library, where I picked out three cookbooks that were on my "to-read" list; two of Mediterranean food and one of central European pastries. More about those on another occasion. Leaving the library we went to the dollar store, where I picked up a plastic strainer for use with my newly-acquired kefir grains (apparently they resent metal). By this time my pictures were ready, so we headed back to Wal-Mart to retrieve them. I didn't want to get my groceries until I'd picked up the pix, so that we could go home immediately afterwards. I cruised back to the chicken guy's table and picked up two of his stewing hens and three dozen free-range eggs: one dozen of the large and two dozen of the smalls, which he had a good price on. Then I hit Safeway for a few essentials, and finally Kuhlmann's for carrots and potatoes. Then my daughter and I headed back to the bus, well pleased with our outing. Last week it was my son I'd brought to the market with me; one of the secrets to maintaining a family life with a schedule like mine is to have time blocked out for everyone. My wife and I get our alone time when the kids are visiting their friends, and it more or less works out for us all. Of course, one thing we've always done is to sit down together at mealtimes. This week I've been away for a couple of dinners, but as a rule we are gathered at the table almost every day. This anchors our family life, whatever else is going on around us. When we got home I put away the groceries, then made a batch of pasta dough. I put that aside to rest, and set about breaking down my chickens (this will come up in the second batch of pictures). The first one I broke down into wings, drums, thighs, breasts, and carcass. The second I did a bit differently; I peeled the skin off in one piece to make a ballotine with on another occasion. Then I took off the breasts as "supremes" with the first joint of the wing still attached. I'll slow-cook these one day. I broke down the rest in the conventional fashion, then packaged up everything except two thighs and took it all down to the freezer. The thighs I boned out and cut into small pieces. I ran them through my geriatric Cuisinart with a panade, some scallions from the garden, a bit of cream, and some salt and pepper. I put that aside and rolled out my pasta into sheets. Then I piped the chicken onto the pasta and made up chicken ravioli; 40 pieces altogether. Over at the stove I slowly panfried bacon from the local butcher with onions and mushrooms. This went over the finished ravioli, with a sprinkling of scallions for garnish. That, and another salad from my garden, was dinner tonight. Dessert was an impossibly sweet honeydew melon that I found at Safeway (after looking through almost the whole bin, and coaching my daughter on how to pick 'em). Afterwards, feeling mellow, my wife and I indulged in a glass each of LBV port, a recently-acquired taste. For those who are into such things, it was the Noval 1997 in a "split" (half-sized bottle, which matures faster than the full bottle). And that was basically my day, except for grappling with ImageGullet and my scanning software. Nice and quiet. Edit: found my problem with ImageGullet, which basically was me being a dumbass. If you copy the link to the thumbnail, you shouldn't be suprised when the end result is a thumbnail. Oy.

Okay... I just scanned all my pictures in and uploaded them to imagegullet, and put together a post to contain them all. Unfortunately, they've come out very poorly and at much too low a resolution (they looked like thumbnails). I'm going to re-scan them and come back in a couple of hours (my wife is clamouring for some computer time). One of these days, dammit, I'm going to have a decent digital!

It's a grey, cool, drizzly morning today. Perfect weather, in other words... The southern half of Alberta is taking a beating right now. In recent weeks they've already faced heavy rain and flooding; now they're getting pounded with tornadoes, heavy rain, and hail. Many towns are evacuating residents, and property damage is already huge. Last year it was Edmonton that took a hit, with not one but two huge storms packing unreasonable quantities of hail. The Whitemud Trail, a major east-west arterial here, was under 2m of water (roughly six feet). The first of those hailstorms hit on the afternoon that my peony bloomed (dammit). We got a whole couple of hours to enjoy the blossoms. As I said upthread, the drought is definitely over. I had a minor detour on the way to pancake-dom this morning, thanks to my son's recently discovered passion for omelette making. So I woke myself up by taking a nice walk down to the local store for a dozen eggs. I rather like a nice warm rain in the morning. I'd coached my daughter to have the kettle boiling and the teapot warmed for when I got home, so before I set to cracking eggs I loaded up the Brown Betty (whoa-oh Brown Betty, bam be lam whoa-oh Brown Betty, bam be lam). I drink more coffee than I do tea, but I do love a cup of tea in the morning. Especially a rainy morning. Especially with pancakes. I like to let my pancake batter rest for at least 20-30 minutes before I start cooking them off; I find that the pancakes are lighter and fluffier as a result. Ideally I like to rest the batter overnight, but often I'm not that organized...or I'm out of eggs. I'm using that rest time to type, right now. I like to have two frying pans going at a time, so that it doesn't take all morning to get breakfast on the table. Unfortunately I only have one cast-iron pan, so half the pancakes are not quite as nice. Oh well. I'll be getting a second one soon, and it won't be an issue. I put them into a pre-warmed oven, on my pizza stone, as they come out of the pan. This is a little tradition that began within a couple weeks of my wife and I becoming a couple. She'd grown up thinking she didn't like pancakes, but it turned out she just didn't like Aunt Jemima (or Smitty's restaurants). When I made pancakes for her, she found that they weren't so bad after all. 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). Saturday mornings are my time to relax, most weeks. There's a very funny program on CBC Radio 2 called "Vinyl Cafe," from 10 to 11, and then the eclectic and always interesting "I Hear Music" (currently profiling forgotten Tin Pan Alley great Dorothy Fields, sometimes called the female Cole Porter). I try to sleep in until 10, if I get the opportunity, but it doesn't usually work that way. So I nap in the afternoon instead. It's all good! Saturdays there are farmer's markets all over the city, and I'll be going to the little local one after we're done eating. I'm not getting much today, but there is a local producer of free-range chickens who will have a big ol' stewing hen for me. Kuhlmann's, one of the major local market gardeners, also have a table set up every week at my local market; that's who I get my staple vegetables from (potatoes, carrots, onions, etc). Unfortunately we don't have any new local produce yet except for radishes, which I can get from my own back yard. I'll also be dropping my film for the one-hour processing, while I'm there. Pictures!! Had I been a little more flush or a little less tired, I'd have tried to get to the market downtown or at Old Strathcona (a rival town a century ago, now the university area of Edmonton) and get you some pictures. These are large and lavish, with a wide variety of vendors; everything from "neo-post-hippy" handcrafts to locally raised bison. The meat, not the whole animals. There are some Hutterites who come in to the market with their remarkably tasty chickens and fresh-made sweet butter, and their stall is always worth a visit. The markets are not especially cheap, but the food is always good. And there are some bargains, I guess. Honey sells for about $9/kg in the supermarkets here, but I buy mine in a 3kg pail at the Saturday market for $19. One of my favourite vendors at the local market is a very sweet grandmotherly Jamaican woman, who sells meat pies and a variety of sweets and pickles from her table. She also makes little fried cakes with salt cod (called "stamp & go" IIRC), which I always buy when I find her there. We've joked in the past that perhaps she grew up eating salt cod that had been caught and cured by my forebears in Newfoundland. Unfortunately she hasn't been there for a few months. I hope she's all right. I'm going to leave off here, for the time being, and get food onto the table. I'll be back with more later on, including the long-overdue photos. I'll also be more than happy to answer any questions anyone may have, of course!

Okay, it's officially been a long friggin' day. Last night at this time, I was just signing off; now I'm just sitting down. At this particular moment I'm enjoying that late burst of lucidity that comes with being very tired. I don't know how long it will last, now that I'm sitting down, but I'll ride it as long as I can. Basically I'm too wired to sleep right away, but I'll crash fast once that wears off. Today's breakfast was a glass of water. Didn't feel like eating, so I just left it at that. Got to work at the usual time (7:50) and got into the routine. Product was looking pretty good, except that some of the muffins were a little small. We'd been battling portion-control issues with the previous graveyard-shift baker...I left a note to tell the new guy that he's officially an overachiever! He's been doing this for just two weeks, though, and overall I'm impressed. He's going to be good at this job, once he's gotten his eye a bit better attuned to doneness and portion size. One of our suppliers sent along some samples of a bagel they thought would be a good fit with our clientele, and which we are not currently buying. So, I had a chunk of that and told myself I'd had breakfast after all. It was a pretty good bagel, I think we'll probably pick it up. A basic white bagel, but with flax, millet, and oats added in. Having performed my product-evaluation duties, I started on my order (I place my Monday order on Friday, as I believe I'd mentioned upthread). I was interrupted mid-way, though, as we had more catering deliveries to make than we had delivery persons for. So I took two of them out; one in the tower that my store is located in, and one in a tower across the street. It wasn't a big deal, just twenty minutes to do both and come back to the store. I rather enjoy getting out once in a while to do deliveries. It's nice to be able to stretch my legs. We got absolutely cleaned out of cakes, today. I hadn't really taken Father's Day into account as a factor in cake sales, but I'll certainly know better next year. It started first thing in the morning, and by the time the lunch rush was over we didn't have a scrap of cake in the house: no slices, no cakes, no cheesecakes, no nothing. Cookies were flying out the door again, too; I'm going to have to up the daily "pars" for those. I don't mind baking more mid-day, but there are other things I'd rather be doing with my time. Besides, if I have any left at the end of the day we break them up and package them, and sell them that way; the broken cookies have a devoted following. I make about the same margins, so leftovers are not a concern for me with cookies. Oddly, muffins didn't really go today. Dunno what's up with that. I didn't have a whole lot of time left for the morning after doing my order and deliveries, so I rushed through making up the day's eclairs and cream puffs. I made some extras so that I could replenish the showcase just before lunch. Then I turned my attention to making some mini-strudels for the coffee bar. By the time I was done those, it was time for me to take over at the till and send my cashiers on their respective breaks. No help with the breaks today; the girl who usually helps out is in late on Fridays. It was okay, though, I'd gotten the biggest priorities looked after. Besides, although it interferes with me doing any actual baking, I rather enjoy schmoozing the customers. Also it's good for business...any consultant will tell you that people like doing business where they're recognized, and called by name, and their preferences are remembered. My two daytime cashiers are outstanding at that. We have a pretty decent in-house loyalty program, based around a keytag with a barcode. The two daytime cashiers probably have about sixty or seventy customers' numbers memorized, for times when they forget to bring the card. Our recently-upgraded POS system can now search for a keytag number based on customer names or phone numbers, but it's more impressive when a human does it. The really regular customers know that if we run out of their favourite item, there will be one tucked away for them. That's very hard to train for; you need to have people who will go that extra mile just because of their innate integrity. Anyway...soon enough the cashiers' breaks were over, and I was bunging my strudels into the oven. I was out of cornbread batter today and hadn't had time to make up any more, so it was just strudels this time. And coffee for me, 'cause I sorely needed some. Then we were into the lunch rush again, which was quite brisk. As I mentioned a few moments ago, we were selling cakes left and right. One of our little perks for loyalty program participants is a birthday card, entitling them to a slice of cake or cheesecake, and a coffee; all at no charge. We had an unusually high number of those today, which accounted for us getting wiped out of cake slices. Once 1:00 rolled around and the worst of the rush was over, I started on some extra cookies. I only baked 3 extra trays today (45 cookies) because it's Friday and I didn't want to have *too* many extra cookies. Saturdays are pretty slow in Downtown Pedway Hell, so we try not to have much extra product around. Having got them into the oven, I made an emergency call over to our south-side sister store, to see if they could spare me some cakes. I scrounged two dozen slices, one large and one small cake, and some pies to fill the empty spots in my showcase. All of these arrived around 3:00-3:30, and by the time we closed we'd sold completely out of cakes again (still had a few slices, but just a few). My pizza girl warned me before lunch that there'd been additional orders for the mini-pizza appetizers. That's always how it works...none for a couple of weeks, and then a bunch of orders all at once. I'd put five dozen into the freezer yesterday, but I still needed to make another batch. I mixed the dough, covered the bowl, and then gratefully went for my own lunch break. All through the week I pick my lunch according to the whim of the moment, and whatever looks good that day. On Fridays, though, we have a longstanding tradition: sausage and perogies in the Big Pan (more about Big Pan on another occasion). I *always* get sausage and perogies on Fridays. After I eat my lunch, I usually drop in to schmooze with the manager of our wine store, right next door. He's of Ukrainian descent, so of course he's all over the Friday special as well. He does tastings every Friday afternoon in his store, and I usually drop in at 5:00 when I get off work to further my education. I don't today, because I'll be driving the company van this afternoon and when I'm driving my blood alcohol stays at ZERO (not even a tasting-sized pour). Also, I suspect I'll be rather tired by the time I'm driving back. On the whole, I'd rather not be falling asleep thanks to the wine. So, after my break I head back to the bakery. Both of the daytime cashiers get a short coffee break at about this time, so I cover the tills as necessary. I can generally get away with doing some work at this stage of the afternoon, only opening the second till as necessary. Today, that means making up more of the mini-pizza doughs. By mid-afternoon, I'm getting a bit concerned about the catering gig I'm doing tonight; the in-home cooking lesson. These may be done two different ways, you see; either interactively, or as a straight demonstration. If I'm doing a demonstration, I'd like to have the ingredients for the recipes right about NOW so that I can advance-prep everything. If it's interactive I'm not so worried, since I'll have the clients helping out. It turned out that our poor catering guy was having hell's own time trying to locate some of the ingredients. Ancho and poblano chiles are not readily available here, it seems. Neither are chayotes. So here was my unfortunate colleague (who'd never seen a chayote in his life, and didn't know how to describe one) making the rounds of supermarket produce departments; trying to find somebody who wouldn't give him a look of blank stupefaction. Eventually, we settled for a handful of jalapenos, a few habaneros, and some acorn squashes. It wasn't ideal, but it would do. The problem was that it was already 4:00. On Fridays (because Saturdays are pretty dead) we don't have both bakers come in. Instead, we bring in just the one for a short shift; baking off muffins/scones/cookies in reduced quantities. That means that someone else (me) has to pull out the frozen stuff and sheet it up for baking later on. This is roughly a half-hour job. That leaves me with 90 minutes to par-cook the ribs, assemble my ingredients, cross-check them against the recipes, organize all of the other supplies I need, clean the stand mixer and food processor (I'll use them during the class), and break down the bakery for closing time. Despite a desperate last-minute search for an errant box of pine nuts, I'm only fifteen minutes behind when I finally get my stuff loaded into the van. The cooking class is in the eastern suburb of Sherwood Park. The written directions I've been given prove to have a major error in them, but it's easy enough to sort out, and I get there on time. The couples mostly have a connection to the local power company, so I know one or two of them from the store (their building is just across the street). A guest turns out to be the head of my school's Alumni Relations department, so we have something to talk about right away. I'm not especially keen on tonight's menu, as it is rather prep-intensive. If I'd had a day to prep ahead (heck, even a couple more hours) it would have been a breeze. We're making up tamales with a fresh salsa and a sort of Mexican pesto; ribs in a peanut-chipotle sauce, and the squash dish. That's not bad, but there's a lot of cutting and mincing and roasting and peeling and so on. What with one thing and another, it's 10:30 before we've got the meal on the table. Margaritas, of course, tend to make one's assistants a titch less efficient than they might otherwise have been. Also my back was to the clock, and I lost track of the time... The big time-sink was wrapping up the tamales. The men more or less cleared out at this stage and left the women clustered around the workspace, joking that they looked for all the world like a group of "babas" making perogies. At any rate, by a little past 11:00 I've got everything cleaned up and back in the van; received the plaudits of the assembled multitudes, and said my goodbyes. Now it's back into the downtown to return the van, unpack and put away the dirty dishes and leftovers, and close the store back up. By now I'm in something of a hurry, because I don't want to miss the bus at 12:25. I do anyway, so I cool my heels at my usual stop for a half-hour until the Very Last Bus. It's a judgement call...I know I could walk home in about the same 40 minutes or so that it takes to wait for that next bus and then ride it; but on the whole I'm thinking my feet will thank me to just sit the hell down for a while. So I do. That was my day. Supper was a plate of the food from the cooking class, at about 10:30 tonight. My family had garlic sausage from the local butcher, fried up with some potatoes that I'd peeled and left in the pot for them to cook off. There was also a cake that I made last night for the kids to snack on after school. It's just a basic butterscotch "quick cake" sort of a thingie, nothing too elaborate. I added some ginger to it, and some ground anise seed, and some ground fenugreek seed. Those of you who frequent the India forum may recall me asking about any use of fenugreek there in sweet dishes (apparently there isn't much). I find fenugreek's odd earthy butterscotchy character endlessly intriguing, and I like the way it works with anise. I've used it in apple pies, coffee cakes, and shortbreads to good effect. Tomorrow I plan to sleep in, which I'm sure won't surprise any of you. The Saturday morning tradition is a big pancake or waffle breakfast; I believe I'll go with pancakes for tomorrow. I don't know what (if anything) my wife has planned for the day, but I hope there's not much. I'll be working again on Sunday, and I'd like to keep Saturday to just veg out. I didn't get my pictures developed today, because the cooking class went so late. I'll post tomorrow for sure, though. Honest.

To begin with, a couple of things I'd overlooked. Lexy: Edmonton has, in round figures, something like 2000 restaurants. On the SWAG principle (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) I'd figure that ethnic restaurants are probably right up there with Chains Minor and Major in terms of overall numbers. The majority would be little mom 'n' pop places like the Chinese restaurant in my neighbourhood, but some are truly outstanding. That's what I hear, anyway...staff meal is usually as close as I get to eating out. See "budget restrictions," upthread. Having said that, we did go to Pizza Boys last weekend, a little shop at the unfashionable end of Whyte Ave, just east of Bonnie Doon. It's a family-owned business, been there for nine years, and they make truly excellent pizza. I recommend it highly to anyone who visits Edmonton. Pan: There is a strong First Nations presence here in Alberta, as there is throughout most of Canada. They aren't really a factor in the culinary life of most cities; although I recall a restaurant in the Pan Pacific in Vancouver years ago, serving salmon/bison/bannock etc. Recently I've been intrigued by the notion of pemmican as charcuterie; aside from the meat being jerky the overall concept is very much the same as a pate. It would be interesting to revisit this notion and "upscale" it. Pam R: Gasoline, natural gas, etc are no cheaper here than elsewhere, and in fact natural gas and electricity are through the roof. Why? D-E-R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N. This is entirely on-topic, of course, since it impacts the cost of turning on my stove (and cuts into my grocery budget). There are a variety of berries that grow here. Saskatoons are the biggie, of course, the sine qua non of regional cooking on the prairies (like avocadoes in California cuisine). Cooking school here is a never-ending parade of Saskatoon creme brulees, game meats in Saskatoon reductions, Saskatoon cornbread, Saskatoon muffins, Saskatoon this, Saskatoon that. Westerners are appalled when I tell them that they grow in Nova Scotia too, but nobody eats them. Kids use them as ammunition, mostly... Aside from those, you get the usual suspects...raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, etc. Also cranberries, I'm told, but they seem to be some sort of dry-land version. Perhaps they're like the eastern "partridgeberry"/scandinavian "lingonberry." I dunno. Now then, for Touaregsand and everyone else who's been interested in the career-change thing...a few thoughts, in late-night-tired-brain random order. I'll start off by saying that despite the equivocal tone of my "teaser" and subtitle, I am entirely behind my career choice. I'm doing what I want to do, and if that means plugging away for a few years at a mediocre income, so be it. I've done it before by accident, now I'm doing it on purpose. Life goes on. Having said that, of course, you have to be a little bit crazy (or obsessive, to be more tactful) to want to do this for a living. It's damned hard on the body, especially if you're coming into it as a mature adult...it's definitely a young person's game. I have flat feet, arthritic joints, tendinitis in my right elbow, and some recent but worrying issues with my right shoulder. I surely wouldn't want to be a "grunt" working the line somewhere in twenty years; and in fact I don't think I could. On the upside of that, I've got a lot of stamina, and more mental toughness than most of my younger co-workers. Most of them defer to my judgement and my palate, even if they've been cooking a lot longer. I think that will help smooth my (planned) transition to management/chef positions. Also, while I'm an easygoing person by nature and prefer to remain on good terms with the people around me, I don't put up with much either. My job is my job, it's not where I go to find new friends. Try to take advantage of me, and you'll find that I do "hardnosed prick" pretty well, too. My current career plans are somewhat nebulous (hey, it's still early) but I have the broad outline fairly clear in my mind. Currently, Plan A looks like this: We're committed to Edmonton for another three years or so, until the twins go to school. I'll have my Red Seal (the Canadian journeyman certification for trades) by late this summer, and at that point I will think seriously about taking a job in one of the major hotels for my part-time income. That's a side of the industry I've yet to explore, and I think I have a lot to learn there. I plan to stay with my day job for at least the balance of this year, and perhaps longer, because I'm going to school on the new market manager and assistant manager. They're both very capable people, and the market manager has not only managed restaurants but taught restaurant management at a community college in Ontario. As long as I'm still learning things and moving forward, I'll be staying put. By the time we leave Edmonton, my son will be off to university and my daughter will be in high school. We're currently planning to remain in Canada until she's also left the nest. Probably BC will be our next stop; not one of the cities but someplace quieter (and cheaper), possibly the Okanagan wine country or one of the islands. I'd prefer wine country, since there are some interesting chefs there and because it suits my longer-term goals. After a couple of years in BC, when we're back down to just my wife and I at home, we'd like to live (I'd like to work) outside the country for a while. This is where it gets nebulous. We'd both love to spend time in Catalonia, but I'm looking for a place where we can live cheaply and save money while I broaden my professional horizons. I don't know if Catalonia fits the bill. Perhaps we might end up in a cultural crossroads like Dubai, or perhaps in one of the less-visited Caribbean islands. My wife would dearly love to spend a few years in a hot climate! I'm certainly open to suggestion on this, though it's outside the scope of the current discussion (and far enough in the future that things can change radically). Ultimately, I want to return to my native Nova Scotia. There is a small but burgeoning wine industry there, and the establishment of a federally-funded institute to support cool climate oeniculture will undoubtedly benefit marginal areas like Nova Scotia and Quebec. The combination of a favourable microclimate (the Annapolis valley) with a nascent wine tour industry, and the existing tourist trade, strikes me as a Good Thing. I'd like to have a small place in that area, network with like-minded entrepreneurs, and eventually semi-retire to a small-scale craft bakery or bed & breakfast (or perhaps combine the two). Along the way, of course, I'll soak up all I can of the free training and support materials provided by the various levels of government. It's surprising what they can do for you, if you pay attention to their offerings. So...that was plan A. Plan B is called, "What if I physically can't stay the course?" Plan B is to become a cooking-school instructor. I have a good basis to build on. I am a sponge for information (my nickname at both schools was "Encyclopedia Fred"), and a good teacher on an informal basis. I do a lot of hands-on cooking classes in the line of work (that's what tomorrow's catering gig is), so I'm beginning to build a foundation. I keep in touch with my instructors at both schools already, and to have this fall-back plan in place I'll be continuing to groom those relationships. NAIT does a lot of special events in the run of a year, and I will put myself forward as an assistant for those. One step at a time, right? You can never have too many strings for your bow. I also aspire to a bit of freelance food writing, which is a nice little profile-raiser. That's a year or so off, yet. I'm not looking at that as an income, as such; more so as "fertilizer" for the rest of my career. Character-wise, both Plans are supported by the fact that I'm a bear for professional development. Given my budget constraints, that doesn't take the form of seminars and masterclasses yet (maybe after the student loans are paid down). However, I do read an absolute boatload of books (12-15/month which are food related, and at least as many that aren't); and hang out at places online where there are smart and talented people I can learn from <insert favourite "sucking up" emoticon here>. And I never miss the opportunity to pick a well-furnished brain. I hope that gives you all a bit more insight into where I am with all of this, and where I'm going. I expect that there will be some modifications in the plan over the coming years, but hey...if you're not in motion, you can't steer, right? That's all I've got time for, tonight (yikes, 1:08 AM) but I'll be back tomorrow with some new things to talk about, and finally some pictures (dammit!). Upcoming topics I'll be touching on will include gardening, yogurt and kefir, weekends at home, and some philosophical speculation on the eternal question, "Why do all the special days fall on my Sunday to work?"

Pan: "Proofing," or "proving," is the secondary fermentation (or second rise) of a yeast dough. The initial rise is primary fermentation. At home most people don't use either term, they just speak of the dough rising. In this particular instance my former late baker used to consistently underproof (dry, uninspiring texture, no "puff" to the croissants) or overproof (croissants which blow up like balloons but then deflate like them, too). I made enough margin on the croissants for them to be worth the effort, but *only* if we actually got to sell them. As I mentioned upthread, I was wasting off about half of my production, which put us into the red on that particular product. IQF is just "individually quick frozen," meaning you get separate berries or fruit slices instead of a brick. Much more convenient. For those of us on the prairies, "local and seasonal" would be a brutally limiting thing where fruit is concerned. A good quality frozen fruit will, more often than not, be better than a "fresh" item shipped under refrigeration from 3000km away. Every professional kitchen has its compromises, and that's a relatively minor one. MicBacchus: This really is light duty, in the context. If I'd blogged Christmas (which would have required a time machine or cloning myself) you'd be staggered. Right now I do more customer service and administration "stuff" than I have in the past, so I'm not nearly cranking out product like I have/can. Sometimes this is frustrating, but that's my scenario...we're a retail outlet, not a full-bore production bakery. Want to see busy? Read Melmck's "Mel's Bakery" thread. Nothing says chronic fatigue like opening your own shop... Today was a "twins" day, so my morning routine was compressed a little bit. Breakfast was a heel of that sourdough bread from last night, with a slice of sage Derby on it. Why sage Derby? Because it was the first thing I put my hand on when I opened the fridge, that's why. Like I said, I'm not at my best in the morning. This morning all the product looked great, and I had no order to place, so I was able to get into some production right away. Priority one was to get a fresh batch of choux made, since I'm almost out and the puffs and eclairs (which are still a new product) are beginning to sell well for me now. I took along my camera today, and got several pictures of the process from start to finish. I made up a handful of cream puffs, regular eclairs with chocolate-dipped tops, and a variation that I thought of last night while dozing off: fresh-sliced strawberries down each side of the eclair, and dusted with icing sugar instead of chocolate-dipped. Those ones were a big hit, and I'll definitely make more tomorrow. Aside from that, the morning was spent in getting my showcases all filled up, in preparation for the lunch rush, and covering a break on the cash register. One of those broke on us yesterday (the cash drawer was sticking), so we had a technician frantically getting it replaced as the lunch rush was beginning. Some fun, huh Bambi? Like yesterday, I baked off two strudels and two skillet cornbreads for after lunch. This time I got some pictures for you, which I should be able to post by tomorrow. Lunch today was a chicken & bacon pizza, from the station where I worked during last year's blog. The girl who is now at that station was my cashier, a year ago. She showed a solid work ethic and a good attitude, so we gave her a more responsible prep/cashier position at the salad bar. Before Christmas one of the managers told me that, next time I needed somebody for the pizza station, this girl would like a crack at the job. Was I okay with that? Traditionally, we had demanded cooking experience in the actual production positions, so it was a legitimate question. In this instance, though, I already knew her work ethic; so I was more than happy to train up a novice. Especially since the preceding several pizza guys, experienced though they were, had included some real putzes. She's now been at that station for six months, and is doing a bang-up job. The pizzas look better than anybody's since mine, and she runs her station in a smooth and efficient fashion. I'm quite proud of her. Lunch was all too short, and then it was back to work. Like yesterday, we got absolutely killed on cookies. Is it the rainy weather? I don't know. I wound up baking off an extra seven sheet pans (105 cookies) just to get us through the afternoon. We had about five left at closing time. We took a late order for the mini-pizza appetizers, and I didn't have any of the little doughballs frozen, so that was a high priority for the afternoon. I make a small batch of lean yeasted dough at about 70% hydration, with a kilo of flour. That yields about 6 or 6 1/2 dozen bite-sized pizzas, depending how diligent I'm being about size consistency. I like a relatively slack dough for these, since a stiffer dough doesn't flatten as well. We wind up having pillow-shaped pizzas! I was on and off the cash register all afternoon, so aside from the mini-pizzas I got little enough production done. I also spent some time with various managers discussing a couple of upcoming catering events: an in-home cooking class and a stagette. The cooking class, for tomorrow night, had been hanging fire for a week...and she decided today to go ahead with it. Oy. I checked in with my night job and they can spare me for the evening, so I'll be the one doing the class (Mexican food). Hurray, something else to blog! The stagette is for next month. The bride, apparently, is passionate about pasta; so they'd asked for a pasta-based cooking demonstration. I'm going to make fresh pasta for the demo, cook some papardelle, and demonstrate making several different shapes. After all of this discussion, it was time for me to quickly sweep and mop cooler #3 before my cashier went home. Yesterday, when I was asked if I could close, I'd assumed that meant closing the store...meaning I'd have more time for prep. In fact, I was pencilled in to be the closing cashier in the bakery...meaning less time for prep. To make things a little more interesting, my early baker called to say that she'd broken up with her longtime boyfriend, and would be running a bit late. So, in between customers, I got started on her stuff. That means running to the back for all of the frozen product (the proof & bake items listed upthread, plus the house-made cinnamon buns) and getting it all sheeted up on a speed rack to thaw and proof for later on. By the time I'd gotten that done, my baker arrived, and I was able to devote my attention to cleaning and shutting down the station. A final check, a note to my night baker, and I was out the door. I know I've left out lots of detail from my description of the day, but frankly my thinker's a bit fogged up right now. Supper was a bowl of the soup mentioned last night, plus a couple slices of bread. I opted for kamut as the grain of choice, and it definitely added something. I like whole kamut kernels in soup, because it retains its texture even when it's "popped," and it doesn't bleed starch into the soup. This gives you a nice, chewy grain in your soup, and the broth stays perfectly clear. What's not to like? Given that I'm going to be doing that catering gig tomorrow, I'll need to come up with a meal to prep in advance for my wife and kids. I'll give that some thought over the next couple of hours, then pop in with the results (and answer any late questions). I also want to return to the subject of the career change, if I have enough time and energy. Until then... *Late breaking question from Pan: Re chocolate milk...yes, that's what I mean. I dunno how you do it in Noo Yawk, but here in Canada milk always has a best-before date imprinted on the packaging. These dates are pretty conservative, meaning that it's still good even after the point where it's saleable over-the-counter. Personally I like to let my milk go even further, to the point of being genuinely sour, for some kinds of baking. That's at home, though, not at work.

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.

Okay...I'm going to answer a few questions here, and come back later to recap my day. In chronological order: Smithy, we are rather far north here and consequently have even longer days in the summer and shorter in the winter. During the year that I was working and going to school, the only sunlight I saw was during the 45 minute bus ride between the two. Like people everywhere else in the cooler climates, Edmontonians revel in the sun while it lasts. Back yards and barbecues are the standard fixtures. If you don't have a back yard, you're probably sunning on a patio, balcony, deck, or at least the roof of your apartment building. Those who can do so will take advantage of any available body of water to launch an unnecessarily large and powerful boat; and of course golf is as much a religion here as elsewhere. I'm not so much inclined to any of this, personally. When the weather gets hot I tend to look for cool, dark places to spend my off hours. This is ironic, I know, in one who spends his days in a hot kitchen, but I find the hot sunshine rather enervating. Most people gain weight in the winter and lose it in summer when they're more active; I tend to gain weight in summer and lose it in winter when I'm more active. As for the effect of climate on my cooking? I'm a big comfort-food guy during the winter, then in summer I tend to lean in the direction of Indian/Mid-East food. Year-round we eat a lot of soups, a lot of rice, a lot of stews, a lot of pasta. I bake at home year-round, doesn't matter if it's hot out or not. As for the effect of weather on my daily plans, well...aside from not tobogganing during the summer or gardening in winter, it isn't really a factor. Lexy: Beef isn't especially cheap here, unless (presumably) you know someone. Last summer there were some good deals, but even at that it was primarily on cheaper cuts and ground beef. Not saying you can't get a good buy, but overall the whole BSE/closed border scenario hasn't made things especially cheaper for the consumer. Touaregsand: I've given the "Reader's Digest" version of my decision upthread...I'm selfish enough that I wanted to do something I enjoy for the rest of my working days. I don't expect to love it *every* day (I'm old enough to know better), but I'm still enjoying what I do, and if I had the decision to make again, I'd do the same thing. Now bear in mind that my situation was a bit different from the scenario most would-be career changers were facing. As the result of some bad luck and bad judgement, we'd spent the preceding few years in financial straits; therefore I didn't take the same "hit" most people would, in going back to school. Even allowing for the higher cost of living here in Edmonton, I'm at least as solvent as I had been for some time. Not that this says a whole lot... More detail tonight, perhaps. Pan: There is a tremendous eastern European influence here, with Ukrainians being probably the largest single group. Outside city hall, in fact, there is a memorial to the Ukrainians who perished in Stalin's deliberately genocidal famines. Perogies (most-used local spelling), cabbage rolls, borscht, and kielbasa are all "soul food" for prairie dwellers, regardless of their personal ancestry. I hadn't given any real thought to cooking something along those lines, but perhaps I'll make one of my wife's grandmother's Mennonite dishes. Edmonton is actually rather cosmopolitan. An illustration: anywhere in Canada we can educate our children in the local "French-immersion" program; here in Edmonton you can also get German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, or Cree immersion. There are probably a few others I'm overlooking. We have a relatively large Latin American community here, and like any Canadian centre we have a strong Indo-Canadian presence. My local convenience store is run by a wonderful Afghan family. I think that's all of the immediate questions. I'll be back later with more.

The seeds inside are always dark, it's only the pods that are multi-coloured. The black ones, in India, are typically used for savoury dishes; the green for sweets. The white cardamoms are bleached, and IIRC begin life as the green kind. I use the green for my baking. I grind them in my mortar and pestle, usually. A few quick knocks to crack the pod, then grind the seeds together with any other spices I may be using. If there is salt to be added at the same stage of the recipe, I'll sometimes put the salt in with the spices to speed the grinding (extra friction). Of course you could use a motorized spice grinder, as well. I don't recommend buying pre-ground unless you use a lot, and will be going through it quickly (and have a source of reliably fresh-ground cardamom).

Welcome to Edmonton! I am located just off the downtown of the city, conveniently close to both of my jobs and to the city's one significant natural landmark, the North Saskatchewan river. The river was Edmonton's original raison d'etre; like most of our western capitals it began life as a Hudson Bay Company trading post. In the glory days of the fur trade, it was possible to ship furs by canoe from the modern-day Yukon territory all the way to Montreal with no portage longer than 10km (far enough, with the loads they carried!). Today the river is primarily a tourist attraction, playground, and occasionally the instigator of insurance claims for flooding. I will take you for a quick stroll through a part of the river valley within the next few days, as weather permits (the lengthy drought broke when we moved here two years ago, though I can't take credit for that...). During the appropriate season there are many berries to be gleaned there, and it's always a pleasant walk. Photos will be a bit late in coming. My digital is painfully old and low-end, and essentially only works in perfect lighting. To supplement it I've bought a simple film camera, but that of course involves processing and scanning time. I hope to start posting some pics by Thursday evening (Friday at the latest), so please bear with me. I am not nearly as active on the board as some of the recent bloggers, so I'll provide you with a bit of context. I am a career changer, 41, originally from Halifax Nova Scotia. A couple of years ago, in one of those epiphanal moments, I realized that I'd just drifted into sales when I was young and had coasted ever since. Verging on 40, I thought that...just maybe...it was time I gave some consideration to what I wanted to do when I grew up... The choice was fairly obvious. I've been a dedicated home cook and baker since I was an adolescent; and while I knew going in that the life of a professional cook is a hard one, I reasoned that at the end of the day if you're doing something you love for its own sake you're ahead of the game. So I went to school. I took my first year at the Nova Scotia Community College in Halifax (honours) and my second at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (honours). I have been working, since my arrival in Edmonton, at this this respected fine-dining restaurant; upon graduation from school I added a full-time job in this popular market/lunch spot. Last summer, while still fresh out of school, I was inspired to blog a typical work week, for the benefit of the insatiably curious. It seemed that there was a lot of interest in how foodservice jobs work in practice, and I thought it might be of interest to many among the community. And that's where it would have stayed, except that a few weeks ago SobaAddict in his role of Foodblog Czar asked for those who are bakers or pastrychefs to step forward. Since I run the instore bakery at my day job, I thought that perhaps I should volunteer. So, here's Chromedome II...the return of the career changer. A few points to clear up at the beginning: for one thing, this is a serious "pot luck" blog. I have one or two special things I'm hoping to squeeze in, but I don't know yet what shifts I'll be pulling over the weekend. That means real life, folks...on the home front you may see souffles or you may see mac and cheese. I promise you I eat better than Wendy ( ), 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. So...we'll be looking at some shots from one job at least, possibly both; my baking at work and at home; my garden; and to the extent that it's pertinent, a few bits and pieces of the city. My budget (wife, two kids, two student loans, the highest utilities in the country, etc) does not permit of special ingredients or excursions to the city's restaurants, and my kitchen is at the opposite end of the envy-inducement scale from Daddy-A's starship bridge and Jackal's vintage AGA. It's a come-as-you-are foodblog! From the subtitle of this blog (and the tone of the teaser Soba posted on Jackal's blog), you may be wondering just how I'm feeling about my career choice. Well...I'm still enjoying myself, but it's most assuredly not for everyone. I'll elaborate further in the course of this next week, and naturally I'm more than happy to answer anyone's questions about that or any other food-related topic. For now, though, I'm going to bed. Tomorrow morning is sneaking up on me, and it's got a cudgel in its grubby little clutches...

My Larousse agrees with Julia...Bearnaise with tomato.

You go, girl! This has been an amazing journey from day one, and I've certainly enjoyed the ride (a lot more than you have at times, I'm sure...). I never doubted that you had the mental toughness to ride out the tribulations of the early days. So here you are, one year in, the object of fawning admiration from the local press; attention from a national publication; and an integral part of a neighbourhood's daily life. What more could you ask for? ...well, I mean...aside from skilled staff, cash flow, and a few days off...y'know... Happy anniversary from "Mrs. 'Dome" and I, and hopefully nothing else breaks for a little while...

Spraying water = huh? Once they're nicely golden, turn down the oven to about 200F and let them ride until they're nice and crisp. Pull one out, and listen to it...you should hear little "rice krispie" noices from a fully-dried out puff or eclair.

They're slowly increasing the quantities of eggs and tweaking proportions of sugar, etc. The Philly is much "chunkier" than the variety we used to use, which was softer and creamier in comparison and contained less in the way of stabilizers. Fortunately, these products come from the bakery at our south-side sister store, so it's not my headache except as stated above. If it affected my muffins, now, there'd be war...

That's interesting. My head office just standardized on Kraft for specific products, and we're now using the Philly cream cheese. Our bakers detest it; our cheesecakes and cream-cheese topped brownie needed substantial re-working. The cheesecakes have come pretty much together; they break more easily than they used to and don't taste like they should but they're more or less functioning. The brownie has been more problematic, the only way we can cut the damn' things anymore is to put the sheet in the freezer for a half-hour and then use a knife heated in boiling water. Even at that, chunks still break off the corners. <sigh> We get 50 biggish squares from a full sheet pan, and since the switch I write off anywhere up to 15 squares per sheet. It's killing me.

I've seen them used at school, and have a serious case of the gimmes. The temperature control is spectactular, and for sugar work in particular they are breathtakingly fast. I also like the no-ambient-heat aspect, since I detest the summer heat and because my wife nannies a pair of two-year-olds. Overall I'd prefer to have gas (I don't) but I'd want induction as well in my dream kitchen.