chromedome

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.

I just weigh the damned things... Seriously, though, the 45-55g range is about right. Just use your best judgement, and add a bit more flour if necessary. Or beat the eggs first so that they're pourable, and add slowly until you've got the right texture (the rest becomes part of breakfast, or eggwash on another product). Of course if you haven't made this particular recipe before, the "right" texture might be difficult to guess...

When I was still crawling, I used to filch the pickled onions out of the jars of mixed. Does that count? Oh, and I tried to eat a frog that made the mistake of taking a shortcut across my blanket. The first thing I can recall cooking for myself was a trout that I'd just caught in a brook near the house. I breaded and panfried it. I didn't know to use milk and flour as well, just went right to the crumbs, so that part didn't work so well, but it tasted damned good. By the time I was eight I could skin a rabbit with a jacknife (but I didn't cook the rabbit stew, that was Dad's job). In grade six, on of my homework assignments was to make a classic French dish from one of the recipes in our textbook. I made a caramel mousse and a salade Nicoise. I can still remember watching the caramel melt, and thinking how bizarre and wonderful it was.

I spend a whole hell of a lot of time on the 'web, checking out sites of every kind imaginable. I have to say, the complaints above are all hot buttons of mine, too; this site has a lot of the bells and whistles I detest. Having said that... DAMN!...Content covers a multitude of design sins (okay, sources of divergent opinion), and the content here is friggin' amazing. I plan on sending the link to several of my former classmates, and at least one of my current bakers (the boy's got ambitions...).

ROI=Return on Investment My former pastry instructor goes down every summer to take a master class from Notter. My impression is that this primarily what his classes are aimed at, established pros looking to push back the corners of their own personal "envelope." I guess that would get you to the same place eventually. Just a question of whether you want to get your upgrade all in one go, or on the "installment plan." And of course, you'd be wanting to answer the sort of questions chefette's been asking, just for your own satisfaction.

...and let's not forget Ben Heppner, the heldentenor's heldentenor. A real quandary for me, since I love his voice and singing but detest most of the German repertoire.

Kind of an odd one...I downloaded Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management from Project Gutenberg. It's not just a cookbook, there's a lot about dealing with servants and suchlike (a big part of my day, for sure....) but there are a ton of vintage recipes. I was amused to note that she even costed them out! For those who aren't familiar with it, this is one of the great Victorian best-sellers. Isabel Beeton wrote it when she was 22, and she died at 29 or thereabouts, but the book continued to sell in a great many editions through the second half of the nineteenth century. FWIW, Project Gutenburg also has a church cookbook from 1894 available for download. I might go back for that.

Uhhhh....yeah. Duh. One of my hot buttons, and I've vented here before about gloves once or twice. They're only cleaner than my hand when I take 'em out of the box. And that's assuming that some half-trained part-timer hasn't spilled half the box onto the floor, and put them all back in (I've caught that one happening a couple of times at different places). After that, they're *exactly* as clean as my hand, and for the same reason: that I've got the training and attitude to work in a clean and hygienic fashion. We've all been in chains where they issue one pair per staffer per shift...don't kid yourself.

Haggis is just blood pudding. Nothing special, lots of places have their own version. A good stout, a haggis, some neeps and taties...nothing wrong with that. I dunno about fur seal, but harp seal is fair-to-middlin'. I'm not as keen on flipper pie as the old-timers, and I'll confess the meat is dark and gamey (I still like it), but the liver is absolutely wonderful. Far and away the best part of the seal. Haven't had that in years, it's just about impossible to get outside of Newfoundland.

I don't know anyone who's acquired a taste for Marmite or Vegemite as an adult, having grown up without exposure to it. But that's an easy one. Coming from the east coast, I'd say that the glory of fish 'n' brewis eludes most "come from aways." Salt cod, poached hardtack, rendered pork fat, and maybe some raw onion and a drizzle of vinegar. Cod cheeks and tongues won't usually have outsiders slavering, either. Present company probably excepted.

I actually got a whole long weekend, which never happens. Neither job needed me for the whole three days. My big plan for the weekend? Sleep. Lots. Yesterday I did barbecue, after a fashion. I've recently been given a gas barbecue but didn't have a tank for it (and too broke to buy one, this week) so I went looking for a bag of charcoal. Nobody had that, either, within my immediate area. So I came home and broke up a bunch of dry hardwood limbs that'd been cluttering up the back corner of my yard, and built a small fire in a broken terracotta flower pot. Whizzed ginger, onions and garlic to a paste with my immersion blender, spread that on skewers of pork shoulder, and grilled them one at a time over the tiny fire in the flowerpot. I could only get about 2 skewers done before refreshing my bed of coals with new twigs, so I spent a lot of time hunched over puffing the fire back into life. As a consequence, I have a few new burns on my hands today and had to trim my beard to get rid of the scorched whiskers (I was due for a trim anyway, mind you). When all was said and done I had fun, provided the wife with some head-shaking amusement, and the pork tasted great. How bad can that be?

Got back to the thrift store, and picked up the five remaining Time-Life books: Italy, Middle East, Caribbean, Latin America, and China. My total expenditure for the seven volumes? $14 Canadian.

I've recently bought A Drizzle of Honey by Gitlitz and Davidson. Although it's primarily focused on the cooking of the "converso" community (Sephardic Jews converted to Catholicism) in the 15th/16th centuries, there is a lot of background information on the Moorish influence. You may find some useful tidbits there, and as a multi-award winner it shouldn't be hard to find.

American recipes that called for "sticks" of butter irritated the hell out of me when I first started cooking. I'd never seen that, so it was like German recipes calling for "one envelope" of vanilla sugar. Fortunately, I had German friends who'd lived in the US, so they were able to clear up both mysteries for me.

Two more for me, this weekend. I was at my local thrift store and spotted a dozen or so of the old Time-Life books on one of the shelves. I grabbed the French Provincial and Spain/Portugal volumes, and will be back for the others within the next day or two.

I could second just about everything that's been said. I love to cook; really, really love to cook (and bake). I graduated cooking school at 40 with an entry-level job and student loans, 'cause that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my working days. When I come home, after cooking and baking at two different jobs for umpteen highly-stressed hours a week, what do I do to relax? I cook and bake, of course, what else? Okay, I'm a freak. But it's a very deep, primeval thing. I've always loved to eat, from earliest childhood (when, of course, my tastes were rather less developed...I thought Cheez Whiz and Velveeta were pretty damn good, back then). My father has always dreamed about self-sufficiency, and subscribed to Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News since my early childhood; so I've always known where my food came from. At various times we raised pigs, rabbits, ducks, and chickens, and I participated in the cycle of raising and slaughtering the animals from about the time I started school. My father also took me hunting and fishing when he was home from sea. The first thing I can reliably remember cooking for myself was a trout that I'd caught myself in a nearby stream. It's rather "old-school" for one of my generation (very tail-end of the Boom, or very beginning of Gen X, depending on how one measures...I don't think I fit either group, but whattaya do...), but I remember as a teenager bitching my way through the annual berry-picking marathon, with my father snarling at me that if I wanted jam through the winter I could damn' well shut up and pick. I knew he was right, but I sure wanted to grumble, just the same... I guess it all comes from that same sense of urgency that makes me haul out the Mason jars come fall; even though I can usually buy jam as cheaply as I can make it. It's not the same, and at some level I guess I'm impelled by the notion that I can feed my family regardless of how tough things get. If push comes to shove, I know how to snare rabbits (and could skin and joint one, unaided, by eight). I can make preserves, or pickles. I can dry or preserve berries and wild fruits. I can be inventive about making meals from almost nothing...during one especially tough stretch a few years back I fed my tribe for over a week on a pumpkin, a cabbage, a dozen eggs, a sack of flour, and the various seasonings and such in my cupboard. I was pretty happy to get a part-time job that paid me in organic vegetables; we were still broke, but we weren't going to be hungry. That's a pretty visceral thing. We've lived an unsettled life this last several years. Every time we move, no matter how all-over-the-place things are during that first couple of days, I always unpack enough of my kitchen things to make a pot of soup and a batch of bread. For my wife and kids (and for me) those smells mean that, appearances notwithstanding, we are in fact HOME and all is well. That's a powerful form of magic, or alchemy if you will. In fact, just this past week, I've started proofing bread dough overnight so that it can be baked off first thing in the morning, and the house will smell of fresh sourdough all day. That way I'm here, even though I'm away at work. I love the energy, the chemistry, the science, the sheer "improvisational jazz" of it. I love the sixty-second stirfry and the 24-hour slow-cooked casserole. I love the flame broiling and the slow-poaching and the gust of steam from the freshly-opened papillote. I love artfully-arranged composed salads, and big random "splotches" of stew served family-style right from the pot. Got a pretty serious case, haven't I? No wonder this place sucks up so many of my non-cooking hours...