Philosophy

Letting it Go- An Unspoken Survival Skill

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Sorry about the very late and frankly short blog post this week. For a number of reasons, this weekend got away from me.

This post WAS supposed to be a review of a new restaurant in town that I’ve been enjoying very much. I wanted to have one more meal there, and Emily and I made reservations for their Valentines Day brunch. A fun night out with the wifey AND fodder for a new blog post? That’s a win-win right there.

Then it decided to snow. A lot. Portland is famous for Not Handling Snow Very Well, given the fact that it’s fairly rare and all the hills and steep roads make driving treacherous with even a light dusting on the ground. Heavy snow, nearly wrecking while trying to drive the car for groceries, and finally an ice storm last night meant that those reservations were cancelled.

We were both bummed, of course, but we wound up sharing dinner and a bottle of wine at home along with a cake I had made as a surprise. Making the right decision doesn’t always feel good, but it’s not as bad as making the wrong decision.

You can’t control the weather, but you can control how you’ll weather it- once you stop wishing it was something it wasn’t.

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5 Simple Steps to Do the Thing

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I have been thinking about what to write in this blog post since I left work yesterday afternoon. In the time between then and now, I was preparing myself to sit down and write.
I also went for a long hike around Mt. Tabor, enjoyed a game night with my housemates, baked a pie, had a bit too much whiskey, slept in, ate breakfast, went for a run, meditated, showered, gamed a bit, and fixed myself a cup of tea.

All of it has been in service to writing this, because if you want to write about Life and Food and Joy and Good Things, a big part of it is getting those things in your life. The bigger part is actually sitting down and writing the thing. Far from being the sole difficulty of creatives, dreamers and nutcases like me, you can find difficulty in Doing the Thing in just about any human pursuit. I think it’s something to do with being sentient robots made of meat and untanned leather, stuck on a speck of dirt rocketing through the void.

So let’s go through my Five Simple Steps to Do The Thing together!

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Gimme More Than A Gimmick!

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A few months ago, I had a great idea. I’d just recently found a great challah recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, and I had the thought, “You know, challah isn’t the same as brioche, but it’s close. Cinnamon rolls are made out of brioche… so what if I made challah out of 6 braided strands of cinnamon roll?

The bread came out interestingly layered and noticeably over-worked, but good. The next step was seeing how the bread would do as cinnamon French toast. When asked how I came up with it, I gave a joking answer of “I like cinnamon toast; if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

It’s a reductivist joke, and one that too many operations are taking literally. If you’re creating a dish, and you want it all to highlight and enhance a particular flavor, that requires fitness to do well.

If you’re going to go overboard, you’d better be able to swan dive.

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Back To Business

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One thing about learning personal discipline relatively late in life that (I wonder) if people think about is the fear of losing it.

Growing up, I was always a very principled kid, but definitely not a diligent or disciplined one. I’d put off homework and assignments to the last minute, I’d barely study, and just count on my native smarts to carry me through tests, classes, and challenges. So, for a bright kid, my grades sucked. Hard.

I don’t think I really gained self-discipline until culinary school and deciding to get in shape. For culinary school, it was finally the chance to do what I wanted. I knew how much I screwed up in school until then, and I wasn’t going to whiff this one.

In terms of getting fit, I had seen in myself and the health of loved ones that this really was self-preservation. I was angry, I had the time and energy, and (to start with) I was spiteful. If we could get spite to turn a generator, the energy crisis would be solved, and the ultimate renewable fuel source would be Twitter.

Willpower, self-control, and self discipline are like muscles. You have to work on them, gain them, develop them and train them- or you lose them.
The good news is, the more you “flex” your discipline, the more you want to.
The bad news is that, when you stop, you need to get them back.

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“Everyone Else Is Taken”- Finding Identity in the Kitchen

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I absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, tell you who you are. You really shouldn’t want me to anyway. Brighter minds than mine have peeled apart the notions of “self” and “identity” for centuries (if not millenia) and even they tend to wind up shrugging and going “I dunno… it’s personal I guess.”

A portrait of Oscar Wilde in grayscale with the quote "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

And it is. I wrote a few weeks back about how to find your “culinary voice”– which ultimately came down to an elaborate rephrasing of “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s figuring out how to best tell your story though… finding out who you are takes people their entire lives, and is often subject to change.

So this post isn’t a “how-to”- it’s more of an exploration of the question, and especially what it means for us cooks- whether we are brand new and trying to find a place to fit in, or old hands getting flexed out of an industry that we can’t continue in and survive. Both groups- all of us, really- wind up looking at themselves in the mirror and asking, “Who are you?”

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