Accepting Moments of Monotony

October 2, 2021October 2, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Behind every exciting or awesome thing you have ever seen, done, or experienced, there was a lot of mindless boredom.

Someone coils and organizes every cable for that rock concert and goes through every switch on the light and sound boards. Before that big hiking adventure, there was a lot of packing, planning, and organizing. In the kitchen, every meal you have ever had- simple or complex- involved someone doing a lot of dull prep work.

This is “paying your dues” on the micro scale. It can be meditative, or it can be mindless. It can be soothing, or it can be drudgery. Either way, if you want that big beautiful pay off, there’s always some bullshit that needs to get done first. If you can “embrace the suck,” you can embrace the bullshit too.

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The Psychological Pitfalls of Servant Leadership

September 11, 2021September 11, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

It had already been an exhausting morning when my boss walked in. A new employee needed to be trained. There were concerns about the production schedule. Orders hadn’t come through, ingredients were misplaced, an extremely impatient and entitled customer… and all of it needed my personal attention when I wasn’t getting my own production done.

When my boss came in and saw all the activity- busy, but not quite chaotic- she asked if there was anything she could do to help. “It’s great that your training the new girl today, but maybe just have her shadow you today instead of giving her tasks? That way you don’t have to be distracted all the time answering questions.”

I refused partly because she was asking good questions and learning well, but mostly because by handing off simpler, smaller tasks for her to learn on, I could focus on the tasks that needed a managers touch- like the lady that thought an incomplete order behind the counter was hers and tried to walk away with it.

It was busy that morning, and it felt like chaos, but it wasn’t. Everything got done, well and on time. What made it feel like chaos and created stress was answering questions that didn’t need answers and handling problems that had already been handled.
I’m a big believer in servant leadership, but there’s a serious difference between that and learned helplessness.

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Envy- Slaying the Green-Eyed Monster

August 28, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

When I am in a sour mood- cranky, frustrated, exhausted, irritated by life- that’s often when I am most likely to do something charitable. I’ll help out a friend with a problem, give some extra cash to a panhandler, or buy something I don’t really need to support a good cause.

Why? There’s a lot of psychology behind the action. We can discuss the differences between empathy and sympathy, that being frustrated puts me in a more empathetic place to others and I’m more likely to try and help. We can discuss how doing good things releases endorphins, making me feel good, and whether or not that makes the action actually “altruistic.” It could even be as simple as “I feel like this world sucks, so I’m gonna do SOMETHING to make it better.”

Those would be excellent blog posts… but they are not this one. This post is about the fact that that same principle applies to when good things happen to other people, and to help your negative feelings about it. This post is about Impostor Syndrome, envy, and diffusing both by supporting your friends.

Five peoples hand grabbing each others wrists in support — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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What Does Quentin Crisp Know About Cooking?- Fashion Vs. Style in the Food World

August 20, 2021August 21, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I am not now, nor would I have ever called myself at any point in my life, fashionable. Not even in college when I started wearing those enormous pants with all the unnecessary straps and half-heartedly dyed my hair blue.

I might have been trend-chasing, and I’m sure I thought I was cool at the time, but I was never fashionable- and likely never will be as I slouch gracefully toward early middle age.

Instead, when people see the effort I do put into looking put together, they say I’m “stylish.” That is a lesson I learned from Quentin Crisp, and I think we as an industry will be happier when we learn to apply it to our food.

Color photo of Quentin Crisp with the text “Fashion is a way of not having to decide what you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perrpetuate it.” — Quentin Crisp pulled off a scarf and eyeliner way better than I pulled off those pants from Hot Topic.

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Learning to Lead by Letting Go

August 7, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Managing is a full-time job in itself, and going from being a cook or baker to a managing is more than a promotion. It’s a shift in mentality. After years of needing to be “hands-on,” I will no longer have the time, energy or focus to give every task personal attention. Ironically, one of the hardest lessons I will have to learn as a chef is how not to be in control.