When I was pregnant, I daily wondered how people with kids do it — feed themselves every day. I see now that success lies in adjustment of standards and procedures, or at least that's the way it's working out here. Gone are the treasured hours in the kitchen preparing a great meal just because it's Tuesday. Eating has become functional; we do it because we must in order to keep bouncing, rocking, feeding, bathing, and playing with the baby.

This sounds like complaining, and I suppose that it is. I miss being in the kitchen so much: miss turning on NPR and cooking all day, especially on these drizzly gray ones, miss smelling my supper all day long getting richer and more awesome as it simmers and stews.

My inability to cook is a bit baffling, too. The babe does sleep during the day, sometimes even for hours at a time, and yet I am still not in there. I cannot think of what I want to eat, cannot remember what we used to like when we were afforded the childless luxury to leisurely enjoy our food. And other, simpler, matters make demands more loudly: clean clothes, cat food, showers and naps.

Other parents tell me often that these first three months are the doosies, after which things settle for awhile, and I am counting on their being right. Our Birdie is a real joy—just as sweet and smiley and pleasant as they come (near as I can tell), but she's shuffled every little thing around these parts. Momming is great; but where did the rest of me go?

We tried again last year. I cajoled him into permitting me to take him to the buffet at Swagat. I have enjoyed the lunch buffet offerings at their NW Lovejoy location many times and together we reasoned that being able to see the food before selecting it might work better than the gamble of the chef's choice lunch special. And there's always Tandoori chicken, I said, suggesting that, even if he wasn't won over by the food, at least he wouldn't starve. Like a fool, I took him to Swagat's Beaverton outpost, a new spot for me too. We both gave it two disappointed thumbs down and I promised never to ask him to eat Indian food again.

Yet, somehow, we had dinner at Vindahlo last week.

We had been watching Gordon Ramsay's show, Kitchen Nightmares, on hulu.com and it had been a very pregnant-feeling day. I was hungry but didn't want to eat, then I wanted to eat but nothing sounded good. [An admission: we're sort of on a Hell's Kitchen/Kitchen Nightmares kick. I watched them for the first time when The Squeeze was getting his geek on at the Apple Developers Conference last month and I thought it was just a sort of lonely, my-squeeze-is-out-of-town type indulgence. And now we're watching together, and loving it when Gordon throws undercooked scallops at the walls, shouts unintelligible obscenities at poorly motivated line cooks, and uncovers cockroaches and rotting bell peppers in nearly every struggling restaurant he visits. I don't want to love these shows, but I do. I'm also pretty sure that once I've seen all the episodes of Nightmares I'll be qualified to sell myself as a consultant to failing restaurants. Lesson numbers one and two: Don't serve rotten food and Make your menu smaller. End digression.]

Anyway, there was Indian food happening on the particular show we were watching on the evening in question. Gordon brought in a fancy Indian chef to remake the menu and there were some very, very pretty shots of pakoras and curries and tall, creamy lassis and I think I might have drooled a little. In any case, my interest was surely perceivable because The Squeeze paused the show and asked if he should go get me some Indian food. He is like this and I do my best not to exploit it. I believe he would have gone out into the night in search of curried lentils, if I'd asked, but since it was eleven in the evening and we were both in our PJs, I settled for a frozen naan from Trader Joe's (a pathetic substitute flavorwise, but still better than eating a potato chip when you really want a naan). I ate happily and went to bed dreaming of the naan wraps I used to buy from India Clay Oven at the Monterey County Farmers Market.

Then the next day when he caught me oogling websites for Portland-area Indian restaurants, The Squeeze said only, So when are we going? And it wasn't, I don't think, in a resigned, exasperated kind of way. I swear, I was planning to take myself out to lunch at the Bombay Cricket Club, East Indian Co., and Vindahlo. I wasn't even going to ask for company. Because, after Swagat, I promised.

• roast beef
• pizza, anything without meat
• pineapple
• watermelon
• enchiladas
• Mom's tacos
• anything a character eats in a book I'm reading
• butter pecan ice cream
• chocolate, chocolate, chocolate
• millet, as a component of something trail-mixy
• bran muffins
• blueberry muffins
• morning glory bread
• fruit pie, any
• mint
• TLC original crackers
• black beans
• lentil soup and spinach pie from Nicholas
• Chaat House fare

What I've Actually Been Eating:

• pineapple
• watermelon
• yogurt
• mutli-grain Cheerios
• fish
• salads
• hummus + veggie sticks
• lentil soup and spinach pie from Nicholas
• bananas
• almonds

These are incomplete lists, of course, but you get the idea. In the last three months food has taken on yet another dimension in my head, my kitchen, and my guts. I've been queasy, then downright nauseated. My digestion has slowed, because that's what happens; my eating habits have had to change. Some days I wake up starving, unable to get to the kitchen quickly enough. Some days anything I eat seems to sit in my stomach, like stone, for hours. Lately, it doesn't feel like there is room inside me for a stomach, a bladder, and a baby. There is, of course, or there will be. It's not like my condition is strange.

Some days I eat what I want, when I want, and I regret it. Some days I plan and choose carefully, proud of myself that I am giving my body—and the freeloader it carries—the material it needs to build the bones, skin, and eyelids of this inchoate being.

I am unused to denial, to discomfort, to frustration around food. I have always tried to eat responsibly, but now I am newly and powerfully motivated. I don't always do my best, but every day I hold my belly and promise to do better. Eating for two maybe isn't eating more, it's eating better. It's also eating what you can get into your stomach, because even a nutritionally-suspect snack is better than nothing at all.*

A few weeks into my second trimester, I can eat real meals most days, though carefully, and some days I can stay awake all day without a nap. I hear, from the few moms and dads that I know, that I have nothing but discomfort and pain to look forward to as we creep towards our November 16 due date, but for now I am celebrating the return of my appetite. I am celebrating also the fruits and vegetables that are coming into season, the mexican watermelons that I can't keep out of my grocery basket; hawaiian pineapples, and tamales from Micro Mercantes at the new King Farmers Market. For now I am celebrating the notion that I might get to raise an Eater, that maybe I can teach my kid to love kneading dough as much as I do, and that maybe soon my body will adjust to it's altered state and I'll be in the kitchen again making pizzas and muffins, minty things and black bean soup—anything to satisfy the growling cravings and nourish the little beast.

*This isn't nutritional advice; it's just the opinion of a cranky, pregnant food writer. If you are pregnant, please consult a qualified caregiver for advice about nutrition. And good luck.

I was having a serious watermelon moment last week, sure that it was the only thing I would ever want to eat for the rest of my life ever. So I bought one. Didn't feel good about it, but I was compelled, you know? And it was crap. I am still eating it, because I feel morally obligated, but, damn, damn, damn if it's not worth the effort to chew and swallow. Then again, it's just the beginning of May. So who's the fool?

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.

This morning I used a towel that had been hung out to dry on my laundry line some weeks ago. It smelled a bit like dirt, but in a good way, and a bit like the ancient and monstrous walnut tree that dominates our yard. Later today the laundry line is scheduled to come down as cooler, wetter weather settles down on us here in Portland. I'll miss the earthy towels.

From here, the walnut tree will drop leaves and nuts until sometime in December, and then it will drop branches until springtime. I love that tree, though, as much as I fear being squashed in my bed in the middle of the night by an old, dead part of it. I like the way it makes the laundry smell when it’s warm enough to dry our clothes outdoors.

The season — heck, the whole year — has been so packed that it should hardly surprise me that fall was swung back around; but it does. As usual. This year the chicks turned into pullets and then into egg-laying hens — one egg from each every day, in fact. Having the hens around isn't as quiet and idyllic as I imagined it would be, but I am glad they are here. I like those gals, even if they are chickens.

Though we were away from home quite a bit this summer, the garden still managed to produce some food for us — which is impressive since there was no pest control to speak of, very little fertilizer, and both flood and drought conditions. I’ve got onions hung up in braids in the basement (I was inspired after reading a forty-nine-cent Goodwill copy of Little House on the Prairie) and quite a stockpile of homemade pizza sauce made with our tomatoes and our garlic. There is jam too, of course, and three new batches of berry wine going through a secondary ferment. I’ll bottle them early in the new year.

I think somedays that these practices are baby steps toward self-sufficiency, but mostly I brew and sew and put up preserves because I enjoy these activities and because I am very picky. Making my own jam, for example, means that I can control exactly what is in it. Plus, I like having what I need here in the pantry. A cache of indispensable, basic items like chicken stock and yellow onions and black thread makes me feel somehow safe. Call me old fashioned if you must.

I am looking forward to the natural slowing that begins in the fall, and to the rich squash soups and baked fruit desserts that just don’t taste as good in the summertime. I swear, I write about squash soup every year, don’t I? I like it loaded with ginger and garlic, served next to a big salad and toasted slices of fresh baguette from the bakery down the street. I’m looking forward to spiced cider as well, and to wild-fermenting my own apple juice again. Last year the Squeeze said it tasted like model airplane glue, but I thought it was delicious. But maybe I shouldn't admit that, or you won't stick around for the '09 version of this post.

Google Alerts is a really neat service. The GoogleBots crawl all over the Interwebs, and when they find content that matches the search criteria you've given them, the Bots send you an e-mail. I have the GoogleBots looking for anything related to me or this site, and I get a couple of e-mail alerts each week. Usually the alerts point back to comments I've left on other blogs, or to blogrolls that feature food. according to me. Sometimes, I get a link to a scraper blog, which really pisses me off. Cookk, the website Google alerted me to the other day, isn't a scraper blog because there's a real person behind it. A real person with, evidently, no original ideas.

At Cookk, which looks far too much like Open Source Food (OSF) to be a coincidence, you can find my recipe for Summer Corn Soup, which – suspiciously enough – I posted on OSF last summer (and have since deleted). The recipe text and photo are identical to what was at OSF, where the recipe was under full copyright, not Creative Commons licensing. Uncle Fedor did – as he's pointed out in our
e-mail exchange – put a copyright symbol underneath the recipe of mine that he stole, as well as a direct link to this site. According to him, that's sufficient attribution. But Cookk seems to be promoting itself as a website that, like OSF, GroupRecipes, Bakespace, and other food-related social networking sites, relies on member-generated content. Members post their recipes, not the site's administrator. But I never joined. I didn't post. No one asked my permission to reproduce my work. So while I admit that not giving me credit for my intellectual property and not linking back to this site would have been worse, what he's done is hardly praiseworthy.

When I saw my recipe up there at Cookk, I did a Whois search and found Fedor's e-mail address. I sent him a note, asking that he remove my material as it is copyrighted and he does not have my permission to use it. I didn't mention the suspicious resemblance his site bears to Open Source Food; I didn't feel up to it. But, really, look:

Sheesh.

I'm no expert in Fair Use or copyright law. I've used Creative Commons licenses in the past, but always with the stipulation that the work be attributed to me, unmodified, and not used for commercial gain. Lately, everything I've published has been under full copyright, since I am planning on being a little bit famous someday.

Whatever appeal I might make to the law, the argument isn't very strong, mostly because Fedor is in Russia and I am in Oregon and because I'm not retaining legal counsel. All I've got and all I've attempted to use in my e-mails with Fedor is that what he's doing over there in Tula is a violation of some pretty standard-issue moral principles. We all learned this in grammar school: stealing = wrong. It was dishonest and arguably criminal of Fedor to use all of those recipes and OSF's design when assembling his website, and it is particularly despicable to refuse to remove my stuff once I've asked – and asked pretty nicely – to have it taken off the website. "I do not delete recipes from my site," he wrote in response to my request, "That's all."

This happens a lot, all over the Interwebs. Both Blogger and Wordpress will shut down a scraper blog hosted on their service. There are other channels for filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints as well. It seems to me, though, that in our digital global village, © isn't too powerful after all. But we publish our work here because we want to share it, want it to be read and enjoyed as widely as possible. Perhaps I should be flattered that someone across the world thinks so much of my Summer Corn Soup recipe that he ganked it from OSF and put it up on his own website. I'm not, though. And I'm angry and disappointed that I've been given a response tantamount to "talk to the hand."

In my last e-mail to Fedor I asked a second time that he remove my material. "I am prepared to publicise your behavior," I wrote, mentally drafting this post as I pressed the send button. And then I waited. This morning my answer came. The entire message from Fedor: "Ok. Do it." Now here we are.

Nothing will happen as a result of this post, however. A few dozen people will read it and shake their heads and move along. In some extraordinary case, someone might track down Fedor's e-mail address too and send a nasty little note. That's about it though, and that's why I suppose he'll win and I'll lose. But I'll keep posting recipes here and at OSF because there are plenty of people who, I think, just want to make some delicious cookies and who are not interested in ripping me off and eroding my faith in human decency. I'd like to think so, anyway. The cookies are very delicious.

In mid-April, when the Squeeze and I met with the catering manager at Oakway Wine and Deli in Eugene, it was cold outside. And drizzly. And it had been cold and drizzly for as long as we could remember. We thought, perhaps even justifiably, that it would be cold and drizzly forever, even during the last week of June. So when we sat in Jessica's office, snuggly in our late Winter sweaters, to taste Oakway's blackened fish and roasted chicken and skewed prawns, the weather did not cross our minds once. Or, more likely, it did – probably we were grateful to be out of the cold and drizzly weather and inside the warm office, eating hot, delicious, free food.

So the Squeeze and I put in an order for our event – spicy chicken skewers marinated with cilantro and lime, blackened cajun salmon filets, lemon rice pilaf, sauteéd green vegetables. We ordered fruit and crudité trays and hummus and pita bread. We ordered a custom salad bar, too – arguably our smartest move in menu planning. The Squeeze and I are dedicated salad people, and we have strong opinions about how one ought to be constructed. And so for this meal, a make-yourself salad with all of our favorite extras: dried cranberries, radishes, snap peas, red onion.

When the day arrived, we were quite in the midst of a most impressive heat wave. Lightning flashed in the skies over the McKenzie River at night, illuminating the tree line and momentarily silencing the river. I am told that Oregon caught fire by some of that lightning. During the day, hot winds blew up the river. The Squeeze said that it felt like having a cow sigh on the back of his neck. Eeks. The cold and the drizzle of April was a distant memory, totally incongruent with the ninety-seven degree afternoon on which we wed.

Our guests moved their tables and chairs three times before the meal was over trying to outrun the aggressive sunshine. The salad was a hit, but not the hot, spicy food. Though delicious and beautiful, it was just too much on such a day. It was even too hot for the lemon curd- and marionberry-filled lemon-poppyseed paisley cake, made by Sweet Life Patisserie. A cake that good should not require a second thought but, alas, I only made it through one piece. Perhaps we should have brought over the Snoopy Sno-Cone maker instead.

Despite the heat and our inability to overindulge because of it, the day was still lovely. Oakway was gracious enough to serve my first batch of raspberry wine, which was surprisingly dry, refreshing, and incredibly fruity. And with help from friend and photographer Kristi, the Innkeeper at Eagle Rock Lodge made a gorgeous edible bouquet for me. Can you spot the artichoke? It's just a little droopy because, you know, we were expecting a cooler, more drizzly day.

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.

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.