First morning’s view

Ricotta Mint Ravioli

Learning in Fabrizia's kitchen

Putting out last day's meal

I’ve spent four days immersed in a Sicilian food and wine experience at the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School at the Regaleali Estate.  Enjoy the photos!

Powisset Farm CSA Tomatoes ready for the dehydrator!

Our shelves are stocked!  The last several weeks I have born witness to the pickling, canning, and freezing fervor of my roommate and dear friends.  We have canned tomatoes, berry jams, pickled root veggies and cucumbers, frozen pestos, and dried herbs, fruits and veggies.  Over at one friend’s house, a posted notice on their refrigerator catalogues their preservation efforts so that the jars and cans are identifiable months from now.

This is one of the many reasons why I have been feeling so great about being back in New England for the last two years.  No doubt, my time in the Bay Area was replete with these preservation projects (jamming sessions with Forage Oakland come to mind), but here in Boston, it is less a treat and much more a necessity, since we’re entering the months where fresh, local produce will be something we won’t be able to take for granted.  Being responsive to the demands of changing seasons feels right, but more than this, it feels sacred.  The sense that our activities have structure, range, and changability… it’s how I understand being rooted in a place and living responsibly on the earth.

The pantry

More on this in the coming months, as I head to Italy to spend five days contemplating Health and Terroir at the Anna Tasca Lasca cooking school.

To my fellow Jews, Happy New Year, to my fellow harvesters and preservers: happy autumn.

Summer's red tomatoes preserved

Not necessarily an opening on pain, but this reflection is about pain and hospitality, and how we accept pain in our lives, and dwell with it, with some deep faith that eventually, like any house guest, it will be on its way.

A couple of weeks ago, I went down to Brooklyn to be with a friend as she began the process of celebration and grief that accompanies the death of a family member.  Her father had passed away only three weeks earlier; here she was, emanating both sadness and unbelievable strength.   She sought refuge in her daily spiritual practice, which helped her unfurl her emotions and understand the part of life that is death.

I was clearly the her guest, but so was pain, and she welcomed us both and made space for us.  We walked around Bed Stuy, we fried chicken and baked macaroni and cheese.  There weren’t grand ceremonies or major events, but there was healing happening, and that pain and I were honored guests and she was able to be a host, I think, provided grounding for that healing.

As the lines for teachers and students are always reversible, so are the roles of guest and host as we nurture each other through pain.  The bar is a place where we go when in pain.  Someone I respect tremendously described this seeking out of our people in the torrent of sadness.  Bar tenders the world over have, I imagine, witnessed pain walk in their doors and sit beside their guests.  The best bartenders help make space for humans and our rags of feeling, pour the right drink — hopefully not as a bullet to obliterate experience — but as a gentle salve that becomes a part of the healing process.

The lesson for me is that hosting pain is an equal opportunity venture.  It’s not something to shirk from or of which to be skittish.  It’s not necessarily glamourous.  It can, however, be a profoundly transformative act we do with each other.  A time to practice hospitality, not as some saccharine, jovial, expression of entertaining, but as the way we look after each other and express care, even in the darker moments.

People ask me all the time and sometimes, for expediency’s sake, I say it’s because I can’t say no to challenge.

It is not, however, challenge alone which has brought me to restaurants.  Rather, it is the particular genre of challenge, and the very particular result found in a restaurant, mentioned by Jenkins in her article: a particular stamina that is developed.  This stamina is built, it seems, on a few things.  There is physical stamina, sure.  But the more crucial elements I realize, are an emotional and psychological stamina.  An ability to do work with full attention and investment, but also to work with a clinical eye.  Imagine a world class doctor: on the one hand she needs to be deeply committed to and caring for each individual patient who comes her way.  On the other hand, she needs to stay appropriately detached so that she can properly deliver prognoses and do her work.  It’s not very different for those of us running a restaurant.  We need to be passionate and deeply committed to each person, each plate of food that comes out of the kitchen, every tiny gaffe and major coup.  And we also need to be exceeding well balanced, level headed, we need to take pride in working hard but not to be prideful that we do…

Jenkins is right about the kind of fraternity which hinges on the “outsiderness” of working at a restaurant.  This can be something to celebrate, this a special kind of fraternity born out of the long hours and hard labor.  It is fraternity expressed in the way that staff, exhausted at the end of a night, will sit down at the bar and hash out that evening’s service at 1:00 or 2:00 am.  And then there is a broader level of fraternity that gets expressed between those of us who work in restaurants meet for the first time.  Like when, late night, I introduce two sous-chefs from different restaurants and they greet each other “hi, brother, nice to meet you.”

Privately, I’m thinking more deeply about the kind of personal growth that occurs for those who work in restaurants and how it seems to be a similar growth to those who work in health care and the healing arts.  This has something, I think, to do with what happens when we are called into service for others.  Jenkins is right to call out the “outsiderness” of that work — I would imagine that it can be similarly othering to be a night nurse in a hospital.  My suspicion, however, is that the sense of otherness is not only due to the fact that it is night work.  I’m describing also the outsiderness that comes, specifically with doing service work, because this is an important element to the ways that restaurant workers are othered.  In most restaurants, the line cooks and bar backs and bussers are not acknowledged as the critical elements to the narrative of a night.  What if this began to change?  What if our restaurants were transformative places where new ways of being together, of serving and being served, were explored.  I think this is why underground restaurants and secret dinners in places like Brooklyn and the Bay Area are so tantalizing.  We don’t have to see our work as being outside.  We’re already very much in.

This is a learning curve that has been in the works since I started at my restaurant, and is one which is at turns exciting, challenging, and frustrating.  Each day, we prioritize each night’s service: this particular guest need, this server question, this burnt out lightbulb.  But managing the restaurant means also being aware of the direction of deeper currents, thinking about where the business will be next week, next month, a year from now.  Until recently, I have struggled to do both, but my mind is now getting better at running two tracks at once, calculating how the specific affects the general and vice versa.  I’m thinking not only about the Food and Wine celebration dinner in nine days, but also the way that the Jewish holidays might affect staff training in the fall.  Every bit of managerial feedback I’ve gotten is the challenge to get more specific — to dig deeper into each scenario with greater efficacy and accuracy — and more big picture — to understand how it all works together, and to have a proactive role in making it all work together.  To read the guest while reading the room, and then make the appropriate comparisons to previous nights like that and nights not like that.

It could be called an indexing project: I allow myself to be the encyclopedia within which the narratives and stories of the restaurant are written, and cross referenced.  It’s intimate work, there is this sense that I give myself over to be both record and agent of three hundred experiences a night, five or six nights a week.  But it’s also fascinating work, profoundly compelling.  Just as I’m challenged to earnestly be present at every moment and generally aware at the highest level, there is a way in which I am deeply affected by every high and low moment, every twist and turn in a guest experience, and yet have to be detached, above the fray…

Imagine growing a million tiny roots into the ground and floating above it at the same time.

This is all to say, I’m fairly well-trained to not react emotionally to others, in the moment.  My instincts are to take my feelings — particularly the darker, more poisonous ones — into another room where they can be processed out of sight.

I’ve written and done some thinking about service leadership — a model which influenced my decision to move into the hospitality industry — and in the past few weeks, as I’ve dealt with intense stresses and joys of my new job I’ve had to being considering how I can allow myself to express and move through my emotions while staying professional and while learning to lead others.

I watch my general manager coach, chastise, guide, rebuke, and educate his employees day after day.  Until now, I always assumed that the role of a teacher is more rational than emotional, but two months into my job I see that rational leadership isn’t the only model out there.  There’s a way to help others grow that is planned and intentional, but not hyper-calculated.  Leading others with the strength of one’s emotion: emotional leadership.  I imagine it’s something like parenting.  Which is certainly a style of leadership that can be influenced by books and studies but is also charged through with emotional up and down swings.

Emotional leadership isn’t really a pedagogy I don’t think; but it does seem to be a way to accomplish two things at once: firstly, to be responsive and responsible to your team and secondly, to allow for the proper channelling of a range of feelings from anger and frustration to compassion.  Certainly by stretching myself to feel and express my emotions in front of a team I’m forced to acknowledge my internal state rather than squirrel it away as I’m wont to do.  My guess is that once I’m able to use emotionality to my advantage, I’ll be a better model and coach for others…

It was about as cold on that Christmas day as it is tonight; my mother picked me and my father up at the airport (he’d come to California for my final days to help me pack up my life).  I remember the flood of relief of seeing her — as I hadn’t for almost a year — accompanied with the sting of guilt that I, her first born child full of talent and promise, hadn’t quite figured it out yet.

Granted, there were some things I did know about how I wanted to live and what I wanted out of my days, and I quickly set about fulfilling those desires.  I was a classroom assistant at Haley House Bakery and Café, I did lots of cooking in my parents’s kitchen (often to their chagrin — they didn’t care much for my kombucha home brew, and some of my macorbiotic inspired dishes were not well received).

It’s funny for me now to think back on where I was, December 25, 2009, how afraid I was of what was to become of me, yet knowing I had to push forward and find my own path into food and hospitality.  It is true I left graduate school, but the educational component of my life has never been so rich, varied, and interdisciplinary.  (For the holidays, my co-managers each bought me a book.  How cool, eh?)

So I’m learning about cooking history and styles, and restaurant histories, and learning also how to manage a team, and how to be on a team of managers, and how to interact with hundreds of people a night and satisfy them, how to make mistakes and make amends, how to be graceful but not icy, and warm without being hokey, and still be professional even over an after-work drink.  Working at a restaurant and immersing myself in this world is really all I could have hoped for in concluding the journey of this year.

“I know exactly how that goes,” said a friend of mine.  ”You know, these people are working 90 hours a week on farms and food justice issues, and then they find themselves in their cars eating Subway because that’s all they have time for.”

That quote is from someone who has spent the last decade working on the forefront of food and farming issues in the midwest and nationally.  I admire her tremendously.  And I also am thankful for her frankness and often brash honesty.

As evidenced by the fact that 1) I haven’t updated my blog in over a month and 2) it took me only one post to realize I don’t have the time to be a gluten-free vegan (although this decision is also influenced by the fact that I live in New England and it is now WINTER: not the time to go drastically cutting foods out of my diet), I am very busy.  Too busy to prepare elaborate meals, apparently.  I’m trying desperately to keep my fruit and veggie intake up and become one of those restaurant workers who subsists on cookies and Red Bull.

Luckily, today I don’t have to be at the restaurant till 2:00 so I’m making myself roasted veggies from my winter CSA share.  So beautiful, eh?  The smell of parsnips wafting through my kitchen right now is delightful…

In other news, I took on a managerial position this week, so I expect to be even busier than before.  I’m very excited about the opportunity, and hope to be able to weave in more stories about my professional life as well as my thoughts on food and eating in 2011.

Wow, 2011.  Two weeks away.  Stay tuned…

I came back from a fairly extravangant meal at a new oyster bar (also my new employer) with a homie of mine the other night, with glistening eyes (an effect, most likely, of both the delicious food as well as the wine), praising the glory of the oyster, and of things like lobster roe; my roommate cut me off.

“Wait a minute, aren’t you vegan?”

That’s probably the sixth or seventh time I’ve heard that question since my blog post of a month ago, when I claimed a need to “clean up” and simplify my diet. So what am I doing eating boudin noir and oysters in the best dining establishments of the city?

I’m not vegan the way I was in high school or college, but at home I maintain buying and eating habits that are almost 100% vegan. I’ve also been cutting down on my wheat consumption; what I’ve been finding is that I feel more sensitive to things like sugar, processed foods, and ingredients in general. My energy is much more consistent and balanced, and I feel better over all.

Most of my meals lately have been like the simple dish above: sauteed peppers, tossed with roasted garlic, garbanzos, and quinoa. Or the pumpkin and lentil curry I served over brown rice with lightly roasted cauliflower for guests the other night.

And yes, when I found myself out at a lunch with five oyster farmers yesterday, I went right ahead and ordered a tuna melt, because it really seemed like my body was excited about it.

Is it, then, worth it to even describe myself as a quasi vegan? Or to say that I eat limited amounts of animal product, whenever possible? Do I talk about my eating habits in the negative, i.e. what I avoid? Or is it more comprehensible to say I try to listen to my body as much as possible for clues about what would be best for it?

Anyone who knows me that I tend to take pleasure in not fitting into boxes neatly: my identity politics make for some interesting constellations. So, it probably makes sense that I would want to play around with being vegan-ish but not entirely anything.

Some years, fasting has been really difficult, with my day of contemplation punctuated by my growling stomach.  But this year, I barely noticed the day slip by, I was so focused on the sermons in synagogue and in my own work of taking stock of how I have behaved for the last twelve months and how I intend to be for the next twelve.  In the process of taking something essential away, I gained something: the “no” was generative.

Since then, I have been looking for other ways to turn “no” into “yes.”  Centrally: I am seriously considering going back to being vegan.  Having been vegan or vegetarian on and off since I was in sixth grade, so in many ways I don’t feel that being vegan is even such a big deal.  More drastically, I am thinking of pulling wheat out of my diet, which I’ve never done before but which have a lot of curiosity around.

Why set these limits, especially when I move in a milieu where it is in fact easy to eat (for example) animal products conscientiously, and when I don’t seem to suffer from a wheat or gluten intolerance?  What am I looking to gain?

The first reason is that I want to gain a fresh perspective on my food habits, and I enjoy the kind of work that I have to do when I limit my food options.  By setting strong boundaries around my food, I am forced to be more contemplative about what I eat, what goes into the food that I eat, and I can’t just assume that there will always be something there to eat.

The second reason is that I am always drawn to challenges, and frankly it seems like it would be a little challenging to be wheat-free and vegan all winter long in New England.  A bit challenging, but not impossible.  I am thinking about rice and potatoes, of stews, of roasted veggies… I definitely would have to channel a new level of culinary creativity.

The third reason is that frankly I’m kind of sick of meat, poultry and fish; and I just don’t feel especially drawn to eggs and dairy right now.  Call me crazy, but when I don’t feel like eating something, I don’t.  That’s not really something I gain, per se, but it is part of where I am at.

The final reason goes back to one of the roles of fasting during Yom Kippur.  Like so many dialectical Jewish practices, the act of fasting helps us understand feasting all the better.  We have to experience the “no” to come to see the “yes.”  If I ate anything whenever, what kind of perspective would I have on food?  When I set food limits, I gain new ways of seeing the roles of food, as personal practice and as collective customs.

I’m not officially transitioning to being vegan and wheat-free until after my birthday feastival, this coming Monday.  I don’t want anyone to feel undue pressure about what they should bring for the potluck.  But stay tuned for my official “back to being vegan” announcement, as well as any other related news that ensues.