Musical Geography Trivia Question of the Day

If King George commands, where specifically do we obey?

Do As They Say Not As They Do

A Tip of the Toque to Robert of The Llama Butchers.

Home Fires

It's been a while since I had time to do any serious cooking at home, but tonight I managed to feed TFR well. The Lad needed a couple of items from the grocery store, so on the way home from Daycare we stopped and I got... THE BUG. A mood to cook mean struck me, so I went to town.

Dinner was pretty light fare, my old standby of cedar-planked hazelnut encrusted salmon, but it was special in that I was able to buy whole wild Alaskan sockeye and break it down myself (which means there's more in the freezer now). I topped it with a shallot and blackberry sauce, garnished with lemon zest. I forewent the traditional sides of a veg and a starch, and combined the two in some sweet white corn-on-the-cob, roasted in the husk on my deck grill. Wine Wine pairing was a dry Pinot Noir Rose from Hamacher.

Appetizers consisted of a ciabatta crostini topped with Oregon bay shrimp in cocktail sauce, garnished with wedges of avocado and finished with lemon juice, served with a cuba libre as the cocktail. Dessert was pound cake topped with fresh sliced strawberries and homemade whipped cream.

Musical Geography Trivia Question of the Day

If by a lonely harbor wall, she watched the last star falling, where is the love for whom she'll wait and hope and pray?

Where are you if you're talking to a tourist whose every move's among the purest?

In All Fairness to Barack Obama

Jesse Jackson was not being fair to Obama.

He really doesn't single out black people when talking down.

Musical Geography Trivia Question of the Day

If you was lookin' for a place to get yourself out of the cold, to warm the frozen feelin' that was eatin' at your soul, where was it winter?

Boy, do I Have THEM Snowed....

A tip of the Toque to Maximum Leader at Naked Villainy:

You paid attention during 100% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

In truth, I did rather poorly, from an academic standpoint, in high school. OK, to be fair to myself, it was more of a problem with application than information, but still, I highly doubt I'd have scored so well had I taken this quize back in the day.

Forget Hell, I'm in Limbo's Kitchen

Two weeks plus since graduation, and things have settled into a random pattern. I've discovered I have a knack for working under pressure, and I've concluded that I'd rather spend an entire shift on a slammed line than do an hour's prep.

The problem is I'm not getting the hours I need. This week and next are our busiest weeks of the summer, yet I'll be barely making 30-35 hours. That is more than during school, but it's still not enough. And the hours are spread out, often 3 or 4 hours a day for 5 days, followed by one full shift, and only one full day off. It doesn't help that the food I'm cooking does nothing to fire my passion. The straw that broke the camel's back was this coming weekend -- When I started the job I made clear that due to childcare limitations, I cannot work on Saturdays. But they scheduled ALL of us to work on every day of the 4th weekend, no exceptions, and missing a shift is a firing offense, called in or not.

I have been surprised to discover that my No Saturdays stipulation is not as much of a deal-breaker as I expected it to be. I discovered this because I spent all day yesterday canvassing the downtown Eugene area, as well as several outlying restaurants, dropping off resumes at at least 15 restaurants. I had 3 impromptu interviews, an on-the-spot appointment to come back for an interview, and had another call for an interview by 8:30 this morning. One of the impromptu interviews ended in a promise of a call, and another resulted in a call-back today. Of the two interviews today, one resulted in a promise of a call-back, and the other resulted in me being scheduled to work on a trial basis during the breakfast shift this coming Friday. I'm sure I'm going to get my ass kicked, especially since I'll be working 5:30 AM -- 2 PM, then going to my current job and working 5-11 PM. But I'm going to work that kicked ass off, and I'm going to get a better job -- better pay, better hours, and more importantly, BETTER CUISINE!

I really do love this work. A few days ago I ended up working solo during the lunch AND early dinner rushes because the other cook called in sick 15 minutes before shift. I was slammed, I was pissed, and I was HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE!!!!! As I worked, and stewed, and fought my way out of the weeds, I found myself smiling and thinking to myself, "at least I'm not at a desk anymore". I'm seriously better of emotionally doing this than I ever was answering tech support calls from pissy, computer-illiterate customers in a row of cubicles, while a supervisor stood at the end of the office, snapping a whip and shouting "Answer FASTER!" as a bald giant wearing nothing but a leather harness beat the rowing rhythm on a kettle drum.

Frightening

My son's intelligence is just that -- frightening. At 3 1/2, his vocabulary is already amazing -- and it's not just how many words he knows, it's how complex some of those words are, and that he knows what they mean and how to use them in context... "privacy", and "catastrophe", for instance. On top of that, his grasp of abstract ideas -- we've given up on trying to spell out words or use synonyms and foreign words for things because he has those dialed in -- and today he finally cracked our "oblique references" code -- as I was leaving for work, TFR asked me if, after work, I wanted to go somewhere to pick the things that grow on plants that you eat, and he exclaimed with glee, "BERRIES?!"

*sigh*

I'm proud, but I'm scared. I'm just waiting for him to start eying the car keys.

Musical Geography Trivia Question of the Day

Where did you go if your horse naturally won, where did you go next, how did you get there, and what did you do there?

When Worlds Collide

So today's foray to the farmer's market got me to thinking. Living in Eugene, and attending the culinary program where I did, can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to food and certain ethical, philisophical, political, and economic concerns. Eugene, being Eugene, is very intensely enthusiastic about the idea of sustainability -- organic, local, seasonal agriculture -- not just for the qality of food, but for the argued environmental benefits. And that enthusiasm carried over into the culinary classroom at LCC. The spring dinner we did was a 100-mile menu, you'll recall.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not against local, seasonal food -- I love the concept, especially as a culinarian. The quality of food is so much better when you get the freshest ingredients, and those that were harvested close enough to you that they actually ripened on the vine. Alice Waters has really pioneered AND solidly proven the validity of the concept at Chez Panisse.

But for me, it's more about the quality of food, and the economic benefit to the local economy, which ultimately benefits the restauranteur, since he's essentially paying the people who pay the people who pay him. It's not the moral imperative or grand crusade that it's made into by people who also ascribe to overarching environmentalist movements (such as the Eugene-style neo-hippies with their almost luddite-like abhorrence for anything that smacks of industrialism).

Those gorgeous, yoummy vegetables and berries I showed you? Those set me back $18 and some change. My next stop was at our local Giganto-warehouse, low-overhead discount food outlet (local readers know of whom I speak) to do the rest of the my grocery shopping, including more vegetables. As an exercise in curiosity, I tried to limit myself to the same $18 and change, and while my math was off (lots of stuff for fractions of a dollar per pound, purchased in fractions of a pound), I only went over by $2. And for that, I got:

1.17 lbs romaine lettuce
2 navel oranges
4 bananas
3 tomatos
2 lemons
.47 lb broccoli
1 bunch cilantro
2 Kiwi fruit
1 bunch green onions
2.26 lbs. grapes
.96 lbs asparagus
4 Gala apples
2 necatrines
2 limes
1 bunch (1.47 lbs) celery

Big difference. Granted, that difference is both in quantity and quality, and the two are inversely proportionate, but here's where my dilemma comes in. If I were buying for a high-end restaurant, I'd buy almost all of my produce that way. But I am not a purchaser for a restaurant -- yet. I'm a purchaser for a family -- a family that until recently was living on one income, and is still only on one and a half incomes, until my hours pick up. Those farmer's market veggies will make a wonderful weekend meal splurge, but there's no way I could have afforded to buy all the vegetables my family needs until the next time I shop, if I'd paid farmer;s market prices for all of our vegetables. I understand, the stuff I bought at gigantostore are not all local 9though some was), are not at their peak, are not organic -- but they are AFFORDABLE.

I have heard all the arguments about priorities, and the benefits of the "sustainable" produce outweighing their cost, but when the chice is between buying inferior vegetables or insufficient vegetables, I know where the choice lies for my family.

I also understand the arguments that the greater the demand for local, organic, seasonal produce, the more farmers will offer it, and the more affordable it will become. But unless you live in a very agriculturally vibrant region, the reality is that the odds are, your local agriculture will never be able to produce enough crops in that manner to feed an entire populations (and if there is data that refutes this belief, by all means, please show me) -- Economy of scale has the upper hand, not to mention the fact that the larger the farming operation, the mote indistinguishable from the model it's purporting to replace it would become.

So for the foreseeable future, I don't see this kind of microagriculture as a viable alternative to the industry that agriculture has become, at least not for most consumers -- it is a luxury, albeit one that is accessible to more consumers than most luxuries.

And as you can tell from my prior post, like Ferris Bueller referring to Ferraris, I highly recommend it, if you have the means.

Foodie P%&#

Today being the first Saturday of my post-collegiate life, I decided to take The Lad with me to the Eugene Farmer's Market and do a bit of shopping. Here's what we came home with:




All of this was grown locally, picked fresh, and sold direct to moi. Clockwise from upper left: Strawberries (not those pale pseudo-red styrofoam giant mutants you get in the grocery store, these are compact, seduction-lipstick-blood-red, and co full of flavor they're almost hallucinogenic), spinach, easter egg radishes, carrots, blue potatoes, sugar snap peas, spearmint, and in the center, a cucumber.

The potatoes I'll slice thin and fry into chips, the spearmint will garnish the strawberries, everything else goes in a salad. I'll serve it all with some wild Alaskan sockeye (can't get any closer to local, our runs are closed for the year) and pair it with a local Pinot Gris tonight, or maybe a Pinot Noir Rose.

Welcome to the Majors, Kid

It seems appropriate that on my first day in the kitchen after graduating from the culinary program, I should get my hiney handed to me.

No, seriously, it really is appropriate. And it wasn't anywhere NEARLY as bad as it could have been, but:

I was scheduled a partial shift -- I'm still only part-time, and although I only get one day off this week, I am only scheduled one full shift. Yesterday I was scheduled to work 11-6. The opener was scheduled 10:30-6:30. Another part-timer was scheduled for 6, and the closer arrived at 6:30.

When I got there, the ppener informed me that he had a sore throat and was going to go home after the lunch rush. So from around 1:30 or so until my relief arrived at 6, I was on my own. Only my 6 PM reliever didn't arrive -- I ended up working until 6:30, when the closer arrived.

And the lunch rush picked back up right after the opener left.

And the dinner rush came early.

And we were 86 several popular items.

And several other popular items, all of which the opener told me had been prepped, hadn't.

I actually held my own. The bartender only had to check on the status of an order a couple if times, I only screwed up about 3 garnishes, and nothing got sent back. Overall, I'd say I did ok.

I Walked The Line

Well, that's that. Yesterday by 5:30 PM PDT, the ceremony was over and I had become a graduate. Before the ceremony, the culinary department held a luncheon in our honor, after it, my family had a dinner in mine.

It's a great feeling. For once in my life I finished what I started, something significant and life-shanging. Two years ago I sat in a classroom with a group of strangers, overwhelmed by the list of competencies required in order to complete the program. Yesterday, I sat in an audtiorium with a group of friends, overwhelmed by everything we have accomplished over the last two years. There was laughter, there were tears, a lot of shouting and smiling, and in the end a sense of triumph.

My mother, my sister, my brother-in-law, my niece and two nephews, my uncle (my father's brother) and aunt, and my wife all were in attendance, and I was even able to surprise my mom with my PTK membership. Yesterday and today we spent as a family, celebrating not only my accomplishment, but the love and support that thy have provided me that has carried me through this all (especially my wife).

It's been a good time, and while both my school and my family made me feel like the center of attention, I also felt like part of something bigger than myself.

I'm ready to move on now. I'm hopeful -- no, I'm confident -- in my ability to make a career of this, and I'm ready to go.

Short

Cue Kickass Rock Anthem

A tip of the Toque to Maximum Leader at Naked Villainy:

Find out Which Marvel Superhero Are You at LiquidGeneration.com!

Musical Geography Trivia Question of the Day

If you've pawned all your hopes and he even sold your own car, (1) how are you getting there and (2) where are you going?

DONE!

My last final... make that my FINAL final... was this morning from 8 to 10 PM. I did not ace it, but I am sure I passed. Now all that's left is to walk on Saturday and over the summer complete the paperwork for the co-op work. But in terms of sitting in a classroom, turning in homework, taking tests, and attending labs, I am DONE.

I would have posted earlier today, but I had to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

Two Down, One to Go

Yesterday was the Culinary Leadership final. Today it was American Regional Cuisine. Tomorrow it's First Aid, and I'm done -- with finals, and for all intents and purposes, with school. There was some clarification today regarding our ACF certification. The application and fee we turned in along with our finals this weeks does NOT get us the ACF certification of Ceritifed Culinarian -- it gets us a membership in the ACF as Student Culinarians. Upon completion of our degree, the ACF membership AND our transcripts showing that we've graduated will get us the coveted CC after our name -- which means that I won't have mine until I OFFICIALLY complete the dregree, which will be some time this summer anfter I've put in enough time at a cooking job and hence completed the "Cooperative Education" class.

Which is a pain in the butt, but is a minor detail. When all is said and done, I'll have the following feathers in my resume cap:

Degree: Associate of Applied Science, Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management

Organization Memberships:
American Culinary Federation
Phi Theta Kappa (National Community College Honor Society)

Certifications:
ACF Certified Culinarian
American Red Cross First Aid Certification
ServSafe Certification
Oregon Food Handler's Card

A week before he passed away, my father looked my wife in the eye and made her promise that she'd make sure I graduated from college. I know it's not an advanced degree, or hell, even a Bachelor's, but it's a degree, and it's in a field that I thoroughly enjoy, and that can be the foundation of a career. It took me 40 years to figure out what I wanted to do, but we kept that promise.