chromedome

I'm ambivalent about Starbucks. On the upside, they pay their staff better than similar chains, and give benefits. They also pay their coffee growers well above market rates, almost-but-not-quite what the fair trade people pay. These are good things. On the downside, their prices are insanely high and their product is, quite frankly, poor-to-mediocre. At my day job we've just recently switched from a local distributor to a "proudly brewing Starbucks" format at our in-house coffee bar. Our traffic has plummetted, though with the increase in prices we're coming out somewhat ahead in $ at the actual coffee bar. I'm down about 200 cookie sales/week, though, on the resultant reduced foot traffic at the bakery counter. I drink a lot of it, because it's free for staff, but I sure don't enjoy my cup of coffee very much anymore.

I used to shop a lot at save-on-meats when I lived in Vancouver, twenty years ago. The quality was acceptable, and their prices were simply amazing. I used to buy chicken necks and backs (for soup) for 8 cents/lb, IIRC; and they had lamb "stew" (aka trimmings) for, I dunno, about 80 cents/lb. And for an offal-eater like me, that place was heaven. All the stuff I liked, and as cheap as any old-school granny could ask.

Sonuvagun. Here I've been cooking and eating those suckers for years, and nobody ever bothered to tell me they were inedible. Go figure. (I skip the ones that've had candles in them, not being partial to the flavour of wax, but to each his own.)

There are a few herbs and spices that scholars debate, but I don't recall which exact ones they were. A popular Roman spice, sylphium, is known to be extinct; it is thought that the last plant known was served to Nero. In later years the Romans discovered the Indian spice asafoetida (hing) which was a close substitute, and is available to this day (warning: there is a reason the name of the spice includes the word "foetid"...) And as for your original question...McDonald's. McDonald's floors me. Maybe it's different elsewhere, but up here they're ghastly horrible; far and away the worst of the fast food chains. How do they keep on selling like they do? It's beyond me.

OK, this is slightly off topic, but I'm gonna ask anyway. A co-worker loaned me one of his vast collection of cookbooks. It's called the "New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook," it was published in 1967 and revised in 1976. It was written by someone named Deirdre Stanforth. While the recipes look good, I really enjoyed the introductory section giving the "biography" of each restaurant. Those in the cookbook are Antoine's, Arnaud's, Brennan's, Galatoire's, Corinne Dunbar's, the Caribbean Room at the Pontchartrain, Commander's, Masson's, Le Ruth's, and Lagniappe. Now I know that Commander's Palace and Galatoire's are still around, but how about the others? Flourishing, fading, gone?

I'm pretty loyal to Assams, generally, and don't really get too far afield into specialized estate teas. At my night job, though, we've recently gotten into seriously specialized custom blends. In fact, our beverage menu has eight pages of teas. Oy! Drove the servers crazy, at first, trying to figure out which was which.

Nice to see a restaurant from the Forgotten Coast make the list. Unfortunately it's opened since I left, so I won't get to eat there for some time.

I would say that 5-6 layers is probably superfluous. At my night job we make 4" tarts using only three layers, and they're certainly sturdy enough to handle and plate. Mind you, the fillings are not liquid, so your mileage may vary. As for cutting we use an xacto knife, and the bottom of a particular-sized can is our guide. It's not elegant, but it's effective and pretty fast, since you can cut through half-a-box of phyllo in one stack.

That's still a popular catchphrase. Now, of course, they can also watch hockey...oh, wait...

Guy Fawkes Day is still celebrated, in attenuated form, in some parts of Newfoundland (it is referred to as "Bonfire Day"). Celebratory comestibles are random, ranging from hot dogs to fresh fish to frozen McCain cakes (dunno why). Copious quantities of alcohol will be consumed, regardless of the food, but this is a given whenever Newfoundlanders congregate to celebrate.

I'll throw in a plug for an East Coast product...Blue Star beer from Newfoundland. The other main indigenous brew, Black Horse, was in my day a decent if uninteresting brew. Blue Star, on the other hand, was reprehensible (and gave me the trots, as well). Many brands varied from one province to the other, so that "Pilsener" in Saskatchewan was acceptable, while the same in Alberta was notoriously something that only a pensioner with a limited budget and atrophied taste buds could look forward to. One of the worst summers of my life involved being in Calgary during a beer strike (was that 1985, or 1986?). All we had to drink was Colt 45 and Old Milwaukee, both of which tasted like a long-dead muskrat.

Now that I have my "awake, post-coffee, less facetious" head on, I should add that I consider eGullet to be one of the finest Professional Development tools any newly-minted cook could ask for. Where else could I find such an amazing group of great cooks (professional and home) to crib from? And the daily count of belly-laughs is certainly therapeutic to my overworked soul.

I tripped across eGullet late last year. I was listening to an amusing CBC Radio program called The Vinyl Cafe, hosted by journalist/educator/humourist Stuart MacLean. He spoke of a recent visit to Vancouver, and how blown away he'd been by his visit to Vij's, and by Vikram himself. Well, as a paid Googlista, I of course mounted up my favourite search engine and found that about 40% of the first few pages of results came from this..."eGullet" place. That I did not join at the time seems incomprehensible to me, and I can only attribute this to my absorption with my finals. A few weeks later (January) I realized that I'd misplaced David Leite's pasteis de nata recipe and went looking for it on his website. There, I spotted a link to eGullet and thought, "Hey, I meant to go back and look at that place some more!" The rest, as they say, is history. That, Daddy-A, has got to be the eGullet credo in a nutshell. I love it. I want the T-shirt. (Sorry, Fat Guy, I'm 100% behind the lofty aims of our collective Society mission statement, but credit where credit is due, y'know?)

Hey, Tana, which shark is your nephew? (------------> Jonesing Canadian hockey fan clutching at straws)

We use La Forme at my night job, in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are durable and work very well. Personally I have no preference between springform and slip-bottom pans, though as an occasionally clumsy person I have found that I'm more accident-prone with the unsecured removeable bottoms.

I don't really follow baseball (it interferes with the end of hockey season - when we have one - and conflicts with CFL football) but congrats to all the BoSox fans who kept the faith when things looked so dark. I have to say, Schilling impressed the hell out of me. His performance against the Yanks was right up there with Bob Baun playing an entire Stanley cup game on a broken ankle (and scoring the gamewinner, to boot!). I know every professional sport requires players to play through pain, but Schilling's performance was worthy of football or hockey, infinitely more physical sports. Good on him. As a transplanted Easterner (Canadian, but still...) I'm happy to have an excuse for a big pot of chowder.

I'd eyeballed those things for years, wondering idly how they worked, but never actually asked anybody (in East Vancouver, they're a common decorative element). Having read this thread, though, and armed with the knowledge contained therein, I treated myself to a battered aluminum moka at the local thrift store. For the princely sum of $2.99 (CDN) I got an ugly little lump of metal which makes absolutely gorgeous coffee. It proudly proclaims that it is "Made in Italy," but declines to furnish any other identification. I don't care. I wanted one, I've got one, and it works. Only thing I've noticed is that the seal is a bit lacking, and if I don't screw it to the exactly correct degree of tightness it'll leak. I can see that a new seal is in my immediate future.

It's all good. Your gnocchi will be hit-or-miss for a while, anyway, until you get a sense of what they're supposed to feel like on your fingers. If you've got lots of squash, try that. If you've got lots of potatoes, try that. And then make them every chance you get, until you're happy with them. Flour and potatoes are pretty cheap, after all, and so are squash in season (which they are, now). Go nuts!

We have a couple of old Kenwoods at my night job. I've never made bread in them (we buy in our bread) but they get used constantly. The resto's been open for 24 years, and they were bought used, so they were probably new around the time the ark landed on Ararat. I'd have no qualms about buying one. And their oddball two-arm dough hook has always struck me as being more logical for a small mixer than the one on the KA.

It makes a good textural accent, I guess...should we dub it the "green feuilletine"? Personally I'd just as soon shred up the ribs and hearts of my romaine for that purpose, but to each his own. Growing up I was never keen on lettuce, but at that time in Nova Scotia iceberg was the only variety known to man (or Mom). It was an amazing revelation to me that there were actually a great many kinds of lettuces, in various textures and colours and (most shocking of all) flavours. I'd always thought of the lettuce as sharing moisturizer duties with the mayo, nothing more.

Lubeck is a remarkably beautiful city, and is the world capitol of marzipan-making. They have a civic website with a breathtaking virtual walk-around, but I'm too tired at the moment to look it up for you (been to the Rocky Mountain Wine & Food Festival tonight, and I'm a bit worse for wear).

Ducasse ahead of Point? Dunno 'bout that. But then, lists of this sort are always rather an excercise in futility, aren't they?

I don't give a rat's ass if it's fashionable or not. It's a good salad, a hundred-odd years notwithstanding. I'll take it any day over some of the abominations I've seen called "caesar."

When I was a young 'un living in Vancouver (back in my punk days) I did a certain amount of dumpster diving. It was a pretty straightforward proposition: I had a very modest budget to live on, and food that I got for free meant that I could eat better. Now, there is dumpster food and there is dumpster food. I was never up for somone's half-eaten Kentucky Fried, for example; but there was a specific KFC that quite often threw out product at the end of their night; just the right time for a nocturnal kid like myself. And then there was the traditional weekend "run" to Granville Island Market, a longstanding if little-publicised Vancouver tradition. I don't know if this is still the case (I haven't been there for a long time); but on Sundays IIRC all and sundry would congregate at GIM for the weekly discarding of produce which would not make it through the market's off day. There's certainly little to say against grabbing (for example) a flat of papayas which are getting soft and brown on one side. Cut off the bad side, grab a spoon, and enjoy the good side! That's just old-fashioned frugality. I've also taken the racks of two or three fish, still in the bags of ice they'd inhabited previously, and made chowder. I never had the chutzpah to build any sort of ideology out of this. I had more appetite than money, and this helped me to make ends meet. End of story.

Ooooohhhhh, boy.... I don't know where to begin, especially since much of what I wanted to say has been covered. I'm doing what you're considering. I sometimes wonder whether I've finally found my metier, or whether this is just the latest of several bad career decisions over the years. So, in no particular order, here goes... Age is neither here nor there. Necessarily. I'm just out of cooking school at 40, and while I definitely have moments of "I'm too old for this crap" I'm also outworking most of my younger colleagues, both in productivity and in terms of the hours I put in. As far as that goes, a friend of mine on another forum just recently graduated from law school at 53. Age is less important than aptitude, and the sheer bloody-mindedness to stick with it and wrest what you want from the industry. Forget about your knives. I own a very basic set of Victorinox knives, and even those I wouldn't take to work unless I knew all of my co-workers very, very well indeed. I've seen too many knives go unaccountably missing. Forget creativity...for a while. You'll be encouraged to be creative while you're in school, but once you graduate and go to work you will, for the most part, be engaged in rote repetition of your chef's standardised recipes. Believe me, unless you are specifically instructed to do so, improvising on one of your chef's recipes will usually be an express route to unemployment. The reality of an entry-level position is that you will see a lot of drudgework. Handle it efficiently and with a good attitude, and good things may happen. The #2 dishwasher at my day job is on the verge of becoming my third baker on a part-time basis. He doesn't know it yet, but he's impressed us all with his work ethic and we don't plan to leave him scraping sheet pans and silverware. Oh, and what the others have said about the 80% pay cut? Believe it. Entry-level cooks make peanuts. In fact, most cooks make relatively little, regardless of the time they've spent paying dues. The exec of a decent hotel makes pretty good coin, and corporate chefs can be handsomely compensated, but these people are more or less junior executives. Your accounting training would serve you well in that sort of of a niche, but of course then you're back pretty much to your point of departure. It would be like me ending up in some form of cooking-related sales...a long way 'round to where I started. This is not to say that you can't do well, especially if you're coming in with a sound understanding of how to run a successful business. I know a gent in Halifax who's clearing an income very comparable to a hotel exec, except he's doing it in an office-tower lunch/coffee shop. His investment was not negligible, but it wasn't huge either; he assumed the lease after the previous proprietor went broke. His food is simple and not overly exciting from the foodie's perspective, but he understands clearly what his customers want to buy. There are many different career options open to you as a cook. A majority of them are nighttime gigs, so balancing cooking opportunities with your significant commitment to music may prove difficult. There certainly are day jobs available (I nabbed one) but they are fewer and farther between. Think seriously about what you want to get out of this career change. In my instance, it was the simple satisfaction of doing something that I enjoy (after 20 years in sales). I have voluntarily accepted the notion of earning only mediocre money for a few more years to come; and the concomitant necessity of a second job to pay down my student loans. If you are looking for a creative outlet, then you may want to go the entrepreneurial route like Abra or my Halifax acquaintance. If you are looking to build a stable and materially rewarding career, you might want to focus on a hotel or corporate situation where your current skillset and history will work in your favour. This is, of course, less than the tip of the iceberg. As for the notion that when you *have* to do it every day it's no fun, well, that's what kept me out of the professional kitchen for a couple of decades. Let me tell you, even when I get home so tired I want to puke, I'm still enjoying what I do. Not everybody would. What's it like, working in a professional kitchen? Well, it's roughly like this. You're tired as hell, your feet feel like they've been dragged behind a bus, you're trying to keep more things in your mind than you've ever had at one time before, you're trying to do them faster than you've ever moved before, you're trying to keep your eyes on more things than you've ever had to concentrate on at one time, there's somebody on your left bitching because you're slowing everything down, there's a server or an expediter about to spontaneously combust because they've been waiting on one plate out of four for....how long? That's a starting point, anyway. It does eventually sort itself out, and become old hat, but a lot of people fall by the wayside without ever getting there. That's why I mentioned sheer bloody-mindedness, up above. I'm sure there are lots of other things I'll think of after I post this, but that's all my tired brain can come up with at the moment (and all the time I can take away from re-writing bakery recipes for work). I'll post again tomorrow if I can come up with anything else meaningful. Please don't interpret any of the foregoing as an attempt to discourage you. I'm very happy with how my career change is going, and I like the way the next few years are shaping up. Just be aware that it requires a certain personality to be able to jump and run with this, and the sheer glee of cooking will only take you so far.