My first two days off in a row in a month and I get the flu. Or food poisoning, can't tell which. I'm back on my feet after a completely miserable and disgusting two days, but I had to call in today for a recovery day. It made the exec cranky, but fuck it. This is what happens to your crew when you work them too hard during cold and flu season.

If it was food poisoning, then I could've gotten it from the portobello mushrooms and asparagus en croute I had late Saturday night after the 1300-plate dinner went off. It was one of the spare vegetarian entrees, and I pulled it straight from the hotbox, but someone could've left it out on a serving tray and put it back in later. It's more likely it was the two blue fingerling potatoes and the thumb-sized piece of duck I stole from the dishup sheetpans while the culinary team put the salads together. I don't think the dessert did it; there's just not much in frozen pink guava souffle with banana-macadamia ganache cones that can bring you low. I know the cream was fresh since I was the one that checked and pulled it and toted it up from the basement walk-in after the gingerbread people stole all our carts. More on that in a couple paragraphs.

( Pink guava clusterfuck. )

Thanksgiving will be spent at D.'s house, as usual. I had plans for pumpkin bread and drinking chocolate this year, but the flu has completely thrown my schedule off, and I doubt I'll have time to make anything. I'll likely just buy a pumpkin pie from our shop. Technically, it's still something I made. I might have time to do the chocolate still, if I can get out and buy some decent stuff. muddy_feet and I toured the Theo factory in Fremont a couple weeks ago, and I was suitably knocked off my feet. I really liked the single-origin Venezuela, and with a little ancho chile powder it'd kick ass. Even more kick-ass was the incredibly cute and articulate bespectacled tour guide, who if I'm not mistaken is their wonder woman head chocolatier. It's worth the $5 for that sight alone. Just don't go on the weekends; we had to suffer through a group of Boy Scouts, who weren't calmed down by the amount of chocolate they ate.

My Christmas shopping's done. I've finally managed to get my family on board with online wishlists, which save me an assload of trouble. We'll be meeting at my sister's in Detroit this year. Every time I mention that, someone says, "I'm so sorry."

I bet the Theo girl's mouth tastes like chocolate.

EDIT: Whattya know, it was food poisoning. No wonder chef was irritable - I was the third one to call in. It took out half of back of the house and a good cross section of the office people. The consensus is that it was something they served us for lunch on Saturday. The majority of the 4th floorers are taking vacation time right now, since it's a long holiday weekend; I confess that I'm getting a little schadenfreude out of the image of certain salesreps puking their guts up during their trips to Grandmama's.

Jesus, two days off in a row. And I only had to work one ten-hour day for it so far this week ... but on Friday and Saturday, we can't predict how long the days will run, at least until 5, with 7 looking more realistic. Absolutely insane. And it's not even Thanksgiving yet. Overtime's always nice, but it doesn't really begin to pay off until you work over 60 hours. It's just more money for the government to tax, and it's not enough to do anything significantly fun or responsible with.

After such a stretch, it's inevitable that a two-day block off will take on the aura of a major holiday: religious mania, grandiose plans, overindulgence, and the resulting indecision and disappointment. And so, all that is wrong and bad in my life is caused by this particular pastry kitchen, all barriers, animate or in, are to be eliminated with righteous and furious anger, and all problems, including my inflamed left foot, will vanish with mere hours of rest; which will lead to the grandiose plans of cleaning my apartment, doing my laundry, taking the trash down, making a month's worth of overdue phone calls, completely revamping my workout routine, and finding a current driver for my elderly digital camera this evening. This afternoon's quad espresso keeps me from a badly needed nap. Crippling indecision sets in the second the holiday officially begins, the sensation of being cut adrift unexpectedly intimidating, the options available contribute to stress instead of dissolving it, and now, stretched on my sheetless bed among unfolded laundry from last week, drinking Sol and mechcanically working on a bowl of edamame because all I had to do was take off the top of the container, I'm vaguely disappointed. Holiday's gotten too damned commercial anyways.

On the other hand, a broadcast of Stockard Channing reading "Why I Live At The P.O." will air on NPR tonight, which is much better than having to listen to "Alice's Restaurant" at Thanksgiving.

Eleven days in a row. Weeks from now, when they bother to look, they will find my stinky corpse on my bed exactly where I laid it when I got home this afternoon cause I'm gonna starve to death since I'm too tired to open a can or dial a phone. My one day off tomorrow is not gonna be enough.

Three weeks of six day weeks, ten hour days, with no relief in sight. Sweet cocksucking Jesus.

One of the multiple good things about my favorite time of year, along with woodsmoke, orange sunsets, the county fair, corn mazes, pumpkin patches, hard apple cider, jacket weather and cute girls in boots, tweed skirts and sweaters:

http://www.splfriends.org/

I try to make this every fall, and there's amazing out of print and rare stuff to be had for about fifty cents to a buck apiece (in addition to the usual boring current junk). Two words, brothers and sisters: vintage cookbooks. Well, fuck yeah, book sale.

Edit: smelled woodsmoke, mixed with gunpowder, on the way back from the used bookstore around nine last night. (Apparently someone's gotten serious and is blowing up their leaves instead of just burning them.) It's official: it's fall.

The sunset tonight is an astonishing Halloween orange, and the bars of color are so distinct that they look almost pixellated - quick, Seattle people that spend too much time online/stalk my LJ, go look!

Fuck, you missed it.

It's that time of year, although a little early. I'm in the kitchen six full days this week and it shows no sign of letting up. I actually like it this way, as I was getting tired of the landscaping gig. I've kept it up for two years and I think I'm done. There were plenty of things about it that weren't working for me, and haven't for a while, but the biggest problem was that West Seattle is an enormous sucking black hole that sucks extra hard when it comes to public transportation. I tried to work last Saturday and after an hour of no-show and just-missed buses, I gave up. If I absolutely have to, I'll find a nearby coffee shop that needs an evening barista, but with all of the big gala events planned I should be fine through Christmas if I keep my belt tight. Recent additions to the banquet menu include vegan chocolate cake, pomegranate sorbet, and raspberry napoleons. (We're making the discs out of almond dough, not puff pastry, since puff is abominably hard to cut and we need to be able to crank out four hundred of these without a hitch. In the professional kitchen, such modifications of classic pastry design are not considered cheating but are instead referred to as "postmodern", in much the same way that a lumpy, misshapen loaf of bread can be disingenuously pointed to as "rustic".)

Work has been surprisingly un-stressful, despite the action-packed days. I've reached the point where your skill at a particular task suddenly takes a jump ("leveling up" in geek speak) and I'm much more comfortable in the kitchen. My pastry exec's grumpy days seem to be at a minimum, the morning guy keeps bringing in the fruits of his backyard smoker, the head exec has grudgingly agreed to buy a tabletop ice cream/sorbet machine for the shop, annoying co-workers are less so, there are new CDs in the shop's library, and even the banquet servers seem less stupid than usual.

( Yesterday ... )

I'm at Bauhaus on the Hill, sitting upstairs in the corner where I like to sit, watching the traffic on Melrose, and a meter maid parking enforcement buggy just pulled up. Their little golf carts have INTERCEPTOR stenciled across the back in a properly serious font. Intercept what? A stray dog with three legs and the gout? A sleepy toddler on crutches?

Goddamn if I didn't just fix my CD burner. I finally unearthed a forum on Daemon Tools that showed I wasn't the only one with this problem. I had a nagging feeling it wasn't my hardware or iTunes ... and now it makes sense that no one seemed to know what the fuck was up. Ain't no big visible companies going to even admit to the existence of software that has a faint quasi-legal odor.

In other news, don't use Daemon Tools for ISO images, or if you do, understand that you won't be able to burn CDs while it's installed and mounted. It's worth it to use Microsoft's teeny little app (I take back my sneer from an earlier post) or a competitor, of which there are a handful. If you do use DT, make sure you delete the driver files it leaves in the System32 folder after uninstalling: sptd.sys and dtscsi.sys. (I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your computer if you fuck it up. I'm too poor to sue, anyway.)

Shit, I haven't been this happy in days. Now if I could find a cheap and easy fix for my slowly frying monitor circuits ....

The next time someone keeps making self-deprecating jokes about what a bitch and how emotionally immature they are, don't say "aw, honey", but nod and run instead.

Thursday night: went to the big chain bed and bath store downtown to pick up new pillows after work. An hour and a half later, I was standing outside with four huge overflowing bags stuffed with new pillows, comforter, sheet sets, and towels, trying to figure out the logistics of toting it home on foot and dazed with that genital-clenching sense of impending credit card debt. But the place looks nicer and I was overdue for a change.

Friday night: I was supposed to do breakfast service at 5 the next morning and wanted to turn in early, but my cousin The Big Gay Bear was in town, and I'd blown him off the past few times he'd wanted to hang out. So I met him at CiCi's with his friends for what turned into about two hours' worth of beer (I remembered just in time that CiCi's mixed drinks are roofie-like strong). After a couple, I began to feel guilty that my meter with my carny friends had gotten so low, and sucked it up and met them at the midnight showing of Young Frankenstein at the Egyptian. I've loved that movie since I was a kid; whenever it was shown on television on Sunday nights, my mother would let us stay home from church to watch it. It was good to sit with a whooping theaterful of like-minded popcorn throwers with DiTolvo next to me in the seat squirming and bouncing and squeezing my hands. I still can't believe Madeline Kahn is dead. It ain't right.

Saturday: plopped down what was probably too much to attend the big PAX videogame expo downtown. I was too tired to do more than attend a couple of developer's panels and the big hour-long demo for a beautiful piece of gaming art that my months-old computer will be too slow to run. There wasn't much going on in the exhibition area that I took interest in, or rather, there would've been if I hadn't been jockeying for space and game time with a thousand other people whose entire lives revolve around gaming. There's not much point in going head-to-head for prizes with a twenty-three-year-old sysadmin from Microsoft (with the mismatched shades of black clothing and unkempt beard and ponytail) who doesn't do anything but game in his spare time when he's not writing pansexual fanfiction. I was happy to see the makers of my favorite indie game, N,squirreled off in a corner. I like seeing small independents at the big shows, and apparently they're getting N ported to the Nintendo DS early next year, which is a huge coup. Bitches didn't give me a sticker, but the surprisingly friendly people at the surprisingly empty Rockstar tent made up for it. (When your latest big release is a ping-pong simulator, I guess even your loyal fans wander off.) The main point of paying for entry was seeing the Minibosses play later, but my afternoon nap put me down for the rest of that night. That's the third time I've missed them.

Today: a long walk in the downtown sculpture garden and downloading Songbird. There's already a few dozen little plug-ins that support iPods, USB devices and various media players and music stores. Whenever I see BoingBoing's latest outraged post about abusive DRM, I remember that there's a million Linux users and third-party developers for whom such things are barely a blip on the screen. If there's one thing sure as death in things computerly, it's that geeks will never stop tweaking and improving existing technology and finding semi-to-fully legal ways to circumvent restrictions.

Poking around astrology sites the other day, I came across this descriptor: "Leos can forgive anything except for a perceived lack of integrity". I'm finding this to be true. The trick's been figuring out if my filter's set correctly.

The pic is a crappy shot of my Mom's 1964 edition of her first cookbook ever. Like me and my sister, Mom didn't know a thing about cooking until she hit her late twenties/early thirties, but rallied quickly with a little practice. This cookbook has some of the most perfect pseudo-realistic, skinny-line era cartoons I've ever seen, and probably set a standard (along with my seventies-edition Childcraft library) for my tastes in illustration. The Cookies section is still smeared with our fingerprints, particularly the page for the thumbprint cookies, which I love. My sister dug up her own copy on eBay, and promised to find one for me for Christmas to add to my vintage cookbook collection.

Okay, goat cheese cheesecake. This is a co-worker's recipe. It might benefit from lagniappe, like a little lemon zest or vanilla bean, or a dash of liqueur, say Grand Marnier. I personally like that it's free of additional flavors. I think that consumers too often forget that cheesecake has a distinct flavor, tangy and sweet, and demand ridiculous combinations like chocolate-hazelnut-caramel or strawberry-lime-kiwi. Enjoy it for what it is. If you absolutely must adulterate your cheesecake, I suggest a fruit compote.

( Recipe: )

Apropos of nothing, I'm listening to Michael Jackson's "Human Nature", and idly clicked on the album cover artwork displayed on my player. I have problems believing that vitiligo alone can turn a handsome young black man with a perfectly good nose and a normal skin shade into Ronald McDonald. It's somewhere after the Thriller album that something obviously went awry. Open up another browser and put the two pics side by side - what the hell happened, and why?

In other news, continuing through my active playlist titled "Childhood Schmaltz", I am still as desperately in love with Olivia Newton-John as I've ever been. She was my first girlfriend, but she couldn't wait for me to graduate third grade, and it would've been wrong to stand in the way of her career. I would've abused myself endlessly to her promo shots for Xanadu, if I'd known what self-abuse was.

Olivia Newton-John, Star Wars, and Pac-Man, the mighty triumvirate of an eighties childhood ....

I'd meant to get this post up sooner, but this summer has turned out to be an unusually busy one. It's not the usual way of things in our kitchen to get overtime in July and August, but there you are. There's been just enough events to keep us occupied, and now that we have enough staff we're starting to make more things from scratch - for example, the hundred and sixty tart shells I formed by hand and baked off yesterday. Man, that shit's tedious. In other news, I am pretty good at making tart shells.

It's Death Week, and you should read Peter Guralnick's astonishing two-volume making/unmaking-of biography of Elvis, Last Train To Memphis and Careless Love if you haven't already. I never thought I'd enjoy a biography as much as a novel. Even if you don't give two shits about the King, it's a fascinating picture of the South on the cusp of change, taking into account the intersection and division of class and race issues and how it affected the then-open format of the locally powered radio and music industry, and the effects of overnight fame on an already emotionally troubled teenager. (Remember the slightly creepy, oddly dressed, pimply misfit with delusions of grandeur that sat in the back of the class in school? Elvis was that guy.) If the idea of committing to two volumes sounds too much like the classroom, then start with the second book, which picks up after he arrives home from Germany and the Army. It wasn't all the Colonel's fault, incidentally. Two big factors were his entourage and the fact that "diet pills" used to be considered harmless.

Anyroad, the visit. ( Last airplane to Memphis .... )

As a thank-you to chefx for tracking down info on aebelskivers, and because I seem to have finally nailed this recipe, here's the final version of the fabled red velvet cake.

( Red velvet cake )

I haven't posted in some time, mostly because I couldn't concentrate long enough to hack one out. For about a month before my birthday last week, I was suffering from severe burnout: short tempered, jittery, restless, insomniac and wishing desperately for a disintegrator pistol to wipe the hordes of thoughtless pink bunnies from my environment. It got a little touch and go in the kitchen. My promotion finally came through, but the raise came with a short, and admittedly good-natured, lecture from my boss about my temper.

Anyway, apparently I just needed some time off. I've been much less keyed up since I got back. Here's all it all came down:

( The party. )

And then, there was the trip to Memphis.

Anybody else having trouble with the newest versions of iTunes not fully recognizing their CD/DVD+-RW drive? It's driving me insane. I've checked my driver and it's fine; iTunes recognizes that the drive is there; but every time I try to burn a disc with iTunes it says, "disc burner or software not found". I'm combing through the Apple support site to find a solution, but it's slow going. Any ideas?

Oh, God. Why do I drink Rainier beer? Why, why? I know why, it's the same reason why I occasionally drink nasty-ass, shampoo-tasting Pabst: I'm hanging out with my twentysomething friends who'll gladly spend a couple hundred on anything and everything internet or video game related but won't spend the extra five bucks for a sixer of microbrewery beer. (I do understand the first priority all too well, but good beer is just as important.) I missed a great deal of the usual twentysomething experiences, like the obsession with nightclubs, wide range of STDs, and drug and/or alcohol habit, but thankfully I passed the whole lookit-I'm-drinking-cheap-beer-I-am-a-sexy-proletariat-with-a-sense-of-irony bullshit. The only beer-referencing t-shirt I own is a reprint concert tee from Wattstax, which was sponsored by Miller, and it's about the music, not the beer. (Gettin' crazy with the links today.)

I should also know by now that hanging out with C. and M. means that 1) M. will progress from his usual good-guy self to at least borderline obnoxious over the course of several hours and beers and 2) I will be hung over and heartburned the next day. I can't wait to be forty, because that means that my younger friends will be in their thirties and hopefully will be past the point of buying poorly filtered beer and drinking til acting the foo'.

So, because chefx asked nice: ( Meme nonsense here. )

This is making me laugh like a spastic toddler.

Sometimes, when I'm at home by myself, I give the tub of hummus a good rimming to get all the smears out. And then sometimes, I eat the entire jar of kalamata olives ... and then I drink all the juice.