I recently had the pleasure of talking with Cathy about her passion for exquisitely simple Italian cuisine and her enthusiasm for educating the next generation of cooks and eaters about responsible eating. The resulting article appears in the current issue of Indulge magazine. Click to read or download it, or pick up a copy at your neighborhood Zupan’s Market. You can find me on page thirty-two.

Food is about farmer’s markets and a floppy hat to keep the sun off my face and hybrid cars and the chickens roosting on my back steps. It’s understanding some chemistry, and being able to manipulate a recipe so it comes out how I think it ought to – it’s making six batches, if that’s what it takes, to get it right. According to me, food has everything to do with politics and environmentalism and ethics. I use food for calories, for pleasure, for stress-relief, and, occasionally, for triggering emotional breakdowns.

According to me, food is about preserving biodiversity. It’s about affection and passion and communication. I can’t tell you what I was wearing when something significant happened, but I can tell you what I ate that day. Maybe I am obsessed – it certainly does appear that my life moves around this central theme. But I assure you, it is not so tragic as that. Food is self-care; food is compost.

I fantasize about self-sufficiency, about being more in command of my food supply. I make my own jam and haven’t eaten the store-bought stuff in more than a year. I’m into preservation, storage, and utilization. Dan – er, The Squeeze – bought me a chest freezer for summer berries and raw pizza dough and trout and anything else we can figure out how to make a lot of and keep in suspended animation. I am learning how to make wine; soon we will do beer, too. One evening last summer, we sat on the porch, eating a salad (for we are very in to salads), and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit here next year and eat a salad full of things that we grew ourselves?” Everything about that question lit me up. So this year we have a garden – three gorgeous raised beds filled with dark, loamy dirt. I’ve stuck seeds and starts in all of the places I think a plant has a prayer of growing. There are strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, figs, pomegranate, nasturtium, basil, cilantro, thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, parsley, mint, sweet corn, sugar peas, lettuces, carrots, one surprise radish, bush beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, watermelon, kabocha, pumpkin, zucchini, tomatillo, artichoke, hot peppers, and sweet peppers.

Did I go overboard? Absolutely. Does it make me feel a little drunk just looking at them? Goodness, does it ever. I grew up in Salinas, California, the daughter of farmers. I didn’t pay much attention until years after I moved away. Now my grandmother says that it’s something that’s in me, this need to sink my fingers in the dirt.

In March, Dan built a coop and we put three chicks in it. Now they are pullets, young adult hens that look awfully mature, but who have not yet begun laying eggs. I believe I can say with some degree of certainty that they are all indeed hens, and that I won’t have to learn how to kill a rooster. The chickens began as a way for me to look like an eccentric neighborhood kook, but soon they became part of the system around here:
        We buy and grow food, but we don’t consume all of it. The humans are not 100% efficient. The chickens, in turn, eat our weeds and our table scraps. Their feet scratch at the soil; their poops enrich it. When they are older and begin to lay eggs, I’ll bake with them, give them away to friends, and make Dan eat omelets for breakfast five mornings a week. We’ll put the egg shells into our compost bin. Next season, we’ll spread the compost in the garden.

Would it surprise you if I said that the laundry line strung between the backyard fence and my eighty-year-old walnut tree has to do with food, too? It shouldn’t. When it is warm, I can save electricity on drying clothes and use it for the food dehydrator, or to offset the extra fuel the stove uses during the midsummer frenzy of jam-making. Plus, the chickens look particularly picturesque walking around under flapping sheets and pillowcases.

I’ve got some strong feelings about how I think commercially-produced food should happen. If, after reading this, you have lingering curiosities about the nature and scope of these feelings, send me an e-mail or pick up a copy of Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Or both. As a liberal arts sort of gal, I’ve taken more than my share of environmental science courses, and anyway it doesn’t take that big of a geek to see that our farming practices are unsustainable and dangerous. If I were in charge, we’d all have time – and space – to grow our own food. Many of us are already sure that we cannot responsibly do otherwise.

So, here is my confession: I’m sort of an urban hippy-type.

And here’s another one: I break my little rules every day.

According to Dr. Weber, my very first Philosophy professor at Monterey Peninsula College and the dude responsible for settling me on this ethics kick, the most powerful objection leveled against John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is that – get this – it’s too demanding.

But the objection isn’t about laziness. This construction of Utilitarianism calls for behavior that always maximizes The Good. The Good can be defined in any number of ways, but let’s just say for now that The Good is Zero Environmental Harm. We may do things that cause Some Environmental Harm, but we must always keep in mind our moral duty to cause Zero Environmental Harm and do everything we are able to get as close to living a harm-free life as we can – that’s the rule.

Imagine you need to get to work. You certainly can’t drive your car alone. You could carpool, but the bus is a better choice – and the MAX train, better still. Preferable to motorized transport, you could ride your bicycle, but biking generates more waste heat than walking does. It’s awfully efficient though.

So maybe you choose to walk to work. Now let’s think about which shoes you should wear : what materials they are made from, how far away they were produced, what they’ll do to any plant life you should happen to step on as you walk.

It might be better to stay home and telecommute – but what environmental impact does your personal computer have? It’s made from all sorts of hazardous stuff. And in your home office space, are the light bulbs compact florescent, or incandescent? Do you pay a little extra for electricity generated by wind or water? Does your employer? It gets worse, this Utilitarianism-business. It is crazy-making to constantly think of the ways you can do better, because you can always do better. I can, anyway.

I take my responsibilities as a consumer, a cook, and an eater very seriously. The things I do these days in the name of our little blue planet would have seemed very unlikely to me as recently as four years ago. I arrived here incrementally; but here I am, saving chicken shit, walking miles to school, collecting old CDs until the pile is big enough to justify a trip to the recycling center. I’ve tried to think of something that I do that’s outlandish and I can’t. Collecting gray water is normal. Washing out plastic bags for infinite reuse just makes sense.

Back to my confession: As much as I am tryin’ to live and eat in ways that feel right to me, I fall short. Often. Some days, Panda Express just pushes my buttons, and I am pretty sure that everything they sell came off of a Sysco truck. Conventional (read: factory farmed) eggs are a lot less expensive than the eggs from hens fed organic meal and allowed, supposedly, to roam free and cluck in the sunshine. There’s an economic premium to this lifestyle, and times can get rough. I’m not often motivated to drive even twenty minutes out of my way to get the Draper Valley organic chicken meat. I should, though. Actually, I should ride my bike out to get the Draper Valley stuff. Or, I should give up eating meat altogether. See how it can get out of hand quickly?

If this ethical eating business is such a huge and important part of my life, then why do I still shop in places I know I ought to avoid? Why do I ever use my car? Why can’t I resist the mangoes from South America? Well, all I have in answer is that I’m doing my best, and my best isn’t perfect. We all hide twinkies – in some form or another – in our desk drawers. As much as I’d love to believe that I can save the world, I know that I am just one girl: one girl who loves mangoes and, occasionally, greasy steam-table chow mein. I won’t feel guilty about my food. My food doesn’t deserve that.

According to me, food is about more than what’s for dinner. According to me, food is about craft and about dirt and about making choices true to oneself and to the rest of the planet. Food is about honesty, and about love. It’s about acknowledging that butter makes it taste better, but not going crazy with the saturated fats.

According to me food isn’t worth much if it doesn’t feel good, if it can’t keep you alive and healthy, if you can’t share it with friends. Food, you see, will soak up all the meaning and the heft you want to give it. And if you don’t want it to mean anything, then just eat it already –– Bon appétit.

     The thing I like so much about this coffee shop is that it’s a very focused place. It is sparsely decorated, but not remotely sterile. There are comfortable places to sit, there is a counter at which to order your drink, and they even offer a couple of pastries if you are feeling nibblish. They know how to make a drink there, which is evident not only in the quality of their product, but in the barista award plaques displayed on the walls and counter. There isn’t a forest of syrup bottles. They don’t make smoothies or frappies or squishies. They make coffee and espresso and some loose teas. And it’s good.

     So I get off the bus in the rain and go inside. It’s seven and pouring and really dark outside. The interior of the shop immediately provides relief from the bus and the rain and the tired ache that’s been creeping up my neck. The deep, rich coffee smell hooks me by my nostrils and draws me towards the counter. On my way I noticed that there are pretty people at all of the tables. They all have Apple laptops and are browsing Craigslist, writing their brilliant Master’s theses, or designing wrapping paper patterns for the holiday season already upon us. I think I see Hillary Clinton in someone’s Skype conference, but as I get close enough to tell for sure, he hurriedly folds his computer closed and gives me the Stink Eye.

     Brown bags of preportioned coffee beans are piled around the cash register, stacked three or four high. I survey my immediate options, then the bean menu written on the chalkboard on the wall. Having given up premium beans in favor of a more economical brew some years ago, nothing leaps out as a clear choice, and I decide to ask the guy behind the counter for his opinion.

     The barista has one black eye and elaborately styled Emo hair. He is wearing tight black jeans and a new-but-old-looking t-shirt with something spray-painted off-center on the front. He politely asks what I am looking for, and I tell him that I am interested in his take on the beans.

     I do this a lot. When spending fourteen or twenty dollars for one pound of coffee, I am much more willing – if not eager – to shelve my characteristic shyness towards strangers and dive into long chats (if that’s what it takes) on the relative acidity of the Sumatran versus the Rwandan beans. It usually goes like this:

• ME: I am looking for some beans.
• THEM: What kind of beans do you like?
• ME: I tend towards medium-dark roasts – something with a little less caffeine and a little more flavor.
• THEM: Our peaberry is really good right now. It’s really floral and vanilla-y.
• ME: How about something bigger? I’ve really enjoyed some of your African beans. And a few months ago I had a little of the Nicaragua Los Delirios that I thought was pretty rockin’.
• THEM: Okay, I think I know what you are looking for. Why don’t you try the Costa Rican – it’s a lot like the Nicaraguan you liked.

     And then I pay and leave happy.

     But the black-eyed barista is evidently incapable of engaging in such an exchange. I say I am looking for a darker roast. He says, Do you mean bitter? ‘Cause that’s what I think of when someone says “dark.” I scrunch up my face a little. What kind of a nutter asks for bitter coffee?

     I try to be clearer with my request. No, I don’t mean bitter, I say, wondering if someone also knocked his brains loose when they gave him that shiner. I mean roasted dark. Most beans used for espresso are dark roasts. The classic French roast is dark. And, while it is generally accepted that dark roasts don’t make for as complex or subtle a cup as do lighter roasts, to my knowledge asking for a well roasted pound of beans isn’t as criminal as, say, asking for a well done entrecote.

     We don’t have any dark roasts. They are all Full City, he tells me, sounding annoyed, as if I should have known, as if I must not understand where I am or with whom I am speaking. He asks if there is any Guatemalan stacked on the counter. That’s what I tell people to get when they come in asking for dark roasts, he says, passing a cup of tea to his previous customer and returning to the counter in front of me. I don’t see any Guatemalan and by now I just want to leave. I want to buy whatever beans lay closest to my left hand. I want to reach out and grab them, throw a wad of cash onto the counter and stomp out towards anywhere else. He asks me to clarify what I really mean when I say “dark.” It’s almost like he wants to help me, but this question is so nonsensical that I can’t think of how to begin my next sentence. I hesitate, agape.

     Chewy, I attempt, which I can see in retrospect probably isn’t the most precise adjective I might have picked. I want to say that I think a lot of light roasts turn out too thin in body and too fruity in flavor. I want to tell him that I like darker coffee because it has less caffeine than lighter roasts and because I do, in fact, enjoy a bit of acidity in my morning cup. None of this is coming out, though, and now he has come around the counter, presumably to look at the beans with me. He picks up a bag from the bottom of the pile and passes it to me. See? I knew we had some. The Guatemalan’s right here. He doesn’t say it like he’s happy for me that we’ve found the beans I want. He says it like I should have seen them and now he thinks that in addition to having bad taste in coffee, I am also a moron.

     I ask to see and smell the beans, which have come prepackaged from Stumptown Coffee Roasters. A minute ago, I wanted to leave, but now I want to make him work for the sale. No, no, no, I can’t open the package, even though it’s not sealed. But I am in luck – he has some brewed. He presses two tablespoons of coffee into a demitasse and hands it to me to taste. I take a sip, not paying any attention to the coffee in my mouth, and swallow. It’s fine, I say, I’ll take it.

     Fine? The black-eyed barista is not moving any closer to the cash register. He is standing only halfway behind the bar with one hand on his hip, his mouth making incredulous smirk. I echo; it is fine. As in, it will do. As in, I want to go home now. I don’t think it’s fine, he continues, and then with the chipperness of a middle school cheerleader, I think it’s great. I stare blankly; but he is obviously waiting for my riposte. It’s kind of sweet, I sigh, and thin. I am starting to think about leaving again, only in this version of my fantasy, I throw the beans overhand, like a football, and nail him in his non-bruised eye.

     But then he says something that frees me: Well, he begins, now exasperated, surely thinking that I will never, ever learn, and that now he’ll have to sanitize the counter where I’ve touched it and apologize to his other customers for subjecting them to such a blasphemous conversation, it tastes like coffee.

     I don’t remember exactly how I got out of the coffee shop. All I know is that I did, because I am home now and because I made some coffee this morning. The Guatemalan beans that I bought were, as expected, much too light for my taste. I had to use more beans than usual and it still tasted watery. I do not wish to suggest that the coffee I bought is of poor quality. It’s great coffee, in fact: subtle, nuanced, complex. And light. Good, but not what I wanted and not what I asked for.

     I think I know what the black-eyed barista was trying to do when I asked for dark roasted beans. He is a proud member of the Portland Bean Scene. He is probably better educated about coffee than I’ll ever care to be. It’s his thing and he clearly has strong opinions about it. Moreover, he works at a coffee shop with a reputation for serving excellent drinks. He took my reasoned preference as misguided ignorance and he thought he’d educate me, maybe change my mind about things, maybe give me my first “real” taste of coffee.

     I can relate, to a point. I was a barista once upon a time, kind of. I was a baker and a bookseller and a deli counter gal who spent a lot of time behind the nearest coffee bar. I know the basics about growing and harvesting and roasting, and am familiar with the profiles of the world’s growing regions. I’ve been to “cuppings,” events hosted by roasters who brew half a dozen pots and then talk participants through a tasting not unlike those for wine. I know what a real macchiato is, and I can make a mean one.

     I got my introduction to the mighty bean in a coffee shop not unlike The Albina Press, in fact. It was a serious coffee joint where we did coffee, tea and espresso correctly and traditionally for it’s own sake, out of respect for the bean and the leaf. And while a lot of our customers could tell the difference between a poorly made drink and a good one, there were many who could not be convinced that we knew what they wanted better than they did. Starbucks regulars, for example, have a habit of ordering The Bucks’ proprietary drinks where ever they go, even if those beverages aren’t on the menu. And while it’s not fun to make a drink that you think is a hideous offense to your glorious beans, you still make it. You just overcharge for it.

     It’s frustrating to see something that you care about destroyed by what you perceive as a third party’s terrible taste. For cooks, it’s ketchup on prime rib. For bakers, whipping cream in the eclair. And for baristas these days, it seems to be dark roasted coffee beans.

     But my understanding of the black-eyed barista’s exasperation towards me isn’t enough to excuse his unprofessional manner. I have never lived so close to a coffee shop as I do to The Albina Press. It is walkable in any weather and they make a really tasty cup. I have long fantasized about walking to my local java joint first thing in the morning for a cup and a browse of the morning’s news – and it’s in my reach, right over there at The Press. But I’m not going there, not any more. I prefer to my caffeine fix without having elbow past the combative hipster barista to get it.

     When I saw the black-eyed barista, I felt a little sorry for him that he’d been roughed up. I wondered if he’d been hassled at the bar the previous night (maybe about his silly hairdo), or if he lives with a woman who perhaps doesn’t know how to express her anger in any other way. But walking out of the shop, I didn’t wonder at all about his black eye. I figure it must have been the last person who tried to talk to him about coffee beans.

          I am living in an old farmhouse with a massive, inviting porch. One side sags just a little bit. I am thinking of screening it off, to keep the summer bugs away and give the cats a place to lounge in the fresh air. There is a table in the far corner, and three chairs. On warm nights when I cannot sleep, I curl up there to read. Inside, to the immediate left of the small entry way, in which stands my parent’s old, mirrored halltree and a small table for keys, change, and other household detritus, is my workspace. Two massive wooden tables are pushed together to create something reminiscent of a double desk. There are filing cabinets under the one on the right, closest to the dining nook. On the surface is my laptop, naturally, the digital camera, and a pile of books I’ve been meaning to review and pull recipes from. My full-spectrum desk lamp sits on one corner. I use it often since I am rarely at my desk when the sun is out. The office spills into my main living/entertaining space. My iPod lives on a shelf there, nestled inconspicuously among books. It’s attached to ten speakers hung around the room and, at medium volume, music fills the house and warms it. The aging hardwood floors throughout are covered mostly with old rugs. The one in here is shaggy and green, mirroring the garden you can see from the front window.
     Past the dining nook – where a massive, roughly-hewn table and two matching benches fills the space almost entirely – is the kitchen, where I spend most of my indoor time. It’s a temporally-confused space, but comfortable, and my favorite place to be. My long-lusted-after Viking range sits against one wall, not far from a porcelain farm sink. On one of the six gas burners sits a stock pot, simmering a few gallons of vegetable stock for soup and for freezing. There’s a wooden manual coffee grinder, the kind that hand-cranks into a drawer. There are herbs drying in the window. Pots dangle on an iron rack hung from the ceiling. The paver tiles are cool beneath my feet.

     Over many months I have been building this place in my mind. It’s my new fantasy and every day it enlarges, acquires new details. A handmade quilt for a bedspread. A chicken coop. Rows of leeks and garlic in the sunny spot out back. Candlelight during power outages. It is a naïve and overly-romanticized dream I’m spinning; and I know this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t want to stop dreaming it.

     I never expected to discover that I am not a city girl. When I moved to Portland three years ago I thought I was coming for a vibrant urban existence. It’s what young people who grow up in small coastal tourist towns are supposed to think they want, I suppose. I imagined I would become a metropolitan gal, a mover and a shaker, the city wrapped around me, providing the kind of love that can only come from concrete and steel. As it happened, however, I have developed a love affair of a wholly different sort – a love of dirt. I have never felt “called” to anything in the same way, or with the same intensity, that I feel I must put plants into the earth and watch them grow. I have always been driven to create – crafty things and food and the like – and I have always been happiest when in the midst of such creation. Gardening, feels like a logical progression of this trend, a tightening of my life as a cook and an eater.

     So this is what I dream about: growing my own food and living quietly, a distance away from all of those things I thought I so desperately needed for fulfillment. A drastic priority shift.

     In real life, my blueberry bush already has fruit on it. Every day when I make rounds to water, prune, and dote on my garden I check in with each plant and, I swear, the pride and satisfaction I feel in admiring my growing garden is so expansive you’d think I’d invented photosynthesis – or at the very least, blueberries – my very own self. I feel so much wonder at those basic natural mechanisms – growth, flowering, pollination, fruit, dormancy. A plant just doing what it does qua plant takes my breath away sometimes. And makes me feel totally silly. And awed.

     Nothing tastes better than food you’ve grown and cooked yourself.

     Yesterday at the grocery store – an all-in-one mammoth compound of convenient consumerism – as I rode the escalator down from the second floor I had a clear look at the aisles of canned goods, cleaning products, housewares, frozen foods, dairy cases, chilled produce. The order and uniformity of that massive place, filled with packaged stuff arrested me in a new way. I wanted to run. Instead, I bought a bag of cookies and some frozen shrimp.

     But what I want, this fantasy of mine, is to leave. I want to somehow live without needing the bag of cookies, the frozen shrimps, the flash and the bling and all the rest. Actually, I know now that I don’t need them. It is only that I am used to them. It is only that I don’t have the time to make everything from scratch, that I am accustomed to buying fruit out of season, that it is often less expensive to buy processed foods than whole ones.

     I have been intermittently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It is the chronicle of Kingsolver’s move to the Appalachian Mountains to live on a farm and do this very thing I have been dreaming of – grow her own food, live closer to her neighbors and to her family, eat locally and mindfully. It is a pleasant enough read, naturally well-written and insightful. There is a lot of food-and-eating ethics that I am mostly skipping over, having read a heap of it in other books. Though I am absolutely behind her philosophy, and more than interested in the story she has set to tell, I am having a hard time sticking with the book. I realized today that I am jealous.

     There are lots of books about “dropping out” and living independently and those who have done it claim that it’s not that difficult to do (if you are ready to be cold, hungry, and tired). While I am not packing up the Prius and heading for the hills with my adze and seed pouch, I have begun to seriously think about the viability of such a plan. I am not particularly strong or clever in a survival-type way. This is the first year I’ve cultivated even a small garden and, while I don’t think I am botching it up completely, I’m sure I could do it better. It strikes me as positively mad, the notion of growing enough food in a year to live off of, but there are in all crazy notions a smidget of truth, an edge of possibility. Reality lives in the middle ground more often than not, and a middle path – life farther from the City and closer to the dirt – does not seem crazy in the slightest. It seems, in fact, much more sane than staying here, living as I do now.

     It begins with my own garden, and shopping at farmer’s markets. It begins with canvas bags instead of paper or plastic ones, and riding my bike to work. It begins with staking out the Goodwill and the Rebuilding Center when I set to do home improvement projects and having the patience to wait to find what I need. It begins with intentional eating and cooking and consuming. It begins with deciding on eating seasonally and, whenever possible, locally. (And not dwelling on what I would have to give up in doing so, like all of those tropical fruits I so love, which certainly do not grow up here in the Pacific Northwest.)
     I do not know if I will ever reach this dream of mine, this farmhouse tucked in the mountains. I don’t know if places like that will exist by the time I am ready to move, if I would be able to sustain myself in such a life, or if I will even want it by the time it is attainable. Some gals dream of perfect suburban houses or city lofts, of storybook weddings or men on motorcycles. I dream of dirt under my fingernails and collapsing hard into bed at night, exhausted from hauling the onions down the root cellar. I dream of cooking fresh food that, months earlier, I knew as seed. And maybe these dreams of mine are just as silly: “storybook” fantasies with slightly different kinds of characters. Though I may never get all the way to the farmhouse with the root cellar and the six-burner Viking, at least I will keep my garden. And I will do it better every season as I learn new tricks and techniques and ways to coddle the blueberries which will be, unequivocally, the best I’ve ever tasted.

In a recent conversation with an old friend and former boss, I mentioned I was working in food again, playing with large batches of everything, laminating doughs and re-learning how to make large-scale bread. He offered that he was jealous of our dough sheeter, a twelve hundred dollar machine that is, essentially, two rolling pins and a couple of circular conveyor belts. We use it to make lumps of dough – up to twenty pounds – into long rectangles down to two millimeters thick. It’s very handy in speedily and uniformly processing the massive amounts of pie dough and puff pastry we use every day, and it’s essential in the creation of our from-scratch croissants and danishes. A croissant, I am sure you know, is a laminated item, meaning that the “dough” is actually layers of alternating dough and butter, eighty-one of them – and all, ideally, perfectly even. It begins with one slab of dough and one chunk of butter and ends up…well, laminated. (I tried to find an existent picture of raw croissant dough on the internet but, apparently, no one is interested except me. And hopefully now you.) It’s doable by hand in small batches, but that way isn’t any fun. Care has to be taken to keep both dough and butter at the same temperature, and as cool as possible. Rolling something out by manual rolling pin makes for a much warmer affair, both because it takes longer to do and because you have to make many more passes with the rolling pin, thus creating that much more friction and therefore heat. The couple of times that my friends have asked how they might make homemade croissants, I’ve told them that it’s not really worth it and, for the home cook, I think that’s true.

So my dear friend – a pastry chef in the Midwest – wishes that he had a sheeter. Sometimes he makes from-scratch danishes for brunch, he said, and does the whole show by hand. Danish dough is even more a pain in the tuckus than croissant dough as it is stickier – owing in part to a substitution of milk and eggs for water in the basic formula – and has more layers of butter and dough than its more straight-laced cousin. When he makes danishes, he laminates the dough by hand, forms them, and then proofs the pastry in a rather slap-dash “proofbox” that is actually a plastic tent with a pan of hot water at the bottom.

Proofing in the process by which yeasted doughs, once formed, are set to rise just before they are put in the oven to bake. Proofboxes are used in bakeries to regulate this process, maintaining a constant temperature and humidity so that, no matter the conditions outside, the baguettes, for example, will always need forty five minutes in the proofbox before baking.

My reaction to his jealousy surprised me. I would have expected to feel smug, I think, that I get to use a neat piece of machinery that he lacked and wanted, that I was making a product that he couldn’t, or couldn’t make as well. But I didn’t feel that way at all. Instead, I felt jealous of him. While we talked, I imagined him at home in the evening, standing in his own kitchen with a notebook on the counter, composing the brunch menu for the coming week and brainstorming how he could come up with a danish, that oh-so classic breakfast pastry. That swirl of sweet, buttery dough filled with glop – fruit or cheese… How to make an evenly laminated, presentable product without throwing labor costs out the window? How many days would it take to make the dough and laminate it? Could it stay cool enough? What size recipe would fit in the mixer? How many would go in the oven? How to rig up a proof box? How warm or cool would it have to be given the average temperature of the restaurant’s kitchen during the day? Then I pictured him at work, assembling the plastic sheeting over a rack of baking pans, perhaps, boiling a saucepan of water to steam up the plastic and warm the dough to rise.

He works – most people work – with disadvantages right out of the gate. Small operations rarely have money or space for sheeters or proofboxes. Sometimes the equipment in pastry kitchens is little better than the appliances I have in my cupboards at home. Or maybe I’ve just been working in threadbare kitchens this whole time. Maybe my perspective is skewed.

There is an ease in working for the well-outfitted kitchen. You rarely have to make up a special procedure or custom tool to compensate for an item or appliance that ought to be there but isn’t. It’s easy to do your job when you are given the right tools and so that is just exactly what you do. And while this way of working is generally less frustrating and certainly more efficient and predictable, it is much less fun.

Lordy, is it so much less fun. In teeny tiny kitchens, you have to dance around your coworkers. You squabble over who gets to use the one and only scale. You negotiate for oven and rack space. In small operations, you often run out of ingredients. Sometimes, you can’t put a produce order together that is large enough to make it worthwhile for the produce distributing company to give you an account. It is the case either that you don’t use enough in a week, or you don’t have the refrigerator space to store it all at once. When you can’t get the produce company to deliver to you, you send your grunts out to the nearest grocery store with petty cash in their pockets or you make trips to Costco on your afternoon off. Maybe you don’t have a mixer large enough to hold a full batch of cookies, so you mix it by hand in a large white plastic tub. Or, you don’t have a proofbox, so you make one.

And when your shift is over, and you are mopping up the space at the end of your shift, you feel a much greater sense of accomplishment and connection to your product and your customers than you ever could have if things had gone more smoothly.

It could be that I can never be happy working in a kitchen that is not my very own. If I were employed in the other sort of place, I might use these pages to complain about how hard it is to constantly run out of currants or lemons. I might write about my frustration at using half of my time compensating for the equipment that I lack with half-effective and haphazard improvisations. From this vantage point, however, it seems to me that these things are part of the soul of cooking for which I have begun to ache.

      There is something very freeing in all of this. There is something rather cold as well. There is no art in my bakery, not that I have been able to see anyway. There is craft – and pride therein – but no art. Things have been reduced to technical details: the temperature of the butter, the best way to measure molasses, the calibration of the scales so that every cookie weighs the same as every other. Attention to these aspects of the craft is critical. But the heart is missing. Maybe there is no room in our crowded schedule for love. We rarely see our customers, are not often present for their first bite. We never see them smile when they taste something they like. We are deprived, by the way the system is arranged, of the feeling that we are feeding anyone at all. We are loading racks. We are meeting quotas and filling orders. We are minimizing waste.

      When I began the post-baccalaureate job search, I did not intend on landing in a bakery again. As my mother pointedly commented when I told her where I had been hired, going back to food “creates a certain symmetry” in my curriculum vitae. I won’t itemize my reasons here, but there were, are, many for wanting to stay out of the professional kitchen. At the top of the list, however, is this: I really, really love food. Moreover, I respect it. I respect eaters, too. I enjoy feeding people, watching them taste what I’ve thought up, what I’ve crafted for them. I revel in eating with my dinner companion, picking apart a meal we’ve just made, congratulating ourselves for small triumphs and drawing out a plan for how to do it better next time. I want to make things the way I think they ought to be made. And I will. I want to experiment. I dream food. I soar when I get it right; I stew when I miss my mark. Pun intended.

      But in my bakery, there are none of these aforementioned pleasures. There are others – a perfectly risen loaf, for example – but we are, I feel, utterly disconnected with the nature of our product. We are missing the human link. We aren’t feeding anyone.

      In noticing this, I am both distressed and relieved. This separation puts my experience on the clock in an entirely different category from the cooking that I do at home, the cooking that is rather special and that I hold dear. At work, I am liberated from my warm and fuzzy feelings for food. Unencumbered by emotion, I can think of weights and measures, of speed, of yield and trim loss, of dough temperature and health codes. It is one part survival and self-protection, and many parts necessity. Indeed, I think this outlook makes me a better employee.

      So I am learning how seal-off that part of me that gets all mushy about food. If anything, I think it will make time in my own kitchen all the better. Lately, when I get off work all I want to do is come back home and cook, to explore some idea I had while weighing and mixing those hundreds of pounds of flour. It is different, what I do on the clock. I am not even sure if it can properly be called cooking. It can’t in the way I mean it, anyway. Cooking is something more than coagulating proteins and emulsifying sauce. It is this emotional, human component that makes it so marvelous, the very bit I cannot do without.

Though perhaps it ought to be, this is not going to be a post about intellectual property rights.

      In my redesign of Food. according to me, I am adding some pretty neato widgets and hoosits to the site that were quite impossible in my beloved Blogger. One feature that I am particularly enthused about is the Eat In section, wherein I shall post recipes, hawk my favorite machines and gadgets, and rant about whatever weird fruit I discovered on my most recent excursion to Uwajimaya. I have always published recipes here, but making individual GoogleDocs and linking them over feels much more deliberate. Scanning some of my older posts, I have noticed a handful of “this is from X’s cookbook” recipes. Though I always make sure to appropriately attribute the source of the recipe, I have begun to wonder, do I have any right to post, for example, David Lebovitz’s biscotti recipe? I don’t think I would post a whole chapter from On Food and Cooking. I know I would not. Is a recipe any different from a entry about the rise of the sugar industry?

      Maybe the answer depends on what a recipe is. Is it a static thing? Printed on the glossy page of a published cookbook, it is fixed. Copied out onto a 3×5 card for my kitchen drawer, it becomes flexible. If I make changes to the amount of sugar in the waffle recipe that came with my waffle baker, does the recipe become mine? What if I just add dried cherries? How different does the finished product need to be to change its identity?

      Websites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com publish recipes for download. On Epicurious, many are republished from past editions of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. Most of the dishes on AllRecipes are contributions from home cooks. Rarely does anyone write, this came out of X magazine or Y cookbook. But we can assume that much of what is published online isn’t original material, if there is even such a thing in cooking. And that’s the thing: the cookie has already been invented. All we can do is improvise.

      We know, of course, that a cake is more than flour, sugar, and eggs. A good recipe will not only indicate how much of what you need, but explains in very precise terms how to put those ingredients together and achieve the desired result. Using a good recipe, twenty people should be able to make twenty identical cakes. Perhaps the difference isn’t in the amount of sugar, or the decision to use pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. Perhaps the property part of a recipe is the procedure.

      But you can’t have one without the other, can you? In my own file, most recipes don’t include procedure at all. That part of the formula (many bakers use this term in favor of “recipe”) is in my head, my hands. I often have a wreck of a time sharing recipes with friends. The “procedure” portion of my instructions is rarely more complicated than Mix wet. Mix dry. Combine all. 325º. Sometimes my notes are no more explicit than an oven temperature and indicators for doneness. Of course, it isn’t at all fair to assume that anyone who might read my recipes already knows what “ribbon stage” looks like, or that of course egg whites in a chiffon cake are whipped before adding them to the batter.

      Plagiarism in academics is easy to identify and there is a clear legal and moral burden to indicate that these words and ideas are not mine. Is it enough that I do not attempt to pass the biscotti recipe off as my own? The question disappears if I write instead, There’s this wonderful book called Room For Dessert. It’s gorgeous and has great recipes in it. I just made the Chocolate Almond Biscotti and they are blowing my mind. You should check it out! But the point of my post is lost. The anecdote, or suggestions for variations or shortcuts, lose part of their force if the recipe is missing. What I want here, is you in my kitchen. I want you to bake a batch and think of me. And, of course, Mr. Lebovitz.

      The concern is not wholly selfless either. A handful of the regulars who hang out on these pages have admitted – to my delight – to printing off some of my recipes for future experimentation. While I am ticked by the idea that someone I have never met is slaving away in his or her own kitchen, wondering how I made such stunning molasses cookies, a part of me is a little sad about releasing my formulae out into the ether. What if someone ruins them and blames me? What if Rachel Ray secretly reads my blog and is stockpiling my recipes for her next cookbook, for which she will take all the credit? I have a handful of treasured recipes that I haven’t published here because I am afraid of what might happen to them out there in the big world.

      There is a certain pride in truly composing a recipe or a dish. Fixing a broken formula is tremendously satisfying and engenders a sense of ownership. The very first recipe I ever overhauled ended up producing what is, I believe, the best Dunking Cookie in the history of Ever. It is a mocha dough and a hazelnut dough marbled together and, when immersed in coffee, becomes utterly sublime. It took my family years to convince me to release the recipe to them. I wanted it to be Mine. I am still holding out with the Proprietary Pork Rub. It is possible that Mr. Lebovitz feels the same way about his biscotti; and this is where I get hung up.

      But for home cooks and professionals alike, I believe that recipes are more like stories than they are like chapters in books or trade secrets, though they may be those as well. Whenever I make my Corn Cake Crepes, I think of learning to make them in an A La Carte class at school. I can hear the Chef yelling. I can smell the parmesan baskets a colleague was making at the burner next to mine. My grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits are that much better because they came from my Grandmother. I feel an affection towards the recipe that cannot be duplicated in a mere itemization of ingredients and procedures. That love cannot be translated. If nothing else, it is the flexible part, the fairy dust that makes a recipe one’s own.

      I will of course continue to publish my recipes and recipes I’ve copied and tweaked from other people’s work. And usually I will write about what they mean to me, hoping that they will become yours, and mean something to you too.

My point is this: Through the little speakers of my radio came these words: “It isn’t what’s on the table that matters, it’s what’s on the chairs” (W.S. Gilbert).

The quote struck me in two ways: First, it’s been a darned long time since I’ve hosted a successful dinner party. It’s not as easy a thing as I once thought, but when it all comes together right, I find the experience tremendously satisfying. Second is to wonder what food is without us. I know what we are without food – dead – but what do carrots do “in the wild”? Hang out and contemplate their own carrotness? Their beta carotene content? What I mean to get at is, I guess, the cultural component of food, meals, cooking, communal eating. A plate of beans and rice can be fuel or a party – or something in between. The pintos are the same, it’s our contribution to the meal that animates it into something else.

I have been thinking a lot about being human. Not in the sense that I’m so glad I’m a human and not a bird, because humans are so much better in any qualitative sense (no, indeed I am not a speciesist), but just in that we seem, as a species, to be moving away from being alive and present. All of these gadgets and widgets we love to make and buy and toss in landfills – they are designed to keep up a wall between us and the rest of our world. We call it convenience or entertainment or some other such benign label but I think it’s mostly distraction.

When was the last time you really looked at the moon? When was the last time you really tasted your food?

      Later, I moved to the dining room table to peruse the pamphlets I picked up at the Salmon Nation Blockparty yesterday: the Pangea Project, Zenger Farm, and Slow Food USA. Clearly, all worthy organizations. This perusal, also, was awesome.

      Again, I seem to be in a place of significant possibilities. When I graduate from University in December, I shall be prepared for…nothing specifically… but a whole lot, generally. I have been studying philosophy: ethics, primarily. I do logic well; I like to argue both sides of an issue, at the same time, out loud, alone. Basically, I have been learning how to think.

      When I dropped out of work in the FoodWorld and dropped back into University a few years ago, I thought that I was leaving food. My hands hurt. I can’t do 3 am mornings. I am young, and a woman, and these two conditions particularly can make life in a professional kitchen somewhat less-easy than it could otherwise be. I am beginning to see now, however, how I can weave these two passions – Passion for the Yummy and Passion for the Good – into gainful employment. No, if I take this route I shall almost certainly never be a billionaire (if that kind of thing is important to you), but what is important to me is personal satisfaction. In the words of Lady J, I do not want to be a “waste of space.” There’s so much to do, and I am starting to see how to do it.

      The first spark happened when I read Botany of Desire. The second, during The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. And then this morning, it was possible. Over breakfast, this frenzied need to DO SOMETHING ALREADY BEFORE ARMAGEDDON, YOU LAZY BASTARD hit a fever pitch. And whereas usually, I fold, hopeless and overwhelmed, this morning was different. Maybe it was the jam, the bread, the sun, but I think I can pull it off. Not saving the world, heavens no. But not leaving it worse than when I arrived, at the very least. I’d say, even, that the outlook for improvement is pretty good. With just a little investigation, you can see the hundreds of organizations, everywhere, run by like-minded people who believe that it is possible, and who are doing it. The time to think and brood is closing. Without forgetting to think, brood, and study, I do believe that the time to act is here. This, I feel, is awesome as well.

So, the enchiladas. This is the sad part. I know I am screwing it all up. I am bastardizing a perfectly wonderful tortilla-sauce-meat-cheese arrangement. I really don’t think I should even be allowed to call them “enchiladas,” but, when I use that word you know what I mean to indicate. If I said “really wet riceless baked burrito” it just wouldn’t come together as quickly – or as precisely – as I’d like it to. So when I write “enchilada,” please understand that I am fully aware of the culinary crime I am perpetrating.

My first attempt I modeled after some frozen enchiladas I get from Trader Joes’s. They’re wheat-free, dairy-free AND vegetarian. Tofu enchiladas: sad; but – yes – tasty. They are also filled with zucchini, yellow squash, black beans, and corn. I added to mine olives, chicken, and scallions. They were all right. They were all right because the sauce that I bought was pretty good (more sinning!).

Today I tried again –shredded the chicken this time, used pintos, onions, garlic, corn – no zucchini or yellow squash – and some cilantro from my windowsill. I made a little sauce out of the simmering water from the chicken (bay leaves, garlic, and dried red chiles) and (canned) enchilada sauce. I haven’t tasted them yet. I know they’d be great if I’d just use some damn cheese…

My family has a multigenerational tradition of bastardizing regional dishes. My mother makes this really great simmered chicken dish she calls “chile verde” that contains neither pork nor tomatillos. It’s really good. But it sure as heck isn’t chile verde. Our family’s tamal recipe came from Martha. They are tasty, but there’s no lard, no sauce on the inside.

We are California folk. For many years, we had Mexican friends who would deliver dozens of tamales to our home on Christmas Eve. We’ve all been to México, and we all ate food while we were there. We understand the difference between what we get down there and what we eat at home. Maybe we just can’t help ourselves – authentic Gringo is what we cook, not authentic Méxicano.

Do we owe it to Mexican food, qua Mexican, to do it right? I have given up on Thai and Vietnamese because I can’t even come close (due, for the most part, to the fact that I cannot bring myself to use fish sauce). A friend of mine said the other day that any regional or ethnic food sold in the United States is, to some degree, Americanized. Do we, as a nation, really have such an embarrassing and infantile palate? Or do we expect that whatever we find here just won’t be as good, effectively lowering our standards?